Dershowitz: Palestinians are ‘stateless’ because they have demanded exactly that

(WND)The status of a Palestinian “state” is the core issue around which much of the violence – the repeated terrorist assaults on Israel – have revolved for years.

That’s even though there are multiple Arab states just over the national boundary.

But a new treatise developed by Alan Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, emeritus, at Harvard Law School, has identified the reason that the Palestinians don’t have the “state” that they demand.

It’s because they have refused it. Over and over.

Dershowitz explains, at the Gatestone Institute website, that the Jews in the Middle East previously “agreed to Palestinian statehood,” again and again.

“In 1937-1938, 1947-1948, 1967, 2000-2001, and 2007. In each case, it was the Palestinian leadership that refused to agree to the two-state solution,” he documented.

Back in 1937, before the Jewish state was declare, he said, “the Arabs categorically rejected (the Peel partition plan), demanding that all of Palestine be placed under Arab control and that most of the Jewish population of Palestine be ‘transferred’ — ethnically cleansed — out of the country.”

At that time, the Palestine Royal Commission Report found that because of the “general hostility and hatred of the Jews by the Muslims,” sharing a land was ruled out.

“Nor could the Jews be expected to accept Muslim rule over them,” since Arab leaders, at that time, were allied with Adolf Hitler.

That plan was for a Jewish majority land in several small strips by the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee, while the planned Arab state was several times larger, including the Negev, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“The Peel Commission implicitly recognized that it was not so much that the Arabs wanted self-determination as that they did not want the Jews to have self-determination or sovereignty over the land the Jews themselves had cultivated and in which they were a majority,” he wrote.

After World War II, the U.N. recommended partition, again.

The Arab leaders again rejected it. “They did not want a Palestinian state. And they wanted there to be no Jewish state,” he explained.

On declaring its own statehood, Israel immediately was invaded by Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, with help from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Libya.

The agenda later included the “three no’s.” No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel and no negotiations.

It was Bill Clinton who reported in 2000-2001, the Israelis “offered to withdraw from approximately 96% of the West Bank and 100% of the Gaza Strip in exchange for peace.”

The answer was “No.”

Dershowitz noted, “It is therefore not correct to claim that Israel denied the Palestinians statehood. The Palestinian leadership did. The Palestinians may deserve to have a peaceful state, but their claim is no greater than that of the Tibetans, the Kurds, the Chechens, and other stateless groups. These other groups, unlike the Palestinians, have never even been offered statehood, let alone repeatedly turned it down.”

He explained, “No one, therefore, should believe that it was Israel that has made the Palestinian people stateless. It was the Palestinians themselves, through their anti-Jewish leadership. The current anti-Israel protesters in the West are not calling for a Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel. They, like the failed Palestinian leadership, just wants to end Israel’s existence. It is not going to happen.’

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