Muslim Palestine: Gone With The Wind

In the years after America's Civil War, the defeated Southerners used to wax poetic about the nobility of "our lost cause." Of course, the cause for which they had fought—preserving the institution of slavery—was anything but noble. But you could tell that they had been defeated, because they at least described it as a "lost cause."

Israel may finally achieve peace with its Arab neighbors when they similarly lose hope for the Palestinian "cause." While US and Israeli actions are not, alas, offering new evidence that the Palestinian cause of destroying Israel is lost on a practical level, the article below shows that the Palestinian civil war may be undermining the moral legitimacy of "the cause," with some Arab commentators going so far as to declare that the Palestinians "are adolescents who cannot and should not be trusted to run institutions of state or any other important matters."

"Arabs Losing Faith in 'the Cause'," Youssef M. Ibrahim, Jewish World Review, June 25 Why is America trying to pour new money and more weapons into Palestinian Arab hands barely days after the Gaza debacle?...

America and Israel may want to wait for what may turn out to be a changing of the guard: Arab voices, both expert and popular, are rising in vociferous denunciations of the once sacrosanct Palestinian Arabs….

"Palestinians today need to be left without a shred of a doubt" as to what other Arabs think of them, a widely read opinion commentator for the Saudi daily Asharq Al Awsat, Mamoun Fandy, thundered on Monday. "We need to tell them the only thing they have proven over 50 years is that they are adolescents who cannot and should not be trusted to run institutions of state or any other important matters."…

For its part, the Egyptian press has become unhinged, spewing vile denunciations of what is universally known as "the cause"—support for the Palestinian Arabs—and describing it as dead….

Kuwaitis, who have harbored contempt for Palestinian Arabs ever since they allied themselves with Saddam Hussein's occupation in 1990–91, also dropped all restraint. "Palestinians are neither a modernized nor a civilized people," Ahmad Al Bughdadi wrote Monday in Al Siyassah, an influential Kuwaiti daily. "They are not statesmen. If what happened in Gaza is what they do without a state, what then shall they do when they get one?"

If there could be an editorial coup de grace, it surely was delivered by no less than Abdelbari Atwan, undoubtedly the Palestinian Arabs' most influential and respected journalist and a familiar face on both Western and Arab television.

Writing in the London-based Al Quds International, his painfully felt commentary, "Yes, We Have Lost the World's Respect," argued that "the cause" may have lost its legitimacy.