The ongoing fighting between the Palestinian Arabs and the Lebanese army in Tripoli says a lot about a skewered sense of entitlement felt by Palestinian refugees in many of the countries that play host to them and not much about their gratitude.
For its part, the Lebanese government has asserted that the Fatah al-Islam gang fighting its army is no more than a band of Syrian hired guns bent on disrupting Lebanon's latest effort to set up an international tribunal to try suspects in the 2005 assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri.
U.N. investigators have ascertained that virtually all of the defendants prosecutors are likely to name are Syrian officials, including President Al-Assad, his brother, and a brother-in-law, among others.
Mayhem is always to be expected from Syria, but why are the Palestinian Arabs offering themselves up as tools of Syria, destroying whatever sympathy is still left for their cause, and turning themselves into pariahs in the Arab world? And why do they keep doing it over and over?
In 1990, some 400,000 Palestinian Arab residents of Kuwait cheered on, and even collaborated with, Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army during his invasion of the Gulf state; when the Gulf War liberated Kuwait a year and a half later, the Kuwaitis threw all their Palestinians out.
Twenty years earlier in Jordan, armed Palestinian Arab gangs waged the so-called Black September Civil War in an effort to overthrow King Hussein and take over the country.
Both episodes cost the Palestinian Arab cause dearly. Those in Kuwait lost some of the best living standards they ever enjoyed. In Jordan, after killing some 7,000 Palestine Liberation Organization fighters, Hussein threw the rest out along with their leader, Yasser Arafat, who had found his way to Lebanon by 1971.
Within a decade, Arafat and his PLO gangs had brought turmoil to Lebanon, in effect triggering the 1975 Lebanese Civil War and, in 1982, inviting an Israeli invasion of the country. Those travesties got the gangster leadership of the PLO evicted once again, this time to Tunisia, leaving behind some 350,000 Palestinian Arabs holed up in refugee camps of Lebanon, which quickly became 12 cesspools of radicalism. They are where Syria and Al Qaeda went to recruit the newest gang of mercenary Palestinian Arabs, Fatah al-Islam.
All of this invites the question of what makes our Palestinian Arab brethren gravitate constantly toward such lowest possible denominators and end up as the prime losers. After the Oslo Peace Accords of 1993 offered a chance for much of the gang leadership to return to the West Bank and Gaza, it took Arafat's crew less than two years to alienate even the most die-hard Israeli doves. Suicide bombings led to checkpoints, which led to two intifadas, thus ending the Palestinian Spring.
Shortly after Prime Minister Sharon pulled the Israeli army out of Gaza in the summer of 2005, handing the Palestinian Arabs their own territory to govern for the first time ever, they quickly transformed it into a "Mad Max" arena of shootings, kidnappings, and lawlessness. Unable to agree on anything, Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al-Aqsa Brigades, Popular Resistance Committees, and the other factions all went for each other's throats.
Similarly self-destructive impulses were seen in Lebanon this week, as Fatah al-Islam gang members made their way back to their camp — from a bank robbery — with the Lebanese army in hot pursuit. Because of a Byzantine pan-Arab agreement brokered in 1969, Lebanese forces cannot set foot in any of the camps hosting Palestinian Arab "guests" of Lebanon.
As you read this, the-bank-robbers-turned-freedom-fighters are likely shooting at the Lebanese army in the name of a free Arab Palestine. Sadly, this is the sort of bankruptcy the Palestinian mind has come to.
But the times, they are a-changing. When the Tripoli episode is done, and internecine fighting among the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza resumes, the world will have moved further away from any sense of commitment to the Palestinian cause, and so will other Arabs.
Writing in a mass circulation Egyptian daily, Al-Akhbar, one of the most widely read columnists in Egypt, Ahmad Ragab, ended a biting commentary about the Palestinian infighting with what seems to be a spreading sentiment: "A curse upon all your houses."
Youssef M. Ibrahim, a former New York Times Middle East Correspondent and Wall Street Journal Energy Editor for 25 years, is a freelance writer based in New York City and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and a contributing editor of the NY Sun. Comment by clicking here.
© 2007, Youssef M. Ibrahim
Jewish World Review May
29, 2007 / 13 Sivan, 5766
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