Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's firm opposition to US President Donald Trump's peace plan even before it was published, and certainly afterward, has not come as a surprise in light of the consistent Arab rejectionism since the British mandate.
For decades, there has always been a side that agreed to peace, while the other violently opposed it.
I would dare say that if Abbas and his ilk in the Arab League would have accepted Trump's deal we could have called this "The surprise of the century."
In order to understand the roots of the Arab-Palestinian rejectionism, I will briefly mention five points for consideration:
- Those who are familiar with Arabic know that there is no exact translation of the word "compromise."
- Anyone who has studied Islam knows that the world is divided into two places: The part where Islam is dominant, which is known as the place of Islam ("Dar al-Islam"), and the other part where Islam fights its holy wars against all the infidels (Kufar), known as "The place of War" (Dar al-Harb).
- According to Islam, there is no way for non-Muslims to inherit and hold any piece of land that used to be under Muslim rule. Any such land is considered to be under the "occupation" of infidels. That piece of land certainly cannot belong to Jews. At best, they can stay under Islamic rule if they pay a special tax for each individual, known as a "Skull Tax" (Jizya) and agree to abide by various restrictions.
- Those who are familiar with the thoughts, beliefs, and spirit of the Arab-Palestinian leaders as they speak in Arabic to their own people, know that they lack a leader who would accept less than 100% of their total demands regarding territories, refugees, and other issues, in exchange for true peace. True peace means a declaration affirming the end of the conflict; the end of all claims; accepting the Israeli state and recognizing it as a Jewish, democratic and sovereign entity, and a national home for all the Jewish people.
- No Arab leader wants to be remembered by his own people, and in the Arab-Muslim history books, as the one who surrendered (as perceived by the Arabs) or gave up (as perceived by "liberals") on demands, land, or – even worse – Arab honor, to the infidels, and to Jews in particular, as they are perceived as the new Crusaders of our time that should be expelled out of the Middle East.
As evidence, Dr. Mahmoud Abbas, the self-proclaimed Holocaust expert, recently reminded the Arabs that the "Jews, if they are even Jewish" – should return to their country of origin.
In conclusion, the roots of the conflict are religious and not territorial and we have every right to exercise our sovereignty there.
As the book of 1 Maccabees says: "It is not foreign land we have taken nor have we seized the property of others, but only our ancestral heritage which for a time had been unjustly held by our enemies."
