Photo: Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas with Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal in Cairo on Feb. 23, 2012. Credit: Mohammed al-Hums/Flash 90.P
Jason Shviliis a contributing editor at Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME), which publishes educational messages to correct lies and misperceptions about Israel and its relationship to the United States.
(JNS) The Palestinian Arab cause is among the most successful in world history, generating untold political, economic and emotional assistance from Western people and nations. Yet ironically, few if any causes—or peoples—are objectively less deserving of such immense support than the Palestinian Arabs.
For decades, the support enjoyed by Palestinian Arabs from Westerners has exceeded that received by any other cause or group anywhere in the world.
Palestinian “liberation” is supported by huge protests on campuses, highways and plazas, as well as boycotts against Israeli businesses and scholars. The war deaths of Palestinian Arabs are the subject of desperate demands for a ceasefire. The Palestinian Arabs receive billions of dollars in aid from Western countries. Since 1947, the United States and other nations have offered them political salvation in the form of land-for-peace offers and the promise of a “two-state solution.”
Paradoxically, the Palestinians have done virtually nothing to deserve this support. They have utterly failed to prepare themselves for a future living beside their Jewish neighbors in peace. In fact, polls show the Palestinian Arabs remain the most anti-Jewish people on Earth.
No wonder most of them wholeheartedly supported the Oct. 7 massacre and, if elections were held today, would readily vote Hamas into power.
As for an independent state, the Palestinian Arabs have received many generous offers over the last 75 years, all of which they have rejected. They have met these offers with war and terrorism. This is no surprise since polls show most Palestinians do not support the much-vaunted two-state solution that Westerners doggedly promote. In reality, since the Palestinians’ primary enterprise is annihilating Israel, they have little interest in peace, statehood or democracy.
It’s no surprise either that the Palestinian Arabs have failed to prioritize creating state institutions or a prosperous economy, despite infusions of billions of dollars in Western aid.
In short, the Palestinian Arabs seem unworthy of support from the U.S. or the rest of the international community. Why, then, do the Palestinian Arabs enjoy such persistent Western sympathy and more aid per capita than any other people?
-The Palestinian Arabs were blessed by settling in a region dominated historically by Jews. No people has been so widely persecuted or unjustly condemned in world history as the Jews. Over the millennia, we have seen that groups fighting the Jews, like the Palestinian Arabs, usually find abundant supporters.
-The Palestinian Arabs have done their best to promote the false myth that they are victims; specifically, a people of color fighting for liberation from European settlers, though the Jews are indigenous to Israel. This myth plays especially well with the West’s far-left since it fits the neo-Marxist ideology of critical race theory and alleged sins of “colonial enterprises.”
-The Palestinian Arabs want no future living alongside a Jewish state in peace. This is not surprising since, according to an Anti-Defamation League survey, Palestinians are the world’s most antisemitic people, with some 92% holding anti-Jewish beliefs. No wonder: Palestinians are fed a daily diet of antisemitism in their media, mosques and children’s school textbooks. Jews are routinely described as “impure” and “sons of apes and pigs.”
Given such ingrained hatred of the Jews, it’s perhaps understandable that, according to Gallup, some 76% of Palestinian Arabs do not support a state alongside Israel.
-The Palestinian Arabs widely support the Islamist terror group Hamas. A recent poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) confirmed that some 76% of Palestinians expressed support for Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre. In fact, the majority of Palestinians want Hamas to continue ruling Gaza “the day after” its war against Israel. In their decades-long effort to destroy Israel, most Palestinians also continue to support “armed struggle”—a code for continued terrorism.
-The Palestinian Arabs have rejected every offer of statehood for 75 years. Middle Eastern Arabs, including those in then-Palestine, rejected the 1947 U.N. partition plan for two states. They preferred instead to launch a genocidal war to destroy Israel, which failed dramatically. Another chance of land for peace arose after Israel repulsed Arab invaders in 1967, but again the Arabs refused to live next to a Jewish state.
Nevertheless, Israel continued to offer the Palestinian Arabs statehood in exchange for peace. Israel, with U.S. support, offered the Palestinian Arabs statehood three times over a decade—in 2000, 2001 and 2008. But despite offers of more than 95% of Judea and Samaria, all of the Gaza Strip and even territory inside pre-1967 Israel, the Palestinian Arabs still refused.
Instead, Palestinians have replied with increasingly ruthless terrorism; more suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings, car-rammings, and, of course, the Oct. 7 savagery.
-The Palestinian Arabs have failed to create institutions to support statehood. Their parliament has not functioned since 2007. There have been no elections since 2006 and 88-year-old Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is now in the 19th year of his four-year term. Today the P.A. is losing control of territory in Judea and Samaria to terrorist militias. The P.A. already lost Gaza to a Hamas coup in 2007. As a result of Hamas’s current war against Israel, its Gaza dictatorship is now in shambles.
-The Palestinian Arabs have failed to create a sustainable economy. Despite receiving more than $40 billion in international funds since the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestinian economy is still dependent on foreign aid, plagued by rampant corruption and high unemployment.
Today’s most lucrative economic opportunity for young Palestinian Arabs? “Pay-for-slay”: Killing Jews in exchange for generous monthly salaries from the P.A., which spends nearly $350 million annually funding this terrorist policy.
-While the ordinary Palestinian Arabs struggle with unemployment and poverty, their leaders get rich. Today, Abbas has a net worth of more than $100 million. Assassinated Hamas strongman Ismail Haniyeh died with assets of some $4 billion. Both the P.A. and Hamas have learned that by keeping their subjects underdeveloped and radicalized, they can attract more foreign aid and then embezzle it.
While the Palestinian Arabs have attracted massive financial, political and emotional support from the U.S. and Western powers, they have done virtually nothing to deserve it.
How much longer can antisemitic and neo-Marxist sympathies sustain them?