“The Brits always favored the Jews. Just look at Balfour,” a Palestinian Arab official told me last week, as we pondered why Jewish nationalists were able to form a successful state while their Arab counterparts are yet to get theirs. I could not help thinking of that Palestinian Arab official as I listened to an Israeli opposition leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, on Friday — the anniversary of the letter exchange known as the Balfour Declaration.

Mr. Netanyahu said he was more concerned about Israeli concessions than about renewed American pressures during the upcoming Annapolis, Md., meeting.

From the November 2, 1917, Balfour Declaration, to the November 29, 1947, U.N. partition plan, to this November’s Annapolis meeting, the strategy of Palestine’s Arabs was to fight the Zionists and delegitimize them in the eyes of the world. Failures were pinned on Western colonialism, anti-Arab one-sidedness, or lack of U.N. Security Council action. The Zionists, to be sure, hardly shied from seeking international support. For the most part, however, success depended on achieving their original goal: freeing Jews from dependence on world powers.

This historic difference in approach may explain the increasingly shrinking expectations on the eve of the Annapolis meeting. Palestinian Arabs hope Annapolis — or other similar forums that will come after it — would deliver internationally binding agreements on so-called “core issues”: final borders, refugees, Jerusalem.

Israel also relies on international agreements, including the Bush administration’s “road map,” which received U.N. Security Council support. But an increasing number of Israelis also thinks that without some demonstration first that Ramallah wants or can end belligerency, as the “road map” requires, no agreement is worth the paper it is written on, no matter how many world leaders support it.

Washington — and even more so its “Quartet” partners: Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations — increasingly advocates immediate progress toward a peace agreement. “There is no other option,” the Quartet’s Middle East envoy, Tony Blair, told CNN yesterday, adding that Arab-Israeli peace would help with winning “the fundamental struggle that goes on within Islam.” To defang Tehran and Al Qaeda, according to this thinking, anti-Israel rhetoric must be removed by signing an internationally recognized peace agreement.

Iran, meanwhile, arms and supports its Palestinian Arab clients regardless of such theories. “If we resolve the Iranian problem, we’ll resolve the Palestinian problem — not the other way around,” Mr. Netanyahu told members of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations on Friday. An international drive for economic divestment is needed, he said, adding that further options exist to assure Iran’s fundamentalist visions fail to dominate the region, though “we don’t have to itemize all the possibilities.”

Relying on his success as Israel’s finance minister, Mr. Netanyahu said that rather than more concessions, the Palestinian Arabs need “market-based programs” to advance their economy. Concentrate on one or two economic projects in the West Bank and “just get one market-based success” that would counter the region’s model of a police state, he prescribed, and the rest will follow.

However, he said, in lieu of such progress, new territorial concessions would lead to the same results for Israel after hastily withdrawing, despite Mr. Netanyahu’s warnings, from Lebanon and Gaza. Those retreats merely provided bases for Iranian-backed terrorists on Israel’s border, Mr. Netanyahu said. The decision is Israel’s, and “if we stand up to it, there will be no American pressure” in Annapolis, he predicted. Meanwhile, as the Ramallah official told me last week, many Palestinian Arabs blame world powers, which from the time of colonial Britain onward never leaned hard enough on Palestine’s Jews. “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country,” Lord Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild in 1917.

The Zionists celebrated, but they knew London would soon contradict itself — as sure enough it did — using the old colonial trick of making to all sides the promises they want to hear. Regardless, Palestine’s Jews went on to build a thriving state, at times with world support, at others despite it. Rather than the world’s sympathy and more international treaties, what Palestinian Arabs really need now is their own realistic vision of what kind of living they want. Then they need to start building it.

bavni@nysun.com