IT’S SIMPLE: NO PEACE? NO PALESTINE!
Condemning Israel for rejecting a two-state solution is like condemning a victim of domestic violence for a lack of harmony in the home.
There are a lot of condemnations thrown at Israel, some legitimate, others not. One that really should rankle anyone who believes in honesty, fairness, peace and coexistence is the idea that Israelis reject a two-state solution.
There is something so devious, so manipulative and so dishonest in this accusation — of course, that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
I’ll explain.
The current government certainly rejects what most Western observers would recognize as a two-state solution. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that, come what may, Israel will maintain military control between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. That is, even in the event of an independent Palestine, Israel will not permit a militarized Palestinian state.
This statement has evoked feverish outrage among the permanently incensed activist set, but it is nothing but pure common sense.
Since the Palestinians snuffed out the Oslo peace process, in 2000, Palestinians have demonstrated precisely no willingness to live in peaceful coexistence with Israelis. Allowing an independent Palestine to be a militarized state, which it would have been under Oslo, would now be an act of profound irrationality on the part of Israel.
Discussing whether an independent Palestine would or would not be militarized, though, is to get ahead of ourselves.
The larger issue is whether there will be an independent Palestine at all.
Let’s just lay it out clearly. There will be an independent Palestine when Palestinian leaders, clergy, media, the education system and the general population give Israelis reasonable cause to believe that a sovereign Palestine would be something other than the sort of hate-driven terror regime we have seen for two decades in the Gaza Strip.
In case you don’t know what the region looks like — and certainly plenty of “pro-Palestinian” activists literally cannot find the place on a map — the Gaza Strip is a small area to the southwest of Israel, with a limited, 60-kilometre land border with Israel.
Even though it is a mere 60 kilometres, and Israel had, they thought, adequate security along that comparatively short frontier, hundreds of murderers and rapists crossed that border and invaded Israel on October 7. (This, after almost 20 years of incessant missile attacks from that enclave of terror.)
The Green Line, which, give or take, is presumed to be the border between Israel and an eventual Palestinian state in the West Bank, is more than 400 kilometres. More importantly, this border snakes through the heart of Israel’s population centres.
A militarized, independent Palestine would endanger the lives of every single Israeli citizen in a way that even the dystopian terror regime in the Gaza Strip does not. I know from witnessing the celebrations of the atrocities of October 7 that many people do not have a problem with this idea. But Israelis and others who are not murderous sociopaths do have a problem with it.
As the writer Frank J. Fleming incisively noted, “You’re always going to have tension in the Middle East when there’s people who want to kill the Jews and Jews who don’t want to be killed and neither side is willing to compromise.”
Israelis learned their lesson on October 7, if they hadn’t learned before. They will not let down their guard. The idea of a militarized, independent Palestine was probably stupid on October 6. October 7 made the idea beyond idiotic. It is off the table, probably for most of our lifetimes, as it should be.
What is most infuriating, though, is that overseas activists blame this state of affairs on Israel.
Yasser Arafat murdered the two-state solution on September 28, 2000. A surprising number of Israelis, dedicated peace activists sworn to coexistence, continued for years in the faint hope that Palestinian leaders, and, yes, Palestinian people, would come to their senses and demonstrate that they were not sworn to the annihilation of the Jewish state (and, in far too many instances, of the Jewish people).
Most of those Israelis, save for the most idealistic (bless their hearts) have had their eyes opened to the reality.
We cannot, I should add, blame the Palestinian people unreservedly. While opinion polls indicate that almost 75% of ordinary Palestinians endorse the atrocities of October 7, they, too, are victims of the Palestinian terror regimes. They have been indoctrinated for three generations and counting by a perverted education system that prioritizes martyrdom over math, hatred over home ec, and jihad over geography.
Undergirding this official education — some of it paid for by Western governments through our support of UNRWA — Palestinians have been inundated with glorification of martyrdom, hatred of Jews and revulsion for coexistence and peace through every facet of Palestinian society, from murderous Sesame Street-style TV shows for children to the annual glorification of terrorists like Dalal Mughrabi, to streets, squares, playgrounds and stadiums named for suicide bombers and on and on, even a school named for one of the perpetrators of the 1972 Olympics massacre. News, weather and sports in Palestine, like the education system, have as their primary objective the stoking of violent rage and antisemitic hatred.
The sorts of bromides uttered by naïve, well-intentioned Western activists (“We all just want peace for our children!”) are simply not true when it comes to (according to surveys) most Palestinians.
Those, whatever number they may be, who do prioritize a productive future for their children rather than martyrdom or the stoking of constant rage, would have to be some extraordinary individuals to have resisted the raging torrent of indoctrination that has dominated that society for at least 76 years.
Acknowledging that ordinary Palestinians are also victims of their tyrannical leaders does not detract from the larger point. A militarized Palestine would be suicide for Israelis.
But what about an independent, demilitarized Palestine?
A country that does not have military control of its own territory is not really a country, is it?
So, yes, when Netanyahu says that Israel will maintain military control from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, that does rule out a two-state solution.
But Netanyahu (it doesn’t matter what you think of him or, according to opinion polls, how close he is to the end of his career) is only stating an unavoidable truth.
Israelis have given up on a two-state solution — but only because Palestinians killed it. Palestinians have shown that a two-state solution would almost certainly result in nothing but permanent war. What sort of sucker would support a two-state solution in such a situation?
*
The people screaming “Free Palestine” today are, put mildly, placing the cart before the horse.
A two-state solution can and will happen only when the two sides demonstrate a willingness to live in peaceful coexistence. During the Oslo process, Israel demonstrated that in spades. By killing Oslo, Arafat proved what many of us knew all along. This was never about Palestinian sovereignty. It was, and remains, about ending Jewish sovereignty.
The endless violence of the past 24 years has given Israel no reason to believe that Palestinians would be willing to live in peace.
The slogans we have heard on constant repeat since October 7 reinforce this inverted cart/horse motif.
“Resistance is justified when people are oppressed,” according to the placards we see on the streets of Western capitals.
Well, no. Not really. Not when that “oppression” is a result of those people and their leaders refusing to live in peace, to promise mass murder and, occasionally, make good on that promise.
On September 28, 2000, Yasser Arafat overturned the negotiating table, ending the Oslo peace process and inaugurating a quarter-century of violence and war.
And yet, with the slightest indication that Palestinians were prepared to live in peace, Israelis would right that table and return to negotiations in an instant.
Far from demonstrating this willingness, Palestinians have only become more intolerant, violent and rejectionist.
That alone is why the two-state solution is dead.
To blame Israelis is like blaming the victim of domestic violence for a lack of harmony in the home. It’s disgusting.
As I said at the beginning, there are a great number of aspersions thrown at Israel. Yet whatever Israeli actions or military interventions we might criticize or condemn, every one of them is a reaction to Palestinian intransigence and violence.
If there were no Palestinian violence, there would be no Israeli repercussions. And that violence is the one thing standing in way in the way of Palestinian sovereignty.
So, if activists truly wanted to “Free Palestine,” they would demand an end to Palestinian violence and insist that they return to the negotiations they destroyed in 2000.
Instead of chanting “End the occupation now,” activists should encourage — no, demand — that Palestinians take the steps that would allow the occupation to end.
Let’s be crystal clear: the occupation exists because of Palestinian violence, not the other way around.
Let’s make it even simpler: No peace? No Palestine.