The Terrible Fate of the Palestinians

Fouad Ajami has an excellent article in yesterday's NYTimes.

Here is one of the best paragraphs (there are many others):

The political maxim that people get the leaders they deserve must be reckoned too cruel to apply to the Palestinians. Before Hamas, for four decades, the vainglorious Yasir Arafat refused to tell his people the basic truths of their political life. Amid the debacles, he remained eerily joyous; he circled the globe, offering his people the false sense that they could be spared the consequences of terrible decisions.

Fouad Ajami, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is the author of “The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq.”