If Yasser Arafat would have shaken hands at Camp David, he would have had to go home and go to work. He would have had to start doing the real business of constructing the legal, economic and political apparatus to build the country that supposedly all the violence and death was aimed toward achieving. To the extent that there might have been failures and setbacks, the option of blaming the Israelis would no longer have been available.
If Arafat would have done the deal in 2000, the last four years could have been spent building and moving forward. Instead, the Palestinian people have endure the same sordid circumstances that have defined their last 50 years.
Martin Luther King is someone who also had a dream for his people. Through hard work, done in strict accordance with nonviolence and Christian principles, he changed the world. Because of these efforts, legislation was passed in 1964 and 1965 that made equality for all, under the law and in the voting booth, the reality of this country. Black leaders could have delivered the message then that the task was to go home, go to work, build families, educate children and create a new prosperity.
But rather than seeing 1965 as the culmination of a political struggle, black political leaders defined it as the beginning of one. They built a consciousness among African Americans that regardless of the law, racism and a dominant white culture would leave them forever the helpless victims and that the only hope was continued political activism and political solutions.
Arab leaders taught their children that they are helpless because of the Israeli oppressors. African American leaders taught their children that they are helpless because of the white racists.
Arab children today volunteer for suicide missions. Better the next world than contending with the imperfections of this one. Forty-five percent of homicides in the United States today are black men killing other black men. Why go to work and raise a family when it's all hopeless and pointless? Liberals call it the hopelessness of victims. I call it irresponsibility.