Vahe H. Apelian
Today I read in Yahoo news an article that saddened me. It is titled “A Saudi Prince Declares Independence From Old Obligations” by Zev Chafets, dated Friday, October 9, 2020. I have copied the text and attached it below.
The first paragraph pretty much sums up the break-up. It reads: “This week, in a three-part series on government-controlled Al Arabiya television, Saudi Arabia served the Palestinian leadership with a writ of divorce and a stinging bill of particulars that explained the break-up. Delivered by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the country’s leading elder statesman, it brutally laid out the failures of Palestinian leaders going back more than 70 years. It also suggests the futility of present Palestinian policies and the grim future it will bring the people it is supposed to represent.”
This new development has come about because a new world order is in the making. A new world order has always been in the making throughout history. I subscribe to the notion that it’s not the leaders who make the emerging new world order by design but rather by incompetence to best address the configuration of the emerging events that are impacting the living.
Surely this short note of concern is not meant to look back at the Palestinian cause but rather to invite the readers of my generation to recapture the turn of events that Palestinian cause experienced since it became prominent for my generation when the Arab states surrounding Israel - Jordan, Syria, Egypt Lebanon - waged a war against Israel which came to be known as the Six-Days War or the June War because it was fought between 5 and 10 June 1967. The State of Israel was created some two decades earlier, when on “On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. U.S. President Harry S. Truman recognized the new nation on the same day.” (Wikipedia).
After the death of the Palestinian legendary leader Yasser Arafat and for most of the past two decades the Palestinians have presented a deeply fragmented reality that any nation should avoid. On one end sits the Palestinian Authority aging leadership in the West Bank and at the other end in the densely populated Gaza Strip, intolerant to each other.
A lesson to be learned for Armenians as well. Since the Turkish-Azeri blitzkrieg against Artsakh and Armenia on September 24 (2020), an unprecedented cohesion has come about among the Armenians in Armenia, Artsakh and in the diaspora. There is a widespread call for unity proclaiming that we all are one and politics have been set aside. Naturally it is a welcomed development but such an outcry for solidarity in fact obscures the fact that Armenians were in a state of war since the liberation of Artsakh. Presently Armenians are in a very decisive, if not in an existential phase of the state of the war.
The verse by the Armenian poet Charents, quoted often, reads: “ Oh, Armenian people, your only salvation lies in the power of your unity”. I do not believe that the quote implies no opposition. Democracy does not entail the absence of opposition. On the contrary, democracy will not and cannot thrive and prevail without a healthy opposition. What marked the sad state of affairs in Armenia during the past thirty years, from which we profess to depart, hopefully for good, was not the presence of an opposition but rather in the manner the opposition was conducted. An opposition that did not make sufficient room for reason to prevail but resorted to politicizing issues snatching them away from reason and confining it to politicking.
Pachinyan led velvet revolution was a necessary correction and wake-up call from that sad reality. It was only after the revolution that I realized the extent of corruption that had taken place in plain view of the previous presidential administrations as evidenced by the theft of soldiers ration to have one of its prominent citizens Manvel Grigoryan feed them to his hungry bears caged next to his ill-gotten pricey cars he had been hoarding in his palatial house, not far from a similar house built for his son, also shutting down some of the streets of the city of Etchmiadzin not to disturb their tranquility. Yes, the prevailing endemic state of corruption led Gagik Tsarugyan release live domestic animals to his caged tigers to devour for the spectators’ "amusement" and Robert Kocharyan, the one time president of the impoverished Armenia, and sons go to safari hunting wild animals and proudly stand next to the animals’ carcasses for a snap shot to be shown on social media.
Vying for power is the natural order of things for any political party be in Armenia and the lack of an effective opposition leads to such excesses and abuses. But governance as well as opposition need to be tolerant, transparent and not corrupt. The lack of the latter led to the demise of the Palestinian cause making it a live lesson for study and for reflection for us Armenians as well.
The text
“This week, in a three-part series on government-controlled Al Arabiya television, Saudi Arabia served the Palestinian leadership with a writ of divorce and a stinging bill of particulars that explained the break-up. Delivered by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the country’s leading elder statesman, it brutally laid out the failures of Palestinian leaders going back more than 70 years. It also suggests the futility of present Palestinian policies and the grim future it will bring the people it is supposed to represent.
