Newt Gingrich’s comment that Palestinians are an ‘invented people’ is proving to be one of the most globally devisive of the 2012 campaign season – particularly in the Muslim world and especially among Palestinians. For Samidoon in the Palestinian Territories, columnist Abd Al Bari Atwan expresses the frustration felt among Palestinians over the wider meaning of Gingrich’s comment, and issues a renewed call to arms for Palestinian youth.
For Samidoon, Abd Al Bari Atwan starts off this way:
After 18 years of talks; the concession of over 80 percent of historic Palestine; the signing of the Oslo accords, which lent Israel legitimacy and broke its isolation among Arabs and around the world; and the repudiation of armed struggle as equivalent to terrorism, here comes America with a double reward for Palestinians. First from the hands of President Barack Obama, who refused to allow Palestine’s symbolic membership at the United Nations; and second with the help of Newt Gingrich, the Republican presidential candidate now leading in the polls, who considers Palestinians to be an “invented people,” an entity undeserving of the status of statehood.
Before the futile and degrading negotiations and the abandonment of the resistance, no U.S. official would have dared make such a statement. … What has changed? … The Americans haven’t changed. It is us, with our own surrender; and it is the Arabs who, having grown increasingly hypocritical toward Jews and Israelis, have throw themselves at their feet, literally killing themselves to please them.
Gingrich is capable of holding this position, safe in the confidence that it won’t hurt him. Because Arabs simply don’t lie at the heart if his country’s interests. And in any case, the Palestinian authority still considers the U.S. a strategic ally, flirting with American envoys who flood Ramallah carrying formulas for reviving the peace process.
When the Palestinian people turn away from being a people of fighters to a people who beg; when their security forces work with their Israeli counterparts to protect settlements from resistance operations, helping make the Israeli occupation the least costly in history – why wouldn’t Gingrich and his ilk go beyond the extremism of even Netanyahu, and like him, falsify history and geography?
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