The late president of Egypt, Anwar Al Sadat, used to say Arabs were always willing to fight Israel until the last Egyptian. That is why, at some point in the 1980s, he disconnected from the Arab world, signing a peace treaty with Israel that returned every inch of Israeli-occupied Sinai.
For that it was worth being shunned by the Arabs for a while.
The same goes for Palestinians who most Arabs are willing to sacrifice to the last person as they shout at Israel across barbed wires.
Unfortunately, unlike the Egyptians, the Palestinians' choice is nowhere near as good, and getting worse, which is more reason why they can do without Arab opinions.
They have already lost 80 percent of historical Palestine. What they are now negotiating for is what is left of the remaining 20.
The talks are suffused with obstacles. Israeli colonists are sitting on illegal Jewish settlements built on Palestinian land. They are backed by a right-wing militant Israeli Likud government, which believes none of this land belongs to Palestinians anyway. An American government is in collusion with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who the state of Israel, to its credit, condemned after an official investigation. The Kahane Report found Sharon of being "indirectly responsible" for the massacre of several hundred women, children and men in Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon, Sabra and Shatila in 1982.
So, for the Palestinians, the Arab proverb applies: Those whose hands are in fire are not as those whose hands are in water.
Palestinians know all too well that the Americans, just as the Arabs, are more than willing to please Israel until the last Palestinian man, woman or child expires, and, alas, that Arabs are more than happy to shout at Israel across the fence until then.
So, as the torrent of "advice" being heaped upon the Palestinians gathers pace, please note the following: Unless you have been in Gaza in the past decade or two and have seen the living conditions of the Palestinians, you really have no grounds to tell Palestinians what to do.
See how the Palestinians live in tin-roofed ramshackle houses in which 10, 15 or even 20 Palestinian children, women and men have to live. Smell the foul odor of the sewers flooding the streets of most Palestinian refugee camps.
Witness the daily funerals as young people, infants and old men and women are buried with mutilated bodies after being hit by Israeli military munitions. Only then will you know the suffering of the Palestinians.
You would not know what the Palestinians are going through unless you have moved from city to city and sometimes from country to country as a homeless person.
Just think what it would be like to leave your home not once but twice, since the creation of Israel in 1948.
Imagine fleeing from home to escape the Israeli army soldiers, leaving behind homes, orchards, cemeteries and prized possessions and grabbing a suitcase or two of what is left.
Think of seeing with your own eyes how Israeli bulldozers flatten your home or your tent as Israelis pursue their calculated ethnic-cleansing strategies?
Is your West Bank stone house now lived in by a Jew from Brooklyn, New York, Johannesburg, Moscow or Kiev?
Unless your brother, father, cousin, daughter or wife has been taken in the middle of the night to an unknown jail without legal appeal or recourse, to be tortured under the protection of Israel's so-called supreme court's legal cover, it is better to be quiet.
Unless you are one of more than 1 million Palestinians living on $1.50 a day, keep your advice to yourself, especially as you walk into that fast-food outfit to buy your children sandwiches for what an entire Palestinian family lives on for a week.
Unless you are a Palestinian worker who has had to endure the pain and humiliation of building a Jewish colony for your enemies on your own land so as to earn enough money to put some food on your children's table, keep quiet.
Have you felt the pain of the pregnant woman or an old man, waiting with their head bowed at one of the 750 Israeli army checkpoints set up in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of Jordan as some foolish, arrogant and racist 19-year-old Israeli soldier decides whether he or she can get medical help?
Think again, before you decide to tell Palestinians what they should do.
Youssef M. Ibrahim is managing director of the Dubai-based Strategic Energy Investment Group. Acknowledgement to Gulf News
Palestinians' final choice
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