Alan M. Dershowitz
As the Palestinian Authority continues to seek recognition by the
United Nations as a "state," the world should consider the implications.
If the U.N. now recognizes Palestine as a state without requiring its
leaders to negotiate a compromise peace with Israel, it would send a
clear message to other groups seeking recognition and statehood:
Terrorism will earn you the sympathy of the world and get you your way.
Palestinian terrorism has a decades-long pedigree that far predates
Israel's nationhood. In 1929, Haj Amin al Husseini—the grand Mufti of
Jerusalem and the official leader of the Palestinian people—ordered his
followers to murder hundreds of elderly Jews in Hebron and other cities
and towns where Jews had lived for millennia.
During World War II, Husseini moved to Berlin where he met with Adolf
Hitler and Adolf Eichmann. At Eichmann's trial for war crimes in 1961,
it came out that Husseini had personally prevented nearly 1,000
Hungarian-Jewish children from being sent to neutral countries. Instead
he insisted that they be sent to Auschwitz, where they died.
In 1948, Palestinians refused to accept the compromise two-state
solution proposed by the U.N., and instead they engaged in the Arab
states' genocidal war in which 1% of Israel's population, including many
civilians, were killed.
In 1968, a Jordanian-born Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, educated to
hate anything associated with Jews or Israel, assassinated New York Sen.
and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. Five years later, Palestine
Liberation Organization head Yasser Arafat arranged to have three
American diplomats kidnapped and offered in exchange for Kennedy's
assassin. When the U.S. refused to release Sirhan, Arafat personally
ordered the torture and murder of the Americans.
In 1972, Arafat ordered the terrorist attack on the Olympics in which
several Israeli athletes and coaches were murdered. There followed
decades of airplane hijackings, synagogue bombings and other attacks
that attracted the attention of the world. These attacks continue, the
most recent being this week's killing of Egyptian soldiers near the
border with Israel, apparently carried out with the complicity of
Palestinian terrorists from Gaza.
Rather than condemn this pervasive violence, the U.N. has done
everything in its power to reward it, including devoting special
agencies entirely to Palestinians and their cause. Meanwhile, the U.N.
and the international community have given the cold shoulder to
Tibetans, Kurds and other stateless groups that have not used terrorism
as their primary means of achieving recognition and statehood.
Yet the case for Palestinian statehood is far weaker because the
Palestinians have been offered statehood on numerous occasions—1938,
1948, 2001 and 2007. On each occasion the Palestinian leadership has
rejected the offer, choosing the gun and the bomb instead.
Despite this sordid history, the U.N. General Assembly—which includes
dozens of states that don't recognize Israel—is likely to vote for the
first time in favor of Palestinian statehood this fall.
I favor the establishment of a Palestinian state, but only if the
Palestinian leadership negotiates such a state with Israel and rejects
terrorism. Israel's government has offered to begin negotiations,
promising generous proposals without any preconditions. The Palestinians
continue to reject these offers of a negotiated two-state solution—with
the Palestinian Authority preferring unilateral action through the
U.N., and Hamas preferring terrorism.
I favor a Palestinian state not so much because the Palestinians have
earned this right by their actions and their history, but because
Israel will benefit by ending civilian settlements on the West Bank and
allowing the Palestinians to control their own destiny. Were the
Palestinians to accept a "land for peace" proposal of the kind long
offered by Israel, the world would see that the conflict has always been
more about land compromises, and the acceptance of Israel, than about
human rights.
Another important reason for requiring the Palestinian leadership to
negotiate and compromise as a condition of statehood—which the Israelis
did when they accepted the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan for Palestine—is
because of the experience with Gaza. Israel left Gaza in 2005
unilaterally, without a deal or agreement. It left behind farming and
other equipment in the hope that the Palestinians would use their
new-found autonomy to build a prosperous homeland that could live
side-by-side in peace with Israel.
Instead, Hamas exploited this autonomy to conduct a violent coup,
followed by repeated rocket attacks against Israeli civilians. There is
every reason to worry that such mayhem would be repeated if the
Palestinians were to be given statehood without negotiating a compromise
peace with Israel.
If the U.N. were to reward this abysmal history of violence and
terrorism, it would be encouraging other groups to follow the
"Palestinian path" to statehood. The end result would be more violence
and terrorism in the world.
This article previously appeared in the Wall Street Journal.
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