EXCERPT:

"So too must we be careful with words like “fanatics” and “extremists” even though I use them in this book. But we must meticulously put meaning behind words like “extremist” and “fanatic” because the meanings are relative. An extremist and a fanatic is a person or individual who replaces reason with emotion, rejects compromise as a form of surrender, and after more than 60 years of tragedy, insists on the achievement of a dream that is not achievable.

"Palestinian extremists and fanatics want to turn back the pages of time and return to a One-State Solution. But the One-State Solution is the No-State Solution. To advocate what appears to be reasonable (to the victims, not the Palestinians) is an act of extremism in its worst form. It sentences Palestinians to a future of continued tragedy, and the failure to realize their own statehood."

Palestinians have a dream but the dream is not a reality. They want justice, but what they are getting from the secular Arab extremist left and the fanatic Islamic right is the promise of continued suffering. The extremists do not want to compromise. They want to perpetuate the conflict in the belief that conflict prevents compromise, which is their defeat. Conflict means that no-solution will remain in effect until they are able to achieve their goals. In the meantime, as we Palestinians wait, we continue to suffer. Palestine is being erased. The Palestinian identity will be little more than a memory. Every day that the conflict continues, a piece of Palestine disappears.

We are an emotional people and we believe in justice. But we allow our emotions not our intelligent reasoning to determine our fate. We need to be smart and recognize that we must now establish a Palestinian State, a state based on the Two-State solution and hold Israel's feet to the fire. Force Israel to accept the Two-State solution that they claim they support but avoid. Palestinian violence allows Israel to avoid making the final decision to return the Occupied West Bank which will become the heart of a future Palestinian State.

The Palestinian Dream is a nightmare today because of poor and deceptive leadership. The extremists, secular and religious have different goals. The secular extremists want to destroy Israel and take Palestinians back to a time when "Christians, Muslims and Jews" lived together in serenity. Yet that serenity never existed in Palestine which has been occupied by one foreign power since time immemorial. They want to turn back the clocks to a period that never existed. And they have built an industry of exploiting that suffering, giving themselves jobs. They thrive on Palestinian suffering and if there will ever be a genuine peace, they will be in the unemployment line.

The religious fanatics do not believe in an independent Palestinian State. The Islamicist movement, which is a bastardization of the true precepts of the purity of the Islamic religion, view Palestine as a stepping stone to the establishment of an Islamic Ummah. They do not care about Palestine as a secular nation or as a sovereign state. Palestine is but one step in a long staircase of conflict and sectarian violence.

The Catastrophe spells out the reality of the Palestinian tragedy, and offers a strategy to win.

BOOK EXCERPT:

Being honest about one's mistakes -- and failures -- and acknowledging the reality of history, rather than its myths, is a crucial step towards lifting oneself out of defeat. You cannot make something "better" if you do not honestly acknowledge that things are "bad" or you attempt to do so from a "bad" position. Only those who are "better" can make a situation better. Improve it. Correct it. Bring it back to the moral center.

Just being "better," as a relative statement, is not good enough. You are either pregnant or you are not pregnant. There is no in-between. The road to pregnancy is pregnancy. The road to peace is peace. Either Palestinians have a state or they don't have a state. You either support peace or you don't support peace. Those who use violence to achieve "peace" are not seeking peace at all. The use of violence is in and of itself a rejection of peace. Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims must answer this important issue correctly. We must clean our own house before we can insist on cleaning the houses of others, our "enemies." We cannot demand justice from others when we deny justice to others in our actions, in our arguments in our beliefs. Doing so is to deny justice to ourselves.

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