Munayyar advances the thesis that the Palestinians resident in and adjacent to Israel constitute a sovereign deterrent to any Iranian attack, particularly one of a nuclear nature. This is an interesting but utterly fallacious notion.
The events of the past sixty plus years have shown that there is no concern for Palestinians held by Arab leaders, let alone those of Iran. The assorted Arab autocrats, kings, and sheiks have exploited, used, manipulated, and assured the deaths of Palestinians time after bloody time. The Palestinians are useful and quite expendable tools in the eyes of Arab and other Muslim political and military leaders.
In and of themselves, the Palestinians are of neither interest nor importance. Beyond their base utility as a cudgel to be used against Israel--and before 1948 the Zionist movement--the Palestinians have no value, be it ideological, political, or religious. The only exception to this general rule is the use of Palestinians as hewers of wood and drawers of water in the various oil based feudal sheik- and kingdoms.
Mr Munayyar and his fellow Palestinians have to get a grip on their history dating back to the immediate post-WW I period. Throughout the ensuing eighty years the Palestinians have been far more cruelly and cynically exploited for ends not of their desire by their fellow Arabs, their coreligionists, than by the Zionists and Israelis.
The record of Palestinian misery directly and solely attributed to the ambitions and goals of assorted Muftis, kings, presidents, dictators is long and so well documented that it needs no dilation at this point. Neither is there any compelling necessity to point out that there has never been an Arab or Muslim equivalent of Israeli historian Benny Morris. No Arab, no Muslim, has done what Morris did so ably years ago--demonstrate and document the ill-usage of the Palestinians.
Morris employed declassified Israeli records to blow open completely the worst kept secret of the Israeli Wars of Independence--the program of Palestinian forced removal. That the Israeli armed forces used atrocious behavior to encourage Palestinians to leave the area is undeniable.
Equally undeniable is the role played by the invading Arab armies whose commanders and political masters worked assiduously to convince Palestinians to leave the area of operations. These appeals were accompanied by assurances of a speedy return in the wake of the victorious Arab armies.
Mr Munayyar is, not unsurprisingly, silent on the complicity of the Arab armies in the "ethnic cleansing" of the land which became Israel. He is equally silent on the manifold sins committed against his fellows by Arab states, Arab statesmen, Muslim Arab clerics, and all the others who sought their goals on the backs and through the blood of Palestinians.
The pall of silence extends to those Palestinian leaders exemplified by Arafat but including scores of others ranging from blood drenched practitioners of terrorism-without-a-reason to imitation diplomats outpointed, out maneuvered at every turn in every conference. Nor does Mr Munayyar mention any of the many times when the Palestinians were offered the better part of a perfect deal only to reject it in the bootless hopes of getting a totality which existed only in fantasy. From the Thirties through the UN offers of sixty-three years ago right on down to the silence which met the Olmert offer two years ago, the Palestinians have rejected ninety percent of the loaf in the delusional expectation of getting one hundred ten percent if only they were intransigent enough, long enough.
In addition to offering the Palestinians-as-human-shields hypothesis, Mr Munayyar spends some time severely excoriating Benny Morris for having come out in recent years as a critic of the Palestinian removal effort not for having been excessive but for not having gone far enough. Morris has repeatedly said in the past decade that the leaving of twenty percent of the initial Palestinian population resident in the land which became Israel was a serious mistake.
From the Israeli perspective the Morris criticism is trenchant. It has much to recommend it. Had all Palestinians ether been ejected or left in response to the Arab importuning, there would be no "Palestinian question" today. Stalin was right when he famously said during the purges, "No person--no problem." This is the centrality of Morris' revised position.
The Geek (who is by genetics, if not culture, three-eighths Apache) has read and heard on a number of occasions that the Whites would have been well advised a century and more ago had they exterminated the indigenous population rather than pen them on the reservations. He has heard and read the same view expressed by descendants of the once free, once proud Native American population both blended like himself and pure of lineage. Anyone who has spent any time on the "res" cannot but help thinking similarly at least every now and then.
Given the conditions under which so many of the displaced Palestinians have been forced to live for generations now, conditions fostered not only by the well-meaning folks of the UN and its lesser bodies but also by the Arab governments, it is not unreasonable to conclude that even the Palestinians of today would be much better off in all respects had the 1948 removal been total and accepted by countries in the region and around the world as a permanent fact. Where they have been allowed to integrate fully into host societies the Palestinians have shown themselves a great addition to the energy, the vitality, the economic prosperity of their new homes.
Full integration, however, has been spotty, haphazard in the extreme. Full, organized integration has been prevented by the reach of Palestinian dreams far outstripping the grasp of reality. Exacerbating this condition has been the exploitation of the Palestinian dream by the self-centered Arab states.
The Palestinian people have been driven to excesses of dream, the farther shores of despair, the violent margins of Islam by a host of manipulators, a legion of exploiters, a monstrous regiment of those who seek their own goals of power through the suffering of others. It is this concatenation of evil doers which has assured the Palestinians have had no moment of peace, no society of harbor, no new world on which to plant feet and family in which to grow a real future.
While Israel is far from guilt free, it is the lesser, even the least of the evils both inadvertent and intentional which have conspired to make the Palestinians inhabitants of a hell on Earth. The same applies when assessing the Palestinians-as-human-shields thesis advanced by Mr Munayyar. It wouldn't bother the mullahs in the slightest if a few million Arab, Sunni Palestinians became ions in a mushroom cloud.
It would be best for individual and collective peace of mind, best for individual and collective futures if Mr Munayyar and his fellow leaders and spokesmen for the Palestinians realized just what Palestinians mean in the Arab (and Iranian) calculus. The entirety of the Palestinian population ranks as less than nothing in the estimate of Arab and Iranian leaders--unless they remain as useful and utterly expendable tools of state policy.
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