And this is the roughly 40 percent of the West Bank, all of it uninhabited, that Israel dares not relinquish. As the current war in the former Yugoslavia shows yet again, control of the air is no substitute for actually holding ground. The U.S. peace team, the same people exhausted from repeating the same tired formulas for almost a decade, has perpetuated the agony by not telling the Palestinian Arabs the truth. But they didn't. Indeed, for the past 50 years, the missed golden opportunity of Resolution 181 has inwardly haunted and taunted the Palestinians.
Time marches on.
Fifty years of time, actually. But the Palestinians, who came so late in history to crystallize their own ambitions, now want to abolish time as a way of abolishing their own mistakes and to pretend that the maps are still being newly drawn and that generations of Israelis have not built lives in those areas which Yasir Arafat has now reverted to claiming as his own. Yes, some of these are places where Arabs once lived and which they left. It makes no sense now to deny that, during Israel's war for independence, Arabs were pushed out, and not always so gently. On the other hand, many of them, most of them, abandoned their homes at the call of the haughty elites who assured them that they would return in triumph.