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Until They Accept Responsibility

[Ha'aretz] Shlomo Avineri - The UN resolution that established the State of Israel on May 15, 1948, also stipulated that an Arab state was to be established. The Palestinians mark May 15 as "Nakba" ("Catastrophe") Day, as something terrible and evil that happened to them. Yet there is not even an iota of introspection, self-criticism and readiness to deal with the Palestinians' own contribution to their catastrophe. If the Palestinians had accepted the UN resolution, then an independent Palestinian state would have risen on part of Mandatory Palestine in 1948, without war and without refugees. To this day, no book in Arabic has raised the question of whether the Arabs erred in rejecting the compromise UN partition plan. There is a complete unwillingness among the Palestinians to acknowledge that in 1948 they and their leaders made a terrible historic mistake by rejecting the compromise they were offered. It is for this reason that the Palestinians' customary comparison between the Nakba and the Holocaust is so outrageous. Did the Jews of Germany and Europe declare war on Germany? Were the world's Jews offered a compromise that they rejected? There will be no true compromise between Israel and the Palestinians without a readiness on their part to admit that they, too, are partly responsible for what happened to them in 1948. The writer, a professor of political science at Hebrew University, is a former director-general of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
2007-05-10 01:00:00
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