Mick Hartley

Paul Gross at Fathom:

My dear friends, I have news for you. If you think the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, perpetrated by the genocidal Islamists controlling Gaza (after Israel withdrew), will convince Israelis they should now withdraw from the West Bank too, you’re living in a fantasy.

This doesn’t mean Israel shouldn’t rein in settlement-expansion, or block the outrageous retroactive legalisation of illegal (under Israeli law) outposts. On the contrary, it would be a smart move by Israel to decouple the policy of civilian settlement from the necessity of military presence. (As Einat Wilf and Shany Mor advocated back in 2017: ‘Military-yes, Settlements-no’.) But I am fairly certain that, post-October 7, you will find an overwhelming majority of Israelis opposed to pulling the IDF out of the West Bank, and that includes the 50-60 per cent of Israelis who see a two-state-solution as the best option in the long-run. They understand that, were it not for the presence of the IDF in the West Bank, the PA would have fallen to Hamas or other Iranian-sponsored terror groups by now. For much of the old Israeli left that has moved to the centre, the desire to see an end to Israeli rule over the Palestinians is overridden by the now-easily-imaginable fear of an ISIS-style terror state on our eastern border. […]

I recently contributed to a new website providing facts for people confronting the constant misinformation from the anti-Israel side. Entitled ‘Self-inflicted Statelessness’, I detailed eight different moments in history when the Palestinians or/and the Arab world had an opportunity to establish an independent Palestinian state, and rejected that opportunity.

Palestinian rejectionism has become such a hoary trope, that most Israelis and pro-Israel advocates abroad just shrug at it. But far, far too many people outside Israel either don’t know – or don’t want to believe – the facts. It’s not that Israel hasn’t made stupid mistakes (just how stupid we’ll hopefully find out when there’s a commission of inquiry after this war), and I’m the very last person to defend the venal, illiberal government we’ve been saddled with this past year, but the fact remains that there have been Israeli governments willing to make serious territorial concessions in order to reach an end-of-conflict, finality-of-claims deal with the Palestinians. And there has never been a partner on the other side willing and/or able to say yes. […]

British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, no fan of the Zionist movement, described the essence of the Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine in this way: ‘For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.’

That has remained the case for 75 years. Real peace will be imaginable only when, at long last, the Palestinian leadership’s greatest wish is the creation of Palestine, not the destruction of Israel.