Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, U.S. president Bill Clinton, and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat – Public Domain

The history of the Palestinians is a history of betrayal. In the wake of World War I, Britain and France redrew the map of the Middle East to suit their own ends. They created countries with artificial borders, which led to unrest and uprisings. They had concluded a secret agreement during the war—the Sykes-Picot agreement—that dashed Palestinian hopes of independence. The following year, the Balfour Declaration called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in what was then Palestine.

Israeli independence in 1948 led to the forced removal of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. Their families had lived in Palestine for hundreds of years. Indeed, Palestinians had lived beside Jews in Palestine since antiquity.

Many of the Palestinians, who were evicted in1948, have lived ever since in refugee camps in Gaza, Lebanon, and Jordan. I visited several of these camps in the 1970s and 1980s; they were horrific in most cases.

In 1956, Israel secretly joined the British and the French invasion of Egypt for control of the Suez Canal. This convinced Arab leaders that Israel was part of the European........

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