‘In One Stroke, Palestine Exists’

I wish to disagree with the main thesis of Pfaff’s column. He claims that Hussein’s decree disengaging the “West Bank” has “created a Palestinian state.” Even so-called “kings” do not unilaterally bring states into existence in 1988, least of all, a ruler whose family is more a refugee than the Palestinian Arabs who make up the bulk of his kingdom. His family fled from the area that is now Saudi Arabia, and was given what is now Iraq and Jordan, the latter carved from two-thirds of the territory of British-mandated Palestine.

The Palestinian people achieved their feelings of nationalism, if that is what Pfaff wishes to deign their feelings of alienation from body of Arab populations in the region, by their experience of 40 years in the limbo of refugee camps where they were forged on the anvil of their camp experience by the hammer of education, propaganda, and indoctrination by those Arab powers who cynically aimed their bellows at the refugees’ misery to fashion a weapon against Israel.

Yasser Arafat became a Palestinian hero because he was the first leader to act or try to act independently of those leaders of Arab states who expected to make a puppet of him as they had made out of his predecessors.

The Israelis should not simply relinquish territories to the Palestinians. Rather, the Israelis should sit down with those states now at war with them. In the course of negotiations, they should relinquish the heavily Arab-populated areas of the administered territories to a commission of Arab states or any other body chosen by these states and agreed to by Israel. If the Arab states then choose to create a Palestinian entity or state under conditions acceptable to Israel, so be it.

The creation of a Palestinian state should not result from the unilateral action of a Jewish state. First of all, for it to have Arab legitimacy, it must derive from an Arab consensus; not in the abstract when they cannot implement it, but when it is an achievable goal.

I might be as cynical as I believe the Arab states have been, and state that when “push comes to shove” they will not want to see another independent Arab state. A Palestinian state created by Israel will only compound the problems for Israel.

Israel, though, should not be sanguine in believing that time is on its side. What Israel can lose in time is its character as a free-wheeling political and social democracy as its youth are brutalized by its military obligations.

JERRY BLAZ

Tarzana