"Is it because we missed one?"
Ramallah, September 4 - Leaders and officials in a polity whose political and diplomatic record features an unbroken streak of siding with the most evil, most barbaric party to any international conflict, continued to wonder this week at the incomprehensible dislike that they encounter from other people in the region.
Palestinian nationalism's choice of allies, from Hitler in World War Two, via the various repressive Arab dictators propped up by the totalitarian Soviets during the cold war, to the neo-Hitlerian Putin and the Islamist imperialist ayatollahs of Iran, has shown an uncanny knack for choosing the most reprehensible side possible.
Diplomats in this de facto Palestinian capital city north of Jerusalem voiced their bewilderment yet again that their cause has hemorrhaged international support and solidarity over the decades, despite the tried and true policy of selecting the most distasteful, most brutal regimes with which to ally themselves in a futile effort to prevent, then to undo, the establishment and nurturing of restored Jewish sovereignty in the ancestral Jewish homeland.
"Is it because we missed one?" pondered Nabil Sha'ath, a longtime confidant of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. "There certainly have been a large number of strongmen since the 1920's, but I'm pretty sure we expressed solidarity with, and enjoyed support from, every single one."
"Stalin, check," he began, ticking off the names on this fingers. "Hitler. Nasser, the Assads, the IRA, every Soviet leader after Stalin as well, Hugo Chavez, Pol Pot, Mao, Idi Amin... I don't have enough fingers for a full accounting, but it's a full one. None of us can wrap our heads around why the Palestinian issue has sunk lower and lower on the international agenda, bombastic Arab League pronouncements notwithstanding."
Financial and material support for Palestinian "resistance" movements and operations have shrunk since the heyday of unstinting USSR backing for any group that might help the Soviets counter NATO and US influence. The collapse of the repressive Soviet regime in 1991 left a vacuum into which repressive Islamist regimes such as Iran and Qatar rushed, attempting to mask their inhumanity behind the standard of resistance. But increasing isolation of the Palestinian position, as numerous Arab and Muslim states reconcile with Israel, has left Palestinian leaders flummoxed as to where they might have gone wrong.
"They're supposed to love us," lamented PLO representative Diana Buttu. "That's why they keep our refugees in camps behind high concrete walls and don't allow them to hold most jobs or gain citizenship in their host countries, for more than seventy years and three generations now. It's because they love us. That's why this is so frustrating and confusing."
Please support our work through Patreon.
Buy In The Biblical Sense: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B92QYWSL