By C.W. Gusewelle Kansas City Star December 2, 2001

That the predicament of the Palestinian Arabs is lamentable no one can dispute. After a half-century as a stateless people, they are among history’s orphans.

Generations of their young, born in the refugee camps, have no profession but violence, no ambition but martyrdom, no creed but rage.

Militant Islamists have come very late to the Palestinian cause, blaming Israel and its U.S. ally for the woes of that unfortunate people.

But in decrying the condition of the Palestinians, it is at least worth getting the facts straight.

In November 1947, the U.N. General Assembly vote to partition the British mandate of Palestine into two terrories that were envisioned as future states - one predominantly Jewish, the other Arab.

Six months later, on May 14, hours before the British withdrew, the state of Israel was proclaimed and immediately was recognized by the United States and the Soviet Union.

At that moment 53 years, four wars and tens of thousands of Arab and Israeli deaths ago, the Palestinians had a state - or at any rate a territory designated for the creation of their state-to-be.

True, they were not wholly satisfied with its shape. Nor were the Jews comfortable with the configuration of theirs. But if reason had governed, it is possible to imagine that those two small nations might ultimately have thrived as neighbors at peace.

But it was not to be.

For on May 15, one day after Israel’s declaration of statehood, the Arab regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria set their armies in motion with the stridently declared objective of driving the Jews into the sea.

The record shows that they failed.

They failed again, even more decisively, in the war of 1967 - a conflict that lasted only six days and ended humiliatingly - especially for Egypt, whose soldiers flung down their weapons and fled on foot back across Sinai, with some 10,000 perishing in the retreat.

The final failure was in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, which begain with an Egyptian and Syrian attack on Oct. 6 - the Hebrew Day of Atonement and also the 10th day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Through all those 25 years of confrontation and in the 28 troubled years since, the Arab regimes, except for Jordan, refused to allow Palestinians to immigrate in significant numbers, or extend to those they did admit the rights of citizenship, or even to commit serious resources to relieving the misery in the refugee camps.

Such compounding errors have inevitable consequences. Thus, today, Palestinian youths strap explosives to their bodies and blow themselves to eternity, somehow imagining it will help secure for their people the state they would have had years ago, except for the tragic miscalculations by their Arab brethren.

Muslims, including those fanatics who have declared a holy war of terror against the developed West, find it expedient to assign all blame to the United States and Israel or the Palestinians’ plight.

But no honest reading of history can ignore the pivotal and altogether shameful role the Arab regimes themselves have played in the endless agony of the Middle East.

Will the Palestinians one day have a state? Had it not been for Arab bungling, they’d have had one a lifetime ago.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2001 and is filed under history.