Insanity

Some madman has written into the Daily today defending David Horowitz's full-page ad of this past week. Defending!

I'll say straight out, I don't think Israel should be destroyed or that it's a bad idea in general for there to be a Jewish state, considering how hard it is for peoples who don't have their own states (such as the Kurds and the Roma/Gypsies). It's true that it probably didn't emerge in the best place, but considering the wackiness of 19th-century nationalism, every nation wants to claim what it considers its ancestral lands, even if they haven't occupied them in hundreds (or thousands) or years. But whether or not you like Israel or Israel's policies, Israel is a fact and it's not going anywhere.

But still, people in this country (a longtime Israel supporter) have no understanding of the region's history, nor have they stopped to consider the commonsensical explanations of why the Palestinians are continually fighting Israel. So let's disabuse everyone of this notion that, to paraphrase, the Palestinians have rejected every offer of a state side-by-side with Israel. It's true that the Palestinian leadership rejected the United Nation's partition plan. But that was way back in the 1940s, when Palestinians were still widespread throughout the territory and when, frankly, it seemed like a slap in the face to them that there should be a Jewish state created at all in the territory they had lived in for centuries.

More than this, the Palestinians had been jerked around on the international scene since the end of World War I, when most other Arab territories became states with more or less foreign influence but Palestine remained under a British mandate. No one offered them a state then, when they could have ruled all of the territory without a contest.

And who wouldn't become angered when a bunch of foreigners came and settled on your people's territory, and then once they had great enough numbers deciding to claim the whole place for themselves? If the Mexican population in Texas demanded self-governance and control of all of Texas, do you think the United States would let them go their own way with best wishes? If the United Nations stepped in and declared that the Tex-Mex nation's rights had to be respected and that a binational state was impossible considering the violence on both sides, which side do you think would agree to partition and which side would refuse and plan an invasion to reclaim their territory?

It's just wrong to say the Palestinians don't deserve a state or shouldn't be angry now because the Israelis so generously offered to cut out only half of the Palestinians' territory for themselves. While it's certainly in the Palestinians' interest now to push for the original partition, you can't say Palestinians rejected a state smaller than their traditional territory in order to give it to Israel.

The bottom line is that the Palestinians did not "reject the offer of a state." They rejected what they saw as nationalistic imperialism and attempted to defend their home and their own nationalism.

But we won't get into now why nationalism sucks or how the Palestinians are not addressing the situation today correctly. The Palestinians have their own faults, including nationalism and using violence, but this claim about them having been offered something reasonable and rejecting it is really a nasty distortion of the facts.