Published: 17 July 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
ARAFAT’S DECISION CAN BE explained less by a particular demand or concession than by the overarching, delusional, and self-defeating worldview to which many Palestinians cling.
As the late Fouad Ajami, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, wrote in a 2001 article, the Palestinians suffer from “an innate refusal to surrender to the logic of things, a belief that a mysterious higher power will always come to their rescue, as if the laws of history did not apply to them.”
In a 2002 letter, one of Arafat’s former ministers, Nabil Amr, condemned this approach. “There is something other than conspiracy that has made the whole world either stand against us or incapable of helping us. Because we have a just cause does not mean we are entitled to do what we want.”
Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister, is Vice President of the Toledo International Centre for Peace
FULL STORY: A doomed Middle-East peace (Project-Syndicate)
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Peace means realising that Jews and Arabs alike all belong to this land (Jerusalem Post)
GERSHON BASKIN: The late Rabbi Menachem Froman used to say, “this Land does not belong to us; WE belong to this Land.”
Photo: From left, Ehud Barak, Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat at Camp David in 2000 (Ralph Alswang/Newsmakers)
