Mick Hartley

Salo Aizenberg at Fathom – The erasure from historical memory of Israeli statehood offers and Palestinian rejections is badly distorting today’s debate about Middle East peace:

The erasure from our historical memory of Israeli attempts to achieve peace by agreeing to Palestinian statehood, and of the serial Palestinian rejections, is now standard practice. This erasure sustains the libel that Israel is an ‘apartheid state’ seeking ‘permanent occupation’ and underpins a ludicrously uncritical attitude to the Palestinian national movement, its leadership, and aspects of its political culture. From Human Rights Watch to Nathan Thrall, Peter Beinart to the Carnegie Endowment, the debate now proceeds as if those offers were never made and never rejected. Bringing those offers back in, and those rejections, we get a more realistic picture of the obstacles standing in the way of achieving two states for two peoples.

Worth reading in full.

It's always the Israelis who supposedly stand in the way of peace, but anyone who's followed the history knows that the Palestinian leadership has never shown any interest in making a reaching an agreement with Israel. The story they present to their followers is one of eventual triumph, with the illegitimate state of Israel disappearing along with its Jewish inhabitants. It's extraordinary that the left anti-Zionists never call them out on this. Palestinian irresponsibility always gets a free pass.

Aizenberg's conclusion:

It seems that even well-intentioned pro-Israel Zionists who desire to see themselves as ‘honest mediators’ do not want to accept the simplest and depressing answer to why the two-state solution has failed since first proposed in the 1930s: the absolute rejection by most Arabs and Palestinians of Jewish statehood on any borders and its corollary demand of the literal ‘Right of Return’. One only has to listen to President Biden who seemingly ‘gets it’ better than most experts when he recently said: ‘Let’s get something straight here, until the region says unequivocally they acknowledge the right of Israel to exist as an independent Jewish state, there will be no peace.’

Let's hope he's right about Biden. Plans to revive the JCPOA with Iran certainly don't look encouraging, since Iran is now the main supporter, via Hamas and Hezbollah, of anti-Israel violence.