Gingrich and Palestinians

Newt Gingrich, a star in the Republican race, has bizarre concerns and shoots off rhetorical firecrackers. As evidence of this, what he says (or does not say) creates a sensation. I will leave aside the Gringrichian obsession with an electromagnetic attack against the U.S. and concentrate on a verbal explosion that gave me that left me pulsating. Gingrich said that the Palestinians are an “invented people.” There is now a predictable furor from the Palestinian leadership and intellectuals from the left (and even from Mitt Romney and other Republican candidates) at this explosive declaration.

Gingrich is still historically correct about the invention (politically it is another story). Palestinian nationalism is a recent cause. There are sectors who simply deny the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism, but it is possible to trace it back to at least 1970. Up until then, it was much more an anti-Israeli cause of Arab countries; the Palestinian refugees were pawns of Israel’s enemies and even a weapon of genocide.

Moreover, the often cited Resolution 242, approved by the U.N. Security Council after the Six-Day War of 1967, did not reference the Palestinians, just refugees. Ironically, before the 1947 partition of the British territory which previously belonged to the Ottoman Empire, the word “Palestinian” referred to Jews who lived in Palestine. The Arabs were called Arabs or Palestinian-Arabs. And between the Independence of Israel in 1948 and the 1967 war, the Arab countries who controlled the West Bank, the Gaza strip and East Jerusalem never had the inclination to create a Palestinian state. This is just history.

Gingrich entered the debate with gusto because he wants to earn Jewish American votes, who are largely pro-Democrat. But as Michael Kinsley, a veteran journalist and inveterate polemicist, says, you cannot un-invent what has been invented. Palestinian nationalism is an established fact. The Palestinian people want and deserve to have a state. Even broad sectors of the Israeli right, notably Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, already accept this aspiration.

It is enough to stick with the statement of the ex-Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Zalman Shoval. He said that whether the comments of Gingrich are “factually true” or not, they are politically irrelevant (in the context of the current political situation in the Middle East). “Palestinian Arabs for the last 50 or 60 years have defined themselves as a separate national unity. Their aspiration to a national unity and self-governance is the fact we should be dealing with.”

This is in fact extremely correct. It is for Gingrich to make better arguments in case one day he becomes president (which I hope never happens) and needs to negotiate the Middle East crisis — including representatives of the Palestinian people.