A Very Weepy Nakba Day To You

As our Palestinian friends prepare to mourn Nakba ("Disaster") Day, which is how they mark Israel's 1948 establishment, we wish to congratulate them on some 90 years of Chelmesque political leadership replete with own-goals. Some highlights:

• Rejecting the 1937 Peel Commission report, which would have given them everything in the British Mandate of Palestine west of the Jordan River except for Galilee and a sliver of the coastline running north from the Tel Aviv area.
  
• The cozy relationship between their first communal leader, Hajj Amin el-Husseini, and a certain Austrian failed artist with a toothbrush mustache.
  
  
• Rejecting the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan for Palestine, which would have given them a state side by side with Israel in the former British Mandate of Palestine.
  
• Assassinating King Abdullah I of Jordan in 1951.
  
• Putting their national fate in the hands of Yasser Arafat from 1964 until his death in 2004.
  
• Assassinating Bobby Kennedy in 1968.
  
• The Khartoum Conference of 1968, at which the Arab states vowed no recognition, no negotiations and no peace with Israel.
  
• Provoking King Hussein of Jordan into expelling the PLO in 1970.
  
• Not taking advantage of the opening created by the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty of 1979.
  
• Provoking the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which led to the PLO's explusion to Tunisia.
  
• Rejecting non-violent protest and destroying tens of thousands of Palestinian jobs in Israel during the First Intifada.
  
• Siding with Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War of 1991, unlike virtually all the Arab states.
  
  
• Adopting suicide bombing as the preferred Palestinian method of diplomacy in the 1990s.
  
• The reputedly ultra-sophisticated intellectual Edward Said throwing rocks over the Lebanese border fence at Israel in 2000.
  
  
• Rejecting the Clinton-Barak offer of a state at Camp David in July 2000.
  
• Rejecting the even better Barak offer at Taba in January 2001.
  
• Celebrating the 9/11 attacks on America.
  
• Provoking Israel's reinvasion of the West Bank in 2002.
  
• Electing Hamas in the Gaza Strip in 2005.
  
• Rejecting Ehud Olmert's offer of a state in 2006.
  
• Forcing Israel to wall off the West Bank in the 2000s.
  

All in all, the Palestinians seem to have adopted their own version of the Golden Rule: "What is hateful unto you, keep doing unto both your enemy and yourself." Way to go, guys!