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Well, some said, that is all history. Israel and those who support her hoped that, with time, the Palestinian problem would fade away; that the Palestinians would be absorbed by other countries; and that their aspirations for nationhood and for the land of their fathers would somehow disappear. This has proved an irrational and extremely dangerous notion. The Palestinians can scarcely forget that they have been dispossessed. Those who remain under Israeli rule are deeply resentful. The Intifadas, the Palestinian uprisings in the occupied territories, in 1988–9 and in 2000–2001, in which hundreds of Palestinians, armed only with sticks or stones, were shot dead by Israeli troops, gives some indication of how deep that resentment runs. And the Palestinian refugees living in camps in other Arab countries have not forgotten the homes and the land which belonged to them.
To the Saudi Government it has always seemed (as indeed King Abdul Aziz explained to President Roosevelt) that with a twisted logic, in some way, the Palestinians are being made to expiate the crimes of the Nazis. And that, because of those Nazi crimes, the Israelis are somehow excused for whatever action they take against those whom they have dispossessed. If this is the case, it is time the West acknowledged that the crimes of one society cannot be expiated by allowing the victims of those crimes to perpetrate crimes against another.
