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The End of "Palestine"?

(Tablet) Lee Smith - The Arabs could have gone along with the UN's partition plan like the Jews did. Instead, they resoundingly chose war. That's the storied Nakba at the core of the Palestinian legend - the catastrophe that drove the Arabs from their land. The Arabs chose the catastrophe; they chose war, based on the premise that they would inevitably win and exterminate the Jews. As the Israelis built a first-world powerhouse in their war-torn, third-world neighborhood, the global conscience was always predisposed to rebuilding what the Palestinians destroyed. Accordingly, the Palestinian Arabs became a tribe whose identity was carved out of the relentless vow to eliminate Israel and slaughter the Jews - despite repeated failures, each one more crushing than the last. Egyptian President al-Sisi allowed Hamas to smuggle arms through the Philadelphi crossing into Gaza, thereby violating Egypt's peace treaty with Israel. Sisi has a new chance to prove himself as a friend of America by adding a million Gazans - who in the past have been ruled by Egypt and have family names like al-Masri ("the Egyptian") - to Egypt's existing population of 112 million, amounting percentagewise to roughly the same number of legal immigrants that the U.S. accepts per year. Should the Palestinians remain in Gaza, they would invariably return to war no matter how much munificence the Gulf Arab states, the EU, and perhaps even the U.S. might shower on them. Here is the stark reality: Gazans, not just the enlisted members of the Hamas brigades, waged an exterminationist campaign against Israel, and they lost. Trump's generous offer to the Gazans signals a chance to raise their families in peace, an existence not premised on total and permanent war with a more powerful adversary destined to rout them entirely, and would have already done so if not for the objections of other powerful global players.
2025-02-09 00:00:00
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