Friday, July 07, 2006
Message To Palestinians: Move On
Courtesy of Israpundit, an editorial by Youssef Ibrahim in the New York Sun. (The original requires subscription.)
It is in the form of an open letter, from the Arabs of the world to the Palestinians:
Dear Palestinian Arab brethren:Indeed. In fact, in Israel as in the United States, the only possible way the terrorists can win is if their opponents give up. This is even clearer in Israel -- the struggle against terrorism has been going on for far longer, the terrorists are far more depraved and more desperate, and they have lost far more. (Some Palestinians are living in the same refugee camps set up for their grandparents by the UN, almost sixty years ago. Israel, in the meantime, has grown and flourished, in spite of being under almost constant attack throughout those sixty years.)
The war with Israel is over.
You have lost. Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children.
We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we stand by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that we are moving on, away from the tired old idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the “eternal struggle” with Israel.
Dear friends, you and your leaders have wasted three generations trying to fight for Palestine, but the truth is the Palestine you could have had in 1948 is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967, which in turn is much bigger than what you may have to settle for now or in another 10 years. Struggle means less land and more misery and utter loneliness.
At the moment, brothers, you would be lucky to secure a semblance of a state in that Gaza Strip into which you have all crowded, and a small part of the West Bank of the Jordan. It isn’t going to get better.
As I've said and written before, and no doubt will say many more times, Israel would bend over backwards to help a healthy Palestinian society get up onto its feet, find itself, and succeed in the modern world. Jewish philanthropists from all over the world would fight each other for the right to donate to peaceful Palestinian causes. The Palestinians might even get most of the land they've been claiming they would settle for, in the Gaza Strip (which was theirs already, until a few weeks ago) and the West Bank.
But for all these miracles to happen, the Palestinians would have to pay a price -- for them, a heavy price indeed. The terror must stop; the indiscriminate murder of innocents must stop; the raising of children to grow up to be human bombs must stop. When Israel can negotiate in good faith with the Palestinians, confident that pizzerias won't start blowing up when the negotiations stall, then the world will be amazed at the sacrifices Israel will make willingly.
Read the whole thing.
