What is the unfunny joke about the Palestinian leadership? The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. They always say no and end up with less and less.  And their people suffer, but not the Palestinian leaders, whether they be the corrupt regime in the West bank or the hypocrisy of the Hamas leaders in Gaza. Of course this attitude has been facilitated by hordes of Western facilitators…educators, “intellectuals,” journalists, “useful idiots” as Lenin termed the Western apologists for communism.

On the perenial question of Palestine. I can only offer this; At an age at which my faith in humanity appreciating the blessings of peace, individual freedom, and liberty are at a low ebb…..I offer this. 

First of all at this point there can be no comprehensive settlement. It is not in the interests of the Arab regimes to buy into one. They prefer to keep it at a low boil as a convenient distraction  to their domestic problems and more recently to deflect Islamist threats to their regimes. For instance the Syrian regime would love to get in a low level conflict with Israel. Imagine the predicament of the “free Syrian:” forces fighting on the side of Israel!

However on the main question …what could have been done long ago to solve the problem?

1. More in the line of what should have not been done. The Arab regimes should not have cultivated and perpetuated the Palestinian movement as a pet project  and for their own regime maintenance reasons.

2.  The regimes should not have  propagandized their people into believing that there is such a thing as an Arab nation because in doing so the only piece of thread holding that  fiction together is the Palestinian problem. As King Hussein famously stated at one point ( gaining some few days of popularity) “we are all Palestinians.” As Qaddafi once stated in one of his rare moments of lucidity …” if we are one Arab nation why do we need another Arab state called Palestine?” More to the Point no Arab leader really believed in that myth making it even more hypocritical and perverse.

3. The Palestinians should have been integrated into the Arab  countries into which they emigrated/fled…  were driven/ left voluntarily ( select your own words). They have not been, even in Jordan which was the most hospitable. The Palestinians have been and continue to be excluded from the sensitive  coercive institutions of the state. ( actually worse now than in the 60’s) They should not have been herded into pitiful refugee camps and treated like crap by regimes extolling the sacredness of the Palestinian problem (lebanon Syria) or as the Gulf states did “Import Palestinians like TV sets.” as quoted by a long time Palestinian intellectual ( the name will come to me sometime later tonight).  Post comment. I remember now. It was Yusef Sayigh

4. The international   community should not, for whatever reasons, adopted the Palestinian  problem as their  favorite theme of man’s inhumanity to man. Why for instance are there so few UNRWA’s   for  the millions  of Africans displaced  in the internal wars over the past decades  and why so little public attention ? And why are we supporting a refugee organization set up to handle the refugee problem of 1948 and now taking care of 4th generation Palestinians in the Camps? Why do the Arab nations contribute almost nothing to UNRWA?   Easy answer, Because they support the perpetuation of the problem and we pay for it.I was in Jordan during the 1970 civil war, every bit as bitter as the Shi’a-Sunni conflict in Iraq and observed all the  European  and American “New Leftists” flocking to the refugee camps to pay homage to the PLO. The Arab guerrilla was made into a noble warrior exemplifying all the great traits of the Marcuse/ Che/ Guevara/ Franz Fanon era. With their tight tiger BDU’s,  flowing black and white kaffiyas, colorful berets they had the  every correspondent in the Civilized World vying for opportunities to  get an interview with Yasir Arafat. They were the “New Arab World”{ ( like the Arab spring folks of today?) They were on the  covers of Newsweek  Time etc.  Our own Tom Hayden came to pay his respects. and genuflect at the altar of “liberation theology.”

5. There should have been a greater reality check done by he Arab regimes and Palestinian leadership in perpetuating another myth that victory was just around the corner. The myth that The Israel state could be destroyed by low intensity tactics and  a military solution. After the conventional warfare failed in 1967, the Palestinian leadership with Western left wing support came up with the concept that Israel was Algeria and since the Jews were  colonialists like the French they could be defeated using the FLN tactics of “resistance” warfare.

So I guess folks that is my answer. Its too late now  for solutions and this conflict will grind on for ages.  Perhaps the “Cananite solution” will  solve it. This theory posited many years ago by a Jewish historian was that eventually with the changing demographics of Arab and Jew,  and  high birth rate of Separdim Jews in Israel it  will become just another Middle East state with the same oriental despotism and corruption of those nations around it.