Mick Hartley

I know the President has the best of intentions, but he cannot wish away the reality that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians have repeatedly made it clear that they support Hamas and approve of the October 7th massacre and consider it justified “resistance”. Even those who…

— Dr. Einat Wilf (@EinatWilf) February 23, 2024

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I know the President has the best of intentions, but he cannot wish away the reality that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians have repeatedly made it clear that they support Hamas and approve of the October 7th massacre and consider it justified “resistance”. Even those who are critical of Hamas, are not critical of the ideology of “From the River to the Sea” that bred Hamas and legitimized October 7th. There are few courageous Palestinian voices that are indeed critical of the entire ideological infrastructure of “From the River to the Sea”, but they themselves will tell you how rare they are.

Any path to peace must rest on a clear-eyed recognition of the reality and the steps needed to address it. This means confronting the ideology of no Jewish state anywhere “From the River to the Sea”. This is an illegitimate ideology that has been built on a singular obsession with the idea of Jewish sovereignty and a century long multi-front effort to prevent and then undo a Jewish sovereign state in any part of the land where Jews had their previous sovereignties.

All societies and ideologies that became obsessed with the Jewish state and its undoing, with “Antizionism”, who have flocked the collaborate with and expand and globalize the Palestinian cause of no Jewish state – whether they were the Nazis in the 1930’s and 40’s, the Pan-Arabists of the 1950’s and 60’s, the Soviets of the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s, the Sunni Jihadists of the 1990’s and early 2000’s – have all found themselves in the dustbin of history. That is because Antizionism and an obsession with the collective Jew is always, but always, the mark of failed societies ideologies.

There is a path to peace, and it is based on the deep transformation of the Palestinian ethos away from destruction and toward construction, away from the mistaken notion of the Jews as foreigners in this land, and toward the Abrahamic understanding of Jews as belonging in the land, and of Zionism as the realization of the millennia long connection between the Jewish people and their ancestral homeland.

This may be a tall order. It may be challenging. There is no guarantee it can be achieved. But one thing is guaranteed: wishing reality away and failing to confront it will definitely not lead to peace.