The battle for Palestine is not in the furrowed hills of the West Bank, the narrow streets of Jerusalem or the scorching deserts of the Gaza Strip. It's in the minds of Americans.

Yet before Palestinians can even engage that battle, they need to come together. And Palestinians are the most divided displaced people on the planet.

The divisions stem from many factors: victimization; occupation; persecution; denial of existence, violence and trauma; loss of land and homes; strategic media manipulation by Israel; and, existence in an Arab World that censors opinions and imposes intolerance of certain viewpoints not embraced by the powers that be.

That may be insurmountable for most, but Palestinians have never given up, although they have never been successful in waging a fight for their rights.

The only successful Palestinian goal achieved was led by Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Under Arafat's leadership, the PLO succeeded in achieving the very first and most significant challenge, to force the world to recognize that Palestinians do exist and that the war of 1948 was not simply about creating a Jewish Homeland but about the transgressed rights of the indigent population, the Palestinian Arabs (Christian and Muslims and even in some cases Jews who have abandoned their Palestinian identities.)

Yet since that sole victory, which was monumental in its achievement, there hasn't been any other victory of substance. In fact, Palestinian interests have suffered, not advanced over the years.

The activists who are leading the post-Arafat campaign for statehood and the implementation of rights, have failed and refuse to allow anyone to challenge their failure. Those activists have been successful in winning over international sympathies that have failed to materialize into effective forces.

In other words, Belgium now loves Palestine, but so what? What does their support mean? Not what the activists want you to believe.

Winning over the international world's sympathies is important as a step towards the real goal, winning over American public opinion. Arabs lost that battle in the 1950s because of poor leadership and the absence of any substantive public relations.

In fact, Israel won that battle in the 1950s and 1960s securing a solid sympathetic base among the powerful American public opinion. Even when the World had three Super Powers, the United States still reigned supreme when it came to the future of the Arab-Israeli conflict. But now that the United States is the world's real sole Super Power - China and Russia don't even come close any more - that mainstream American public opinion remains an even more important audience to win.

Israel hired a PR specialist in the early 1960s to find a writer who would define Israel's story or narrative in a way that would capture the hearts and minds of the American people, and secondarily, reinforce the mission of the Israelis and Jewish immigrants who were being told that stealing land from non-Jewish Palestinians was not a crime but a birthright. They were able to live with their abuse of civil rights, which has only worsened over the years as evidence by the Superbly precise report of the UN Commission on War Crimes headed by renown jurist Richard Goldstone.

[(Part of this topic was discussed during a recent interview on Radio Baladi (www.RadioBaladi.com), a simulcast radio show I co-host with Laila alHussini that broadcasts every Friday morning in Chicago and Detroit. You can listen to the podcast of the 90 minute segment online.]

Yet the Palestinians have been incapable of telling their own story. The story the PR agent commissioned was a fiction concocted from a few grains of truth called Exodus and it was written by Leon Uris. That book and eventually a major Hollywood motion picture has remained as the benchmark of how Americans view the Palestine-Israel conflict.

Pure fiction. Written out of the imagination of a brilliant writer who tugged at the heartstrings of the American public.

Why don't Palestinians tug at the heart strings of the American people? First, most Palestinian activists are engaged in a war with the very audience they need to befriend, the mainstream news media. Instead of engaging the media forcefully as one voice, they mostly only scream at the mainstream media.

Worse, though, Palestinian activists engage the media as enemies and foes. They blame the media, but that blame really is a reflection of their own failure to correct the media bias that exists in a large part because the Arab World doesn't believe in media spin or professional communications. They believe in the truth and if you don't embrace it, you're the enemy.

Palestinians need to stop yelling at and blaming the American people. We need to stop our activists from engaging the mainstream American people in a confrontational mode that instead of generating sympathy reinforces opposition o our cause. From the flotilla to protests across this country, Palestinian activism has reinforced Israel's domination of the mindset of the American people.

An American was murdered by Israeli soldiers during the Israeli siege of the civilian-led flotilla to break the siege of Gaza strated not by Hamas rocket fire but by Israel's goal to create a conflict to influence Israeli politics and world opinion. Israel does not want a Hamas that embraces peace. They want a Hamas that engages in conflict and failed strategies of blame. Israel needs Hamas to continue to dominate American thought.

Palestinians need to develop a powerful PR strategy to change that adverse environment in the United States and alter the dynamics of what Americans think.

It's possible to do. But rather than do that, many Palestinians prefer to play the blame game. Blame Israel and blame any Palestinian who dares to ask them, what have you accomplished in 62 years to make Palestinian Rights a reality?

The answer: not enough.

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