Saudi Columnist Abdulateef Al-Mulhim examines the defeat of the Arab League in 1948 and the legacy of Arab rejectionism in ArabNews.com. He asks, what if Palestinians had accepted the mandate and decided to live side by side with the Israelis? According to AL-Mulhim:
“On May 14, 1948, the state of Israel emerged on the world map. One day after, a long and bloody conflict broke out and after the dust settled, the Arabs called it Nakba or the Day of Catastrophe. It was a defeat, but the Arabs chose to call it a catastrophe.What if those Palestinians had accepted the UN decision and decided to live side-by-side with the Israelis? Many of the Palestinians didn’t have to flee their homes. It is said that it was the Mufti (Husseini) who encouraged them to flee. 66 years later with many wars and loss of human lives, the conflict continues. The Palestinians’ agony became a moneymaking machine for some of the Palestinian eliteLet us get real and think straight. How can the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank accommodate the millions of Palestinians from the refugee camps? The Palestinian-Israeli conflict could have been resolved in 1948 by either accepting the UN decision or by absorbing the thousands of Palestinian refugees into the Arab world. Palestinians, don’t fool yourself. Just look at what some regimes in the Arab world are doing to their own people. If they don’t care about their own people’s pain, then what will make them care about your pain”? (Arab News-Saudi Arabia)
Read the rest here.
