Friday, June 22, 2007

Who represents the Palestinian Arabs?

Is it the Palestinian Authority?

If it's the Palestinian Authority, which Palestinian Authority? The legislature, controlled by Hamas, or the executive branch?

If it's the executive branch, which executive branch? The unity cabinet or the new cabinet chosen under circumstances of questionable legality — as if anything done by the Palestinian Authority can be considered otherwise?

If it's the legislature, then apparently nobody represents the Palestinian Arabs, since according to the Associated Press, the parliament has been "paralyzed since Israel's roundup" of many of the Hamas terrorists who were elected to it.

If it's not the Palestinian Authority, is it the PLO? For decades, the world has insisted that terrorist group is the "sole representative of the Palestinian" Arabs, although the same Associated Press article notes the PLO has been "largely inactive in recent years."

Although the PLO may have been inactive as an organization, its constituent terror groups, including several factions of Fatah, have certainly been active when it comes to murdering innocent Israeli civilians.

Sooner or later, the Palestinian Arabs will have to decide who represents them. If they do that and follow it up by making a societal decision to work towards improving their lives rather than destroying Israel, at some point in the distant future there may be as much hope for a resolution of the Palestinian Arab-Israeli portion of the Arab-Israeli conflict as there was before the ill-fated Oslo experiment began.

That experiment was well-worth trying and might have worked if both Israel and the rest of the world had not ignored the fundamental Arab violations from the very beginning. Unfortunately, much of the damage it caused, such as thousands of unnecessary deaths, both Arab and Israeli, can never be repaired, and even if there is a decision to repair what can be repaired, such as the creation by the Palestinian Authority of a culture of hatred, those repairs will take decades.

The best that we can hope for now is that we all learn from those mistakes.

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