No Arab government has ever issued such a harsh public denunciation of the Palestinian movement. Bandar, a longtime former Saudi ambassador to Washington and former secretary general of the Saudi National Security Council is now a private citizen, but Israeli intelligence figures and other experts I asked with were in no doubt that he was speaking for the Palace and, more specifically, Crown Prince Muhammed ben Salman. Indeed, the director of the Crown Prince’s bureau, Badr Al-Asaker, publicly praised the series as “full of facts.”
Bandar spoke in Arabic, to make sure these facts reached every country in the region, with English subtitles for an international audience. He began by affirming Saudi support “for all legitimate rights of the Palestinian people,” and chronicled the ways in which his government has stood steadfast during decades of futility and regression. “The Palestinian cause is a just cause but its advocates are failures,” he said. “The Israeli cause is unjust but its advocates have proven to be successful.”
He begins with the first Palestinian advocate, the Mufti of Jerusalem. “Amin El Husseini in the 1930s was betting on the Nazi in Germany,” Bandar recalled. “He was recognized by Germany, Hitler and the Nazis for standing with them against the allies.” But Bandar notes that apart from Berlin radio broadcast recordings, his loyalty got him nothing and he did no good for the Palestinian cause.
Bandar goes on to mention a list of similar bad choices and decisions: The Arab rejection of the 1948 United Nations partition plan that would have given the Palestinians a state. The Arab League’s rejection of UN Resolution 242 after the 1967 War that called for an Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories; and the Palestinian Liberation Organization rejection of the Clinton Plan in 2000 that would have given the Palestinians a state in most of the West Bank and Gaza.
The most interesting rejection came in 1979, at Camp David. Israel offered Palestinians autonomy in the occupied territories. Yasir Arafat, turned it down flat. Sixteen years later, Arafat signed the Oslo Accord with Israel. Bandar asked him at the time to compare that deal with the terms he had turned down 16 years earlier. Arafat said that the autonomy offer was “10 times better” than Oslo.
Bandar asked Arafat why, then, he rejected such a good deal at Camp David. Arafat replied, according to Bandar, that he wanted to sign but refrained because Hafez al Assad (then Syria dictator and father of the current Syrian dictator) threatened to kill him if he did. “I remember thinking at the time,” Bandar told his audience, “that he could have been one martyr and saved millions of Palestinians.”
The story is not only a slap at Arafat but the present leaders in Ramallah who practice a similar brand of negative diplomacy. “An opportunity comes and it is lost,” says Bandar. By the time the Palestinians come around to the idea it’s no longer on the table. Significantly, that is also so far true of the Palestinian rejection of the current American peace plan, which is modelled on modelled on the 1979 autonomy offer that Arafat rejected to his regret, although, given that hundreds of thousands Israelis now live in these territories, and Gaza and the West Bank are separated for now, the proposed size of the autonomy would be smaller.
Prince Bandar is candid about the reasons for his monologue. First, he wants a record of how hard the Saudis have worked on behalf of the Palestinians over the decades. Second, he intends to reassure the UAE and Bahrain, which are being vilified by the Palestinians for recognizing Israel -- and any other Arab country contemplating a similar step -- that the Saudis have their back.
Third, he is calling out the PLO and Hamas for making alliances with non-Arab countries Turkey and Iran, who the Saudis consider dangerous. He is signaling that the Saudis will deal only with a new generation of pragmatic, moderate and dependable Palestinian partners. About the current leaders, he is candid: “It is difficult to trust them and to do something for the Palestinian cause with them around.”
The prince, who posted all his words on social media, concludes with a declaration of independence from old obligations. “In my own personal opinion,” he says, “we are at a stage in which, rather than being concerned with how to face the Israeli challenges in order to serve the Palestinian cause, we have to pay attention to our national security and interests.” This is not, of course, simply Bandar’s personal opinion. It is the policy of the Saudi government that put him on the air for three days this week.
Israeli strategists have long shared this evaluation. They are hoping that the new Saudi position may move the Palestinians toward a more realistic view of their prospects.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Zev Chafets is a journalist and author of 14 books. He was a senior aide to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the founding managing editor of the Jerusalem Report Magazine.
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