Palestine: Is reality on the horizon?

Fouad Ajami, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and author of The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq, writes in today's New York Times about the Palestinians:

The Palestinian ruin was a long time in coming. No other national movement has had the indulgence granted the Palestinians over the last half-century, and the results can be seen in the bravado and the senseless violence, in the inability of a people to come to terms with their condition and their needs.

As he continues:

The political maxim that people get the leaders they deserve must be reckoned too cruel to apply to the Palestinians. Before Hamas, for four decades, the vainglorious Yasir Arafat refused to tell his people the basic truths of their political life. Amid the debacles, he remained eerily joyous; he circled the globe, offering his people the false sense that they could be spared the consequences of terrible decisions.

The Arab states, too, says Ajami, must bear some responsibility for having contributed to the delusions. As he writes:

The Arab cavalry was always on the way, the Arab treasure was always a day away, and there was thus no need for the Palestinians to pay tribute to necessity. In recent years, the choice was starkly posed: it was either statehood or a starring role on Al Jazeera, and the young “boys of the stones” and their leaders opted for the latter.

The Palestinians, Ajami suggests, are not the dolphins they've been made out to be. As he writes:

It has long been a cherished legend of the Palestinians, and a proud claim, that they would not kill their own, that there would be no fratricide in their world. The cruelty we now see — in both Gaza and the West Bank — bears witness that the Palestinians have run through the consolations that had been there for them in a history of adversity. . .

We must not overdo the distinction between the “secularism” of Fatah and the Islamism of Hamas. In the cruel streets and refugee camps of the Palestinians, this is really a distinction without a difference. . .

It is idle to think that Gaza could be written off as a Hamas dominion while Fatah held its own in the towns of the West Bank. The abdication and the anarchy have damaged both Palestinian realms. Nablus in the West Bank is no more amenable to reason than is Gaza; the writ of the pitiless preachers and gunmen is the norm in both places.

Amazingly, Ajami still holds out hope that the Palestinians will finally grasp their reality:

For decades, Arab society granted the Palestinians everything and nothing at the same time. The Arab states built worlds of their own, had their own priorities, dreaded and loathed the Palestinians as outsiders and agitators, but left them to the illusion that Palestine was an all-consuming Arab concern.

Now the Palestinians should know better. The center of Arab politics has shifted from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, a great political windfall has come to the lands of the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, vast new wealth due to the recent rises in oil prices, while misery overwhelms the Palestinians. No Arabs wait for Palestine anymore; they have left the Palestinians to the ruin of their own history.

The Arab states, says Ajami, should also finally be forced to acknowledge the role they played in fomenting this mess:

The rise of Hamas in Gaza should concentrate the minds of the custodians of power in the Arab world. Palestine, their old alibi, the cause with which they diverted the attention of their populations from troubles at home, has become a nightmare in its own right. An Arab debt is owed the Palestinians — the gift of truth and candor as well as material help.

Curiously, he leaves the Quartet (the U.S., E.U., U.N., and Russia) - and even Israel - almost entirely out of the discussion of the way forward. What he seems to be saying here is that the Palestinians need not look to anyone but themselves and their brotherly Arab nations to find the way out of their misery.

While Ajami's advice seems reasonable enough to me, I bet it will continue to be dismissed by "pro-Palestinians" because it will be perceived as being "anti-Palestinian" (i.e., "pro-Israel") or "anti-Arab" (i.e., "pro-Israel" or perhaps even "neocon").

To paraphrase Bernard Lewis, we live in a world where if you see the Palestinians as ultimately capable of solving their own problems using their own enterprise, this is not a "pro-Palestinian" view. To be "pro-Palestinian" in other words, you have to see them solely as victims, as a childlike people who have only been exploited.