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Peace requires both sides involved to believe that a state of peace is in their national interest. The Palestinians do not want peace and for them peace would be considered an enormous failure.
Think of the who’s who of secretaries of state who have tried to broker peace between Israel and Palestinian Arabs since 1948. Giants from both parties put their own personal prestige as well as that of the United States on the line and never produced anything more than temporary agreements and photo ops. Both Republicans and Democrats failed, as did their “Quartet” counterparts. Dean Rusk, Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, John Kerry, Colin Powell, Tony Blinken and others all worked for a final peace agreement and came up empty-handed—as did the presidents who employed them. The question is why? If you throw the best and brightest and enormous resources and promises at a problem, how can the problem still remain unsolved?
A thought exercise will provide part of the answer. Do you hate somebody? Most people dislike some people and this feeling may even reach the point of hatred. That’s pretty normal. Would you kill that person? And would you kill yourself in the process of killing that person? Those last two questions for most normal people are beyond discussion. One may hate another but taking a life is immoral and not something most would consider. Now think of the Palestinians. One canard sold to the West is that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) are extremist terrorist groups but the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its associated Fatah organization are somehow moderate. Nothing could be further from the truth. While many Fatah and PA officials do not seem to be Islamic fundamentalists, their hatred of Jews and their desire to destroy the State of Israel are indistinguishable from the feelings of Hamas and PIJ members. Their hatred is so intense that they are willing to die to kill a Jew, any Jew—not some specific Jew who somehow may have harmed them personally. In the indictments of those involved in the suicide bombing in downtown Jerusalem on March 21, 2002, the bomber (a PA policeman) was told by a PA intelligence officer that whatever he did, he had to kill at least one Jew. To the best of my knowledge, no Nazi officer told another officer or enlisted man to ever endanger himself in order to kill Jews. The ones dropping the Zyklon gas canisters were on the roofs of the gas chambers and out of harm’s way. Those in the mobile killing squads on the Eastern front murdered Jewish men, women and children and were never in danger from their victims or the locals who often helped in the task. The Palestinians themselves often say that they love death more than Israelis love life. At the height of the Intifada and subsequent killing periods, Palestinian support for attacks against Israeli citizens would reach 65 percent or higher in the general Palestinian population. Many of those famous secretaries of state wished to claim that only a small percentage of Palestinian Arabs were actually involved directly with terror. While that might be technically correct by the numbers, the PA and its voting populace lionize the murderers and name streets and buildings after them. How would you like to visit a square named after someone who killed one of your parents or a sibling?
One may argue that the Japanese also committed and glorified suicide with many of their kamikaze attacks against US soldiers and naval ships. So if the Japanese could come around to make peace and be a solid ally of the US and the West, why can’t the Palestinians one day change course and make peace with Israel? We see that fanatical devotion to killing the enemy does not necessarily have to prevent peace between former combatants. While true, there is one more consideration in the Palestinian view of Israel.
The hatred of Israel and Jews is only one reason behind failed peace efforts for all of Israel’s 75 years of existence. The second is geopolitical brainwashing. If you ask Palestinians or their international supporters about the history of this portion of the Levant, they will tell you that there was a Palestinian state over what today is Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank—”from the River to the Sea.” Jews showed up and took over about half in 1948 and then stole the rest in 1967. They thus see Israel as a completely illegal state, and if you listen to them, that is what they will tell you. They—unlike our distinguished secretaries—do not see the events of 1948 as a legitimate birth of a nation and those of the Six Day War in 1967 as some type of overreach; rather, they see 1948 as a disaster (“Nakba” they call it and memorialize it every year since 1948). They do not see any legitimate place for a Jewish homeland, and all of the arguments of Jews being in the Land of Israel for 3000 years or Jews purchasing land for kibbutzim and moshavim mean nothing to those who believe in a nonexistent Palestinian state prior to 1948. Israel is a terror state; Israel is an illegal state; Israel is an apartheid state. The only real difference between the Palestinian factions is that Hamas, Jihad and the PFLP say they want to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth, while the mealymouthed PA claims only when speaking with Western officials that there is land for two states. One notes that the PA has rejected any proposal that would allow Israel to have defensible borders, and that is no accident. The PA wants to get rid of Israel as badly as Hamas does, but they simply enjoy the billions in international aid that come with pretending to want peace. Did you know that Yasser Arafat went straight from the White House signing of the Oslo Agreements to a mosque in South Africa, where he promised a “million martyrs” to go up and take Jerusalem? Was the Yasser Arafat of the Rose Garden or of the mosque the real deal? You can figure that out for yourself.
The fact that the Ottomans ruled this region until World War I and then afterwards, the British took over Egypt, Palestine, Jordan and beyond means nothing to the Palestinians or their Jew-hating supporters in universities and BDS movements. That there was never a Palestinian state anywhere is simply an inconvenient fact for our 21st century antisemites. Even after 1948, Gaza was under brutal Egyptian rule, while the West Bank of the Jordan River was claimed by Jordan as its own. Not until the ill-conceived Oslo Accords of 1993 did Palestinian Arabs ever have governmental control over a square centimeter of any land. But the Palestinians and their supporters are not big on history. They are big on converting traditional Jew-hatred into Israel hatred and vice versa. It does not take much to convince an antisemite in Europe or on a university campus to hate Israel.
