The ability to negotiate, perhaps, and not stake everything to a ruinous maximalism?
Is that not what the Zionists did? As long as the Zionist objective was a Jewish State, there was nothing to negotiate, as that state by its fundamental nature would have excluded the existing non-Jewish population.
To the best of my knowledge, that goal was never considered negotiable, and that "maximalism" made negotiation meaningless.
The Palestinians didn't have the best of choices, but they had both a colonial government and Zionist neighbors who could be argued with as well as fought and stood ready to negotiate a compromise solution.
They tried to discuss the matter with the British Colonial Secretary, a certain Winston Churchill, in 1921. They asked him to reduce Jewish immigration. His response: “This is not in my power, and it is not my wish”. A few months later the first of the anti-immigration riots broke out.
Who knows what might have happened if the British really had stood ready to negotiate a compromise, or if the Zionists had been prepared to negotiate the goal of a Jewish State? Maybe nothing, but the attempt wasn’t made, so we can’t really say. |
