These *do* seem like interesting questions. Why was Hajj Amin a Nazi? Why did Arafat's organization decide that killing olympic athletes was a peachy-keen thing to do? Why the prolonged refusal to recognize Israel?
Does anyone know the answers?
>What I shall discuss in my next article is how the only possible
>political strategy for the US so far as Arab and Palestinian policy
>are concerned is neither a pact with the Zionists here nor one with
>US policy, but a mobilized mass campaign directed at the American
>population on behalf of Palestinian human, civil and political
>rights. All other arrangements, whether Oslo or Camp David, are
>doomed to failure because, put simply, the official discourse is
>totally dominated by Zionism and, except for a few individual
>exceptions, no alternatives to it exist...
In large part because the image of Palestinians in the mind of America's necktie-wearing class is of the people who rolled people in wheelchairs into the ocean and started hijacking airplanes--thus leading to our current air travel ritual passages through the metal detectors and the x-ray machines. Wasn't the decision to take the Black September road (as opposed to, say, the Gandhi road) a decisive political error on Arafat's part? Is there any way it can be repaired?
Brad DeLong