Mick Hartley

Einat Wilf at Quillette talks about “Schrödinger’s Palestine”. The one state – the state people like to kid themselves that the Palestinians want – is a responsible partner to Israel which accepts that the talk of permanent refugees into the fifth generation is nonsense, and accepts responsibility for the violence against the Jews culminating in the 7th October massacre. That cat’s dead. The other state – the one Palestinians actually want – is the one where Israel can continue to be harassed and attacked until it no longer exits. That cat’s alive.

The metaphor seems a bit laboured to me, but yes, we know what she means.

This is to the point though.

 I always bring the quote by Ernest Bevin…the British Labour foreign minister after World War II. He explained why Britain failed to fulfill the mandate unanimously given by the League of Nations to help the Jewish people achieve sovereignty on one sliver of the Ottoman Empire. They didn’t betray the Arabs—the Arabs got plenty of states on the lands of the Ottoman Empire—but the Jews, who are a people of the Empire, should have received their fair share proportionally. Israel would have been multiple times the size of what was proposed.

To explain the British failure—Britain: only the Jews didn’t get a state, and this is Britain’s failure to fulfil the terms it received from the League of Nations—he said: “The conflict in the land between Jews and Arabs is irreconcilable.” He called it irreconcilable in February 1947—before any excuses: no occupation, no settlements, no Netanyahu, no displacement.

He continued: “For the Jews in the land, their top priority is to establish a sovereign Jewish state.” Self-determination for the people of Israel in the land of Israel. “For the Arabs, their top priority”—the point of principle—“is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of the land.”

He’s saying this is a conflict between the Jews wanting a state and the Arabs wanting the Jews not to have a state. Back to the present: this has always been the Palestinian vision long before Hamas. Hamas is merely the most recent executor. If there’s no Hamas tomorrow, this remains the Palestinian vision—what I call Palestinianism. They will always produce organisations to realise it. Nothing in the recognition or in UN declarations put a stop to Palestinianism. No one said, “Enough. You can live next to a Jewish state, but not on its ruins.” They continued to fuel the vision that the Jewish state can one day be gone.