Palestine: Failing the test of history resoundingly - by Martin Sherman

...in spite of these highly conducive circumstances, the Palestinians have been utterly unable to produce any semblance of a sustainable productive society. Quite the reverse! The Palestinian leadership has done nothing but bring about a repressive and regressive regime that produced little but the pillage of the Palestinian people and the squandering of the vast resources provided by donor nations.

Martin Sherman..
JNS.org..
05 June '18..

On July 22, 1920, The Times of London published a letter by T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a.”Lawrence of Arabia”) setting out a case for the political independence for the Arabs in the Middle East. He wrote: Merit is no qualification for freedom…. Freedom is enjoyed when you are so well armed, or so turbulent, or inhabit a country so thorny that the expense of your neighbour’s occupying you is greater than the profit.

Despite being written almost a century ago, it is a diagnosis that is still extremely pertinent in assessing the validity of the frequently aired view that “the Palestinians deserve a state of their own.”

Indeed, such views have been explicitly expounded by US Administrations for well over a decade from George W. Bush to Barack Obama ,who both incorporated the idea into their “visions” for the Middle East.

Cannot condition national sovereignty on regime type

In the past, several pro-Israeli pundits have tried to dispute the widely accepted contention that “the Palestinians do indeed deserve a state” Some, like author Naomi Ragen, have warned of the unsavory nature that such a state would take – devoid of any semblance of law and order and due process, tolerance of religious diversity, right of political dissidence, freedom of expression, or regard for the status of women. Others, like former Israeli government minister Natan Sharansky, have argued that Palestinian statehood should be conditioned on the emergence of Palestinian democratization.

Regrettably, despite factual accuracy and moral validity, objections of this ilk cannot serve as a binding political criterion for national independence.After all, if tolerant pluralistic polities, in which the rule of law and civil equality flourished, were the sine-qua-non for recognition of national sovereignty, such recognition would have to be denied a slew of states across the globe – from authoritarian monarchies through military dictatorships, and tyrannical theocracies.

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