Last week the Middle East Quartet called on Israel to “cease settlement construction and on the Palestinians to halt violence and incitement.”
And it upset Mahmoud Abbas. Deeply. And it upset him because, even though the report was critical of Israel, it dared to criticise the Palestinians too. Can you believe the chutzpah?
He was disappointed because he wanted the report to only blame Israel and he wanted the report to call on Israel to withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines. And even though I don’t believe in the cessation of what the report terms “settlement construction,” the mere fact that it tried to show some attempt, allbeit misguided, at a kind of balance between the two parties upset Mahmoud greatly.
So he did what he always does. He whinged to the UN Security Council, urging them to reject the report. Now, this is nothing new, because every time Israel responds to a terror attack, or when some guy builds a toilet in his backyard, or when a palestinian has a flat tyre, or when the weather report said it would be 23 degrees and it was only 22, he complains!
He complains because the last thing he wants to do is have direct negotiations with Israel. The last thing he wants to do is resolve the conflict. He will do everything in his power to involve the UN Security Council, the European Parliament, the World Organization of the Scout Movement, the International Association of Lyceum Clubs. Anyone and anything – as long as he avoids Israel directly.
And the reason he wants to continue along this path is because he wants to be awarded a fake state of Palestine without any of the responsibilities and obligations that go with it. He wants to get all the cake with all the cream and all the toppings, but not pay a cent for it. Even though he’s already declared himself President For Life, he wants a kingdom to go with it! Kind of like how Jordan was formed – a fake country created by the British to give some pompous Arab clan leader a patch of land to rule over – a patch of land illegally trimmed out of the British Mandate for Palestine.
Unfortunately, much of the world bodies acquiesce to this childish ranting of a man drunk with the riches of a so-called “occupation,” one that has made him and his family very rich people indeed.
And carrying on from this, the PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah’s office said, “The Palestinian Leadership expressed its dissatisfaction with the recent Quartet Report. The Report offers an imbalanced assessment of the realities on the ground, and equates between the victim and the colonizer, while giving Israeli settlers a pass.”
This is truly incredible, because does anyone even know or care who the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister is, or that there even is one?? He has about as much influence as emptying an ocean with a teaspoon.
But importantly, what we can gather from his statement, is that the Palestinians will always see themselves as victims – victims who, despite having received billions of dollars through the years, and are among the world’s largest per capita recipients of international foreign aid, have done nothing with it. And that mentality is what gives them an expectation that somehow the world must create a state for them, while they sit back and do nothing. Why negotiate, when you can simply sit back and let the world scramble over each other to throw money at you.
In truth, the Palestinians are victims. But they are not victims of Israel, or the international community or some international conspiracy. They are victims, the same as any ordinary citizen in any Arab country, of corrupt regimes who see people as cannon fodder to be denied human rights and freedom.
When the international community begins to realise this very simple fact, they’ll be able to assess the “realities on the ground” and force the Palestinians to accept that to build themselves a future will require responsibilities – responsibilities that no one has yet demanded of them.
