The big anger of a little king

At the United Nations assembly on Tuesday, Jordan’s King Abdullah II angrily demanded justice for the Palestinians, claiming that “No injustice has spread more bitter fruit than the denial of a Palestinian state”.

I happen to agree with the king on that point. Palestinians should have a state. The lack of a state for them has caused many problems, not only for the Palestinians, but also for the Israelis, the Lebanese (that I witnessed personally), the Jordanians (as he well knows), the Egyptians, and others. That is a fact, and no one needs Abdullah’s reminder.

But after repeating that platitude, the king failed to address the reasons why there is no Palestinian state. Instead, he fed the false narrative that Israel is the cause when he said, “Israel has to embrace peace or eventually be engulfed in a sea of hatred in a region of turmoil”.

Jews have had to deal with Arab hatred for decades. In fact, they have been dealing with it since well before Israel became independent, but that hatred and the lack of a Palestinian state are squarely the consequences of Arab actions, not Israel’s. The king showed his smallness by failing to acknowledge that fact and his kingdom’s part in it.

He failed to recognize that Palestinians were offered a state by the 1947 UN partition plan which Jews accepted but that Arab states, including Jordan, rejected. He failed to recognize that Israel has offered the Palestinians a state several times since then but that the offers were refused with the support of Arab states.

Most importantly, he failed to recognize that the main obstacle that remains standing in the way of a Palestinian state is Arab hatred towards Israel and Arab violence towards Israel. That hatred and that violence keep Palestinians divided, dependent, occupied, and led by swindlers and terrorists.

The king’s hypocrisy at the UN matches his hypocrisy in the book “Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril” which he published in 2011. In that book he makes the same claim of supporting the Palestinians while he tries to sell a narrative that avoids all blame on Arabs and places all blame on Israel.

By paying lip service to the concept of a Palestinian state without admitting the reasons why that concept has not materialized, and without acknowledging what needs to be done today to make it happen, the king showed that he has no courage and no sincerity. The king showed that he is very little indeed.