If your contention is Arafat does not have a country, then that needs to be extended to Israel also when a group of Jewish folks militarily grabbed a piece of land and claimed it their country
This premise is incorrect. The Jews got permission to settle, first from the Ottomans, then from the British and the Hashemites under the Balfour Declaration. The Zionist bought every piece of land they settled on until 1947. No grabbing. The landowners made a fortune. In 1947 partition was voted by the UN and the Arabs went to war. If the Jews had lost, they would have been killed or driven off (as they were from the West Bank) and Palestine divided between Syria, Transjordan and Egypt. There were no such people as "Palestinians" in 1948, just Arabs of Palestine, and nobody wanted an Arab Palestine, except the Mufti, but Nazis were out of favor at the time.
Now the Arabs try to pretend that the Jews first showed up from Europe in 1948 and grabbed the land, but if there hadn't been 650,000 Jews in Palestine in 1947, there would have been nobody there to defend the country from the invading Arab armies.
If they could have one in that manner, then why is it that Arafat also cannot have one in a similar fashion?
Why can't Arafat grab a country? Because he is not strong enough, for one. As a leader, he is a serial disaster. Also, he would be an intolerable neighbor for both Israel and Jordan, so they have a common interest in preventing a sovereign Palestine from coming into existence.
Edit: Now, if you meant, why should Arafat get the Great Powers of the day (that would be Israel and the US) to give him a country, just as the Zionists got one from Britain, the Hashemites and the UN, it seemed as if he were succeeding for a while there. But the Great Powers demand some level of cooperation, and Arafat's penchant for double-crossing and betraying everyone he deals with have left him few friends. The Great Powers also demand pragmatism and compromise, and Palestinian politics have reverted to their usual course of maximalism. |
