Blogger Neo-Neo Con linked to an article: "The Arabs of Palestine" by Martha Gellhorn from 1961(!) here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/196110/gellhorn

Among other things, Gellhorn says:

"It is hard to sorrow for [the Palestinian refugees] who only sorrow over themselves. It is difficult to pity the pitiless. To wring the heart past all doubt…[they] cannot have wished for a victorious rewarding war, blame everyone else for their defeat, and remain guiltless…."

The validity and clairvoyance of this harsh criticism have only magnified exponentially in the intervening decades. Martha Nussbaum, who has written extensively and honestly about compassion and pity, once wrote that pity is not totally unconditional, that it is very hard to pity someone whose suffering was brought upon themselves not through some lapse of momentary judgment but through malevolent intent, an act of will.

More than ever, I think, Palestinians are in limbo. They are waiting for some miracle to happen, like the disappearance of Israel. Their leaders are playing cruel mind games with their people's future, what normalization means and encourage them to believe in a cult of death, self-mutilation and destruction as a means to bring them closer to their past paradise, which never really was.

I often wonder if anything can ever save the Palestinians from disappearing into the pit of their bottomless self-pity. Where are their bright and energetic young men and women? Why aren't they telling their leaders and their false Arab friends: enough!? Why aren't mothers reclaiming their life, their right to decide for a future of life for their children?

Such a brilliant and moving piece - I hope everybody takes the time to read it. It is full of insight - the descriptions of the people - the Gaza Strip - too - in 1961 described as no hellhole - balmy and even prosperous - but something worse - a jail - because the Egyptians wouldn't let the people out.

She speaks too of the splendid UNWRA and the endless incitement - Revenge and Return - and of hope for the future, as the young people, in care of the UN, receive educations.

But her projection for the future was so wrong - how could she have known:

"The Palestinian refugees are unfortunate victims of a brief moment in history. It is forgotten that Jews are also victims in the same manner, of the same moment. The Arab-Israel war and its continuous aftermath produced a two-way flight of peoples. Nearly half a million Jews, leaving behind everything they owned, escaped from the Arab countries where they lived to start life again as refugees in Israel. Within one generation, if civilization lasts, Palestinian refugees will merge into the Arab nations, because the young will insist on real lives instead of endless waiting. If we can keep the peace, however troubled, the children of Palestinian refugees will make themselves at home among their own kind, in their ancestral lands. For the Jews there is no other ancestral land than Israel."

How could she have known, in 2007, following several disastrous wars, endless acts of terror, there has been no assimilation and generations have been born in camps, the only WWII era refugees in the world. And the Middle East is now almost entirely empty of Jews.

And Israel, still threatened with destruction, still the only homeland of the Jewish people, is described as a "colonialist/imperialist" project, the Zionist movement that saved the remnants of a people defined as "racism", and for all Israel's attempts to integrate people of all races and faiths into the state, she is vilified: apartheid.

:(

Martin Peretz is one of the few clear thinkers at The New Republic. Unfortunately, he is a voice in the wilderness, not only there, but in general.