How to Solve the Palestinian Problem…and bring peace to the Middle East, by Daniel Greenfield.
In 1990, there were half as many Palestinians as Kuwaitis in Kuwait. Two years later there were almost none.
With the support of the international community, some 700,000 Kuwaitis expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their country. If they had not done it, basic arithmetic shows that the Palestinians would have outnumbered Kuwaitis in Kuwait in a generation.
The Palestinians of Kuwait were kidnapped, tortured and killed. “Kill a Palestinian and Go to Heaven,” became the slogan. When Kuwait was “liberated”, tanks and armored vehicles were sent into the Hawally suburb of Kuwait City known as Little Palestine. Half the buildings were knocked down by bulldozers. Some detained Palestinians were buried in mass graves. The vast majority, including those who had been born in Kuwait, were deported or forced to flee a land they had lived in for a generation.
I don’t recall any of the above being reported in our media. Imagine the fuss if a western country, especially Israel, had done even a tiny fraction of that?
The violent ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians went mostly unremarked. While the Kuwaitis were ethnically cleansing their Palestinians, they continued to fund Palestinian terror against Israel and condemn Israel for violating the human rights of those they were deporting. …
A year later, Israel expelled 400 Hamas members. Every human rights organization was outraged. The State Department “strongly” condemned Israel. And Israel was forced to take them back. …
Kuwait refused to allow Palestinian Authority leader Abbas to visit until he apologized for supporting Saddam. And apologize he did. “Yes, we apologize for what we have done,” the terror boss whined. The PLO has yet to apologize to Israel for the Muslim settler role in the attempted 1948 genocide of the indigenous Jewish population and the thousands who were maimed and murdered by its terrorists. …
Nation states in Muslim Arab lands are largely illusory and artificial:
The Middle East is migratory. It is not Europe. An Arab Muslim who moves from Iraq to Syria or flees Kuwait for Jordan is not a refugee. When you start defining every migrant in a region with an extensive nomadic history as a refugee, the end result is the absurdity of the Palestinian refugee cities of Jordan or the million migrants showing up in Europe.
If you go back far enough, everyone in the Middle East is a refugee. …
The indigenous Jewish population and the Muslim migrants who settled in Israel are inherently incompatible. The Palestinian problem might be solved somewhere in Jordan or Syria. History and experience tells us it will never be solved in Israel.
The Israeli government should begin distinguishing between the Muslim settler population based not on artificial borders dating back to a particular war but on clan and ethnicity. The Israeli government should begin distinguishing between the Muslim settler population based not on artificial borders dating back to a particular war but on clan and ethnicity.
The Circassians who migrated to Israel in the 19th century from the Caucasus have not been a problem. These Ottoman military colonists are Muslims, but they serve in the Israeli military and have no interest in joining in the tribal wars of other Muslims against the Jews.
The Husayni clan, which gave us Arafat and the Mufti of Jerusalem, has been a source of strife and violence in the region for far too long. Israel doesn’t have a national problem with the “Palestinians”, it faces threats from marauding clans which dominate the leadership of Islamic terror groups such as the PLO and Hamas. No one has managed to make peace with the Husaynis yet. And they never will.
The first step to solving the Palestinian problem is to recognize that it doesn’t exist. The second is to determine which clans would be more compatible where. That is a process that must take place across the region in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Israel and beyond. And it is far more likely to bring peace than any amount of negotiations and peacekeeping missions.
The great error of Western foreign policy in the region was the belief that stability was best achieved through modernization. The Arab Muslim world is not going to turn into Europe.
hat-tip Scott of the Pacific
