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Palestinians Need Real Support, Not Self-Serving BDS

(Times of Israel) Bassem Eid - Nothing is being done to establish an economic infrastructure in the Palestinian territories. We Palestinians have no legitimate leadership. Even though the world still pretends that Mahmoud Abbas is the legitimate president, no one believes that he represents anyone anymore. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, "I think that anyone who moves to establish a Palestinian state today, and evacuate areas, is giving radical Islam an area from which to attack the State of Israel," he was right. If Israel evacuated the West Bank, Abbas would quickly be replaced by Hamas. Outside Israel, much of the world sees us through the lenses of the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement - which Palestinians largely do not support, since many Palestinians are employed by Israeli firms - the only source of good jobs for Palestinians. The BDS movement does not seem to understand that the building of settlements benefits Palestinians. The settlements are a great source of well-paying jobs for Palestinian workers. Jews residing in the West Bank is not a problem. Why should it be? Muslims live all over the world, so why should there be areas where Jews are not allowed? That would be apartheid. The Arab world is almost one thousand times larger than Israel, so the existence of Israel was never a threat to the Arab world, but it was a great opportunity to allow corrupt Arab leaders to keep their peoples distracted. We cannot expect our situation to improve while terrorism continues and while Palestinian youth are taught to believe that killing Jews is honorable. It is not honorable, and such hate will never benefit the Palestinians. The writer is the founder and former director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group.
2017-05-09 00:00:00
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