Steve Rothman: “If I may, as far as I am concerned, the Palestinians need to take responsibility for choosing their own leaders. If they…”

“If I may, as far as I am concerned, the Palestinians need to take responsibility for choosing their own leaders. If they choose to call Yasser Arafat their leader, so be it. But that does not change what we as Americans must do. We must say to the Palestinians, they have to put forth a leadership that announces in English and Arabic and to the world that they are ready to live in peace next to the Jewish state of Israel, something the Palestinians regrettably have refused to do, believing that they would intimidate, terrorize, or in other ways use the leverage of middle eastern oil to force America or Europe to make Israel weak enough so that they could finally, after 5 attempts to destroy Israel in five wars, they could finally destroy Israel. What they are learning now is that Israel will not be defeated militarily or morally, since they have the legal right recognized by the U.N., and were established at the same time as all those other nations in the middle of the 20th century, and that they, the Palestinians, are the only ones. They must look in the mirror if they are looking for the culprit as to who has deprived them of statehood. The Palestinians were offered statehood in 1947 by the U.N. They rejected it. They were offered it again in 1967, after they invaded Israel, along with all the other Arab armies. They rejected it. In the year 2000 at Camp David, they rejected a proposal for 97 percent of what they wanted, even though they were the defeated entity.”