http://blogs.aljazeera.net/middle-east/2010/08/02/do-arabs-care-about-palestine
Do Arabs care about Palestine?
By Teymoor Nabili in a.. Middle East
on August 2nd, 2010
.
To conclude that Arabs do not care about the Palestine issue on the basis of a
recent newspaper survey is wrong.
In The New York Times, Professor Efraim Karsh of King's College London, draws
our attention to a poll that suggests 71 per cent of Arabs don't care about the
Palestine issue.
At face value the statistic is pretty sobering, as are the conclusions he draws
from it.
Because of this "staggering" number, the Professor says, there is absolutely no
basis to the belief that the Palestine problem is fuelling " regional anger and
despair, [that gives] a larger rationale to terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and
to the insurgency in Iraq".
Then, citing a list of carefully chosen historical events, he glides into the
further conclusion that an even bigger problem for Palestinians is active
persecution by Arab governments. (Not even a passing mention for any other
Governments that may be party to this particular issue.)
And the logical end product of this reasoning is that Palestinian people might
as well give up any hopes of being heard:
??"The sooner the Palestinians recognise that their cause is theirs alone, the
sooner they are likely to make peace with the existence of the State of Israel
and to understand the need for a negotiated settlement."
Many people will, of course, buy into this simplistic narrative, but two basic
problems stand out.
First - public ignorance and lack of concern about a chronic and intractable
geopolitical issue is far from "staggering", it's the norm in almost all
countries, even the best educated.
It therefore seems rather foolish to base an entire political philosophy on
this one selective statistic.
But more importantly, the Professor appears to have entirely mis-interpreted
the very statistic upon which he bases his argument.
If 71 per cent of Arabs don't care about the Palestinian problem, then,
logically, 29 per cent do.
As a rough benchmark of the size of the Arab world, let's take Wikipedia's word:
Twenty-five countries and territories with a combined population of 358 million
people straddling North Africa and Western Asia.
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