This week I have read on an Egyptian newspaper a very wise article titled: "If only the Palestinians had accepted the Partition Resolution. If only Nasser had accepted Israel's peace proposal. If only the Palestinian Authority and government had not been formed." This title reflects the contradiction between the wish that the Palestinians had accepted the Partition, thus avoiding the 1948 War and the subsequent liberation conflicts, and the wish that the Palestinian Authority and government had never been formed, as they continued those wars. This title, though, also reflects some people's retroactive wisdom which emerges only when everything has already become history. Likewise, some rulers say, whenever the situation is inflamed: "If only the Arabs had accepted Israel since the beginning, they would have avoided all those wars" or "If only Nasser had accepted to make peace with Israel instead of trying to liberate the Arab territories that it had occupied…" I wonder why we do not come up with more of such wisdom and say: "If only Sadat had accepted the occupation of Sinai and had not waged the October 1973 War which liberated it." Accepting the status quo imposed by Israel and reflected in these statements totally contradicts the acceptance of the October War, which instead changed that status quo. Patriotic Arabs could not accept to leave their lands, homes and farms to foreign settlers who were not born in these lands and had perhaps never visited them in their life. Some people may say that such wise declarations are actually unfair, as they deal with principles and ideals through a status-quo-based logic. These declarations, in fact, do not understand that one can not give up his or her country or part of it; this is against everyone's principles. No other country in the world has ever been forced to leave half of its lands to another state born on that very spot. Yet, at the time we were not strong enough to object and we had to accept what was dictated to us. Some people, though, may question the wisdom of these declarations, as they judge events based on today's conditions and not on those in 1947, when the Partition Resolution was adopted. Indeed, at the time, the Arabs controlled the whole Palestine. This made it unacceptable to leave the country or half of it voluntarily to some foreign migrants just because the West felt guilty for what had happened to them and wanted to give them some compensation at the expense of those who had never made anything wrong against them. If Arab rulers had accepted such a shameful and unprecedented imposition, they would have turned into traitors and been labeled as such by the following generations. Yet, let me say that we should accept this logic ("if only we accepted everything that is imposed on us") and let me say to the Palestinians: if only you were wise this time and accepted the current occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the killing of children and the demolition of schools and hospitals. If you did, you could make up for Arabs' previous mistakes, as they refused to leave their lands to the foreign migrants coming from abroad.
