The pro-Hamas set in the West is not interested in some type of compromise. They want Israel, Jews and the West destroyed. Those threatened need to take note.
Cornell University recently had a panel discussion about the Middle East. Included were Daniel Shapiro, Salam Fayyad and Tzipi Livni. For those of you under the age of 30, they were respectively the U.S. ambassador to Israel, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, and the foreign minister of the state of Israel. Their presence together these days would be the diplomatic equivalent of an old-timer's game at Yankee Stadium. In the day, they were the “normal” antidote to Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu’s supposedly right-wing, pro-settler, extremist policies, as they would have described them. In the old days of say the early 2000s, these folks would have been greeted respectfully, the left’s hope for a deal that would end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for good. The crowd at Cornell was in a different mood. They booed and made pro-genocide statements. Students wearing keffiyehs screamed and held signs. Some walked out while others were escorted out of the forum. What a difference a decade makes.
In the past, the mantra “two states for two people” would have been accepted by students at an elite university. Fayad had been trained as an economist in the U.S. and represented an alternative to his terror boss, Yassir Arafat. Livni had negotiated the UN resolution that ended the Second Lebanon War. These people, along with Obama’s man in Tel Aviv (Shapiro) were the ones who were supposed to usher in an age of stability and Palestinian statehood. It never worked out, however much people dreamed of a day when Jews and Palestinians could live together in harmony. And the blame is squarely on the Palestinians, as even Bill Clinton of late has finally admitted. Israel is not perfect and one could argue that certain actions taken over the years pushed the Palestinians towards radicalization. But even so, it was the Palestinians themselves under Arafat and his frenemy, Hamas, who chose violence over negotiations. There was no combination of land, money, refugees, and guarantees that would have gotten Arafat or his hand-picked successor, Mahmud Abbas, to agree to bury the Kalashnikov and make peace. Their only goal was and remains the destruction of the state of Israel. Whereas Hamas never strayed from the official position of wanting to off Israel and the Jews, Arafat and his men could purr about peace to the willing fools of the West, while their internal goals were the same as those of their Islamist brethren in Hamas.
What one notices since the October 7th massacre is that there is no peace group any longer on the Palestinian side or on the Western left. I have yet to see a campus or Western city protest where people demand a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Everything is for the extremes: “from the river to the sea” and “global intifada” are short-hand ways of saying that Israel cannot exist anywhere on the map and that the Jews need to go. Nobody outside of the clueless foreign ministries of various countries is talking about “the two state solution” any longer. The heavy funding of Qatar and Iran, combined with the importation of Jew-hating Muslims from around the world has transformed Western thinking from Israel taking risks for peace to Israel turning off the lights for good. If Israel offered to shrink itself down to the greater Tel Aviv area, the zanies on campus and off would not agree. From the river to the sea with a dash of Jews in the middle is not what they are calling for. They are demanding that Israel either be destroyed or agree to end its history. Israel’s enemies, thank God, are incapable at this time of the former, and the plucky people of this country are not interested in the latter. Sometimes in life, like with cancer or a war of annihilation, one has to realize that compromise is not an option. It’s us or them, and Israel had better be thinking that way should she renew the war in Gaza and attack Iran. As long as Hamas and Iran exist, Israel’s existence can and will be called into question. Qatar’s big money influence on the world also has to be neutralized.
Imagine a squatter taking over your house. He produced some fake rental agreement, and only the court can decide who is the rightful dweller. In the past, people suggested that you guys work something out: you live in the house and give him the apartment over the garage. But now it’s you or him: he claims that he alone has the right to live in the whole house and you need to go. There is no room for compromise. Such it is now with the Palestinians. There is no room for two states. As many have rightly noted, Gaza was for all intents and purposes a full Palestinian state—with no Jews present. And all it did was arm itself to kill as many Jews as possible. There is no place for a Palestinian state—this is something that Donald Trump understands but the European diplomats refuse to accept as their opinions are always clouded by their traditional hatred of the Jew. The Europeans must decide—and I am not clear that they believe—that Israel is a legitimate state and has the same right to exist as do Spain and Ireland. If so, then until the Palestinians give up on their genocidal fantasies, there is nothing to discuss about “two states for two peoples.” If given a vote, those two European states would rather have a Palestinian state rather than a Jewish one, given the choice of only one country on the same real estate.
While compromise is considered the highest goal of international negotiations, sometimes life is binary. The current situation is not one that Israel wanted. Most Israelis desired some type of arrangement with the Palestinians that would end the bloodshed. The Palestinians, like the great one hit wonders of the 1970s, only like killing Jews. The left in the West, infested and infected with Qatari money and Jew-hating Arabs, has joined the bandwagon. While the war will one day end, the hatred is here to stay. The mainstream Jew-hatred unleashed by the Biden administration, Western governments, college administrators, and a compliant media is, like Covid, here to stay in some mutated form forever. Fortunately, lefties don’t believe in making babies, so maybe in a couple of generations we’ll go back to the tolerance for Jews and Israel we had in the 1980s. Israelis are more accepted in the anti-Muslim Brotherhood UAE than in the Sharia-compliant France of today. As long as the Palestinians want it all, the world must learn not to give them anything.