Palestinians have no right to Israel's land

Recently I received an e-mail from a person who was angry with me over an article I wrote. The article in question was a piece I did a while back explaining why the Palestinians have no claim whatsoever to the land that is called Israel. This topic came up again in the newsroom, in a totally separate incident, and I was equally amused by my opposition's claims that the Palestinians have some sort of "right of return." The Israel/Palestine argument is a deep conflict with many variables but there is one constant that remains true throughout and outweighs all else — the Palestinians have proven that they are incapable of striking any kind of deal with the Israelis, despite the fact that the land in question is something that the Palestinians have no right to in the first place.

Originally, Palestine's governing body, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), admitted that it had no right to the land. The PLO, which was formed in 1964 with the help of several Arab countries, has a charter which contains its "mission statement," which was originally to destroy Israel. The PLO admitted that Palestine was "nothing but southern Syria" and that it did not "exercise any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, [or] on the Gaza Strip."

In 1993 Yasser Arafat, the PLO's chairman, admitted that Israel does have a right to exist, condemned terrorism (which is odd since he is a terrorist himself), and later on, in the presence of former president Bill Clinton, removed the clauses of the charter calling for the destruction of Israel. Terrorism still continues to this day in spite of what the charter says, which proves two things: one, that the Palestinians do not care about an official document designed to serve as a blueprint for their society, revised by their leader himself; but two, and perhaps more importantly, they have no bargaining skills at all and cannot be reasoned with.

Another topic of contention when it comes to this issue is the claim that Israel is illegally "occupying" Palestine. This is not only an absurd allegation but it also proves that people are ignorant to the facts. After the Six Day War in 1967 Israel acquired, among other areas, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. These areas were occupied illegally by Egypt and Jordan prior to the war, which came about after they invaded the regions in Israel's 1948 war for independence. The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine which legally declared the Jewish right to the whole of the land was terminated in 1946, but those exact rights exist to this day, carried over by the United Nations. As an aside, since the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were illegally occupied, the inhabitants living there would be considered Jordanians and Egyptians, not Palestinians, but this simple truth is disregarded by the ignorant.

In 1991, under the Oslo Accords, Israel agreed to relinquish control of the disputed land to Yasser Arafat, and in the blink of an eye, almost 100-percent of the Palestinians now lived under control of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Because of continuing Palestinian terrorism, one of the terms of the accords was a commitment to the security of Israel by the PA, which was, in true PLO fashion, ignored almost immediately. In 2000, in conjunction with Clinton, Israel offered even more land to the Palestinians in an attempt at peace, but this was rejected by the PLO, and shortly thereafter, the Palestinians began the al-Aqsa intifada, which was basically an uprising of continuing terrorist attacks and "demonstrations."

In the end, the PLO was given a chance to govern its people but they rejected it, forcing the Israelis to maintain a military presence in the disputed region for Israel's protection.

As you can see, attempted peace plans by both Israel and the United States that were clearly extremely beneficial to the Palestinians for land they had no right to in the first place seemed a no-brainer, but when you are dealing with a group like the PLO who is unable to reason and bargain, no-brainers are brushed aside for unknown reasons. The morals of the story: don't offer a no-brainer decision to a brainless group and stop saying that Palestinians are entitled to land that they aren't. Or, of course, remain ignorant.

Gerry Wachovsky is a senior broadcast journalism major at CSULB and the Diversions editor of the Online 49er.