The cheerleaders who encourage Palestinians to swim uphill - by A.J. Caschetta

So long as they are led by fools who never miss a meal, whose electricity never goes out and whose bank accounts are in the black, Palestinians will remain stateless.

A.J. Caschetta..
JNS.org..
05 August '19..

What happens when the loser of a war demands reparations and territory from the victor? If the question seems ridiculous (and it should), it nevertheless accurately describes the decades-long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. What’s most remarkable though is that Israel continues to underwrite Palestinian society with territory, money and autonomy—all of which the Palestinians freely admit they will use to fight Israel.

The latest wrinkle in this bizarre situation finds the losing party refusing $50 billion in economic aid because the cash deal does not force the winning party to give up everything it has won since 1948. That’s right, the Palestinians have refused to even negotiate the Trump administration’s so-called “deal of the century” because they know that it will not grant them a “right to return” and claim land in Israel.

The Palestinians’ bold sense of entitlement comes primarily from their leaders, both the PLO/Palestinian Authority and Hamas. But a close second place in the competition for encouraging Palestinian rejectionism goes to the academic world. Without both an elite class of Palestinian ideologues and an international coterie of academics instilling jealousy and anger in the Palestinians, there would likely be a Palestinian state today. Instead stateless Palestinians are encouraged and applauded for turning down offers that stateless Kurds and Tibetans would jump at.

Curiously, the fact that no one has seen Trump’s mysterious “deal of the century” has stopped few from expressing certainty about how bad it must be.

(Continue to Full Column)

A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is a Ginsburg-Ingerman fellow.

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