Now let’s take the two pieces together. We have a people convinced that they had a country that was stolen from them by a bunch of European Jews leveraging the Holocaust to take their land. Couple that with a mentality that is filled with hatred and grievance for the theft of their non-existent country. The result is Palestinian intransigence. They simply have no interest in making a peace agreement that would require them to recognize a legitimate state of Israel and leave Israel militarily safe. But the West blames Israel because they have enormous leverage over the Jewish state. President Obama halted shipments of Hellfire missiles during an active conflagration in 2014, while European countries routinely blackball Israeli products produced over the 1948 armistice line. If the West wants peace between Israel and the Palestinians, then they should tell the Palestinians that they are on their own. Begging them to make peace has led to nothing but misery for Palestinians left in ancient refugee camps as well as Israelis who have lost loved ones or been injured in Palestinian terror attacks. As James Baker did to Israel, the time has come for Secretary Blinken to tell the PA that when they are serious, they should call the State Department switchboard.
Given the desecration of Jewish cemeteries when Jordan occupied Jerusalem, the Palestinians won’t even let Jews rest in peace, never mind live in peace.
And while I am commenting, I want to point out some ideas that do not seem to get mentioned about Israel.
First, the “Apartheid” label. Apartheid is the written in law discrimination based on RACE.
Israeli Arabs have full rights; those saying Israel is apartheid base it on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. But Israeli Arabs and Palestinian Arabs are the SAME RACE. Any discrimination is based on national identity, and EVERY COUNTRY discriminates against non-citizens. If that is apartheid, the term is meaningless.
Another is that Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem were once “Palestinian”, especially between 1948-1967. If that is the case, then Jordan is the Palestinian state; the areas lost were due to a war that was defensive for Israel, and thus legally captured. If the ICC or UN insists that they were ruled by Palestinians, then Israel (and the rest of the world) should drop recognition of the PA and say Jordan represents them, and they are citizens of Jordan. (Never mind that Jordan occupies over 75% of the land that the 1920 San Remo conference gave to the Jews)
There is more than just hatred of Jews and a fictional history at work here. It is Islam. Islam has this concept of the Islamic Waqf. Under it, any land once under Islamic control becomes an eternal endowment of Islam. Since, like Spain, Israel was once conquered by Islam, they, with the self serving doctrine of the Waqf, consider Israel (and Adaluse – Spain) to be there’s forever. They, therefore, cannot agree to a peace with Israel that allows it to remain in existence as a Jewish state.
Kasandra, you’re 100 per cent correct. The fundamental reason for Arab/Muslim irredentism is Islam itself, not land disputes. Dr. Bauer lives – or did live – in Jerusalem, but apparently knows little or nothing about Islam. He,’s simply wrong, like so many others, when it comes to understanding the basis for the intense Jew-hatred and rejectionism of the “,Palestinians” and their Muslim supporters. Study Islam, and get a clue.
Actually, the ancient Philistines recorded in the Bible and history came from the Greek Islands and some parts of the mainland Greece. They have no connection, at all, the to the Arab /Muslim of modern times who called themselves the “Palestinians.”
From those ancient people, the Philistines, the word “Palestine” .came into being.
There is no genuine ethic group or race who are the “Palestinians.”
Early in the last century a anyone living in that land, Arab or Jew, who lived in that land was called a ”Palestinian.”
Only after 1967 did the Arab/Muslims start to refer to themselves , exclusively , by the word “Palestinian.”
The reason for that is that they felt that by giving themselves that title they would appear to have some kind of valid claim on that land.
Furthermore, the truth is the God had given all this land that now composes the State of Israel, including all of the West Bank, to the Jewish people. This may be found in the Bible, as seen in, for example, Genesis 28:13-15. 35:10-12. Deuteronomy 32:48,49. Psalm 105:7-11. 135:4.
In other words the Jews have tall this land by Divine Right. Furthermore, the Jewish people should have this land by historic rights as shown in First Kings 4:20,21, 24,25. 8:55, 56.
Joe Biden says that he’s “a Christian” but he denies that Jews prayers at Judaism’s holiest site is appropriate, is Biden so very ignorant and outright stupid that he doesn’t know that Jesus Himself was a Jew ? Maybe Biden does know that but being a godless and wicked man doesn’t’ care.
Likewise Biden keeps on pushing for a for a division of the land State of Israel , which is so false called “the two state” solution.
That fool idea contradicts the Wisdom of Jesus Who taught that “If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.” Mark 3:24. [N.E.B.]
Whatever happened to the Saudi plan The Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine. That seems to me to be the only solution. Jordan is Palestine the Saudi plan recognizes that fact.
When American Jewry’s genius leaders released the “2000 Jewish Population Survey” for public consumption, in all of its granular detail showing how we were cratering demographically, the Arabs had a field day. Hanan Ashrawi was crowing at the top of her voice; Al Ahlam (Egypts largest circulation daily paper) started a weekly column on Jewish demographics and psychology; the UAE held as major international conference to discus the issue, form working committees to advance their plans. They understood, with perfect clarity, that Israel’s main source of support–American Jews–would go extinct, leaving Israel SOL. At that point, they realized that all they had to do was stall for a few decades, not make peace, and Israel would find itself alone. All the while, Muslims are building their population base and organizational know-how to replace US Jews in the political pecking order. They’ve no incentive to make peace and every incentive to hold fast–all thanks to American Jewry’s “leaders”.
The Philistines were designated in the Bible as the “Plishtim” which is derivedf from the Hebrew verb ‘liflosh”- i.e. “to invade”. Those that take pride in describing themselves as Palestinians are in fact designating themselves as “invaders'” which is accurate as their own origins in recent times has been from surrounding Arab countries from which they infiltrated during the British Mandate
when jews wake up to the fact that they don’t have any friends in any govt. body worldwide they will be able free themselves from the yoke of bondage to double speak by said governments . the left and the media are only friends with one religious group and that is islam . all three are going to take away any freedom you have . during the tribulation if you don’t bow the knee and take the mark of the beast you will be beheaded . sounds familiar to only one group . you have one guess .
Liberals get the idea that we need a Bridge of Friendship between America and Russia but that’s never to happen except in t he minds of Liberal Pinheads