In some respects, Israel’s virulent enemies in the West have done her and her allies a small favor. They have shown their real intentions, something that they have tried to hide for decades prior to the 10/7 pogrom.
One of the most challenging aspects of attaining a lasting peace in the Middle East is the duplicitous nature of the Palestinians and their supporters. For decades, leaders like Yasir Arafat and Mahmud Abbas have been saying one thing to the Palestinian people and another to Western diplomats and audiences. Arafat famously went from the Rose Garden signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 to a mosque in Johannesburg to talk about “a million martyrs” going up to take Jerusalem. Because the West was desperate for peace and mistakenly thought that everybody naturally yearns for peace, they convinced themselves that the two-state Arafat was the real one and that the incendiary one in South Africa was for home consumption. But the truth was just the opposite.
This split nature has had very painful consequences for Israel. The pressure from US administrations not to take steps that could endanger a “two-state solution” has led to Israel harming its own strategic and economic interests and even putting its citizens in mortal danger. I recall a period during George W. Bush's administration when Condi Rice complained that Israel’s many checkpoints in the West Bank seriously harmed the Palestinian economy. Israel took the hint and removed several army checkpoints. Not more than a few days went by before a car came to a bus stop near Hebron and terrorists inside sprayed the people waiting for a bus with bullets. Several died and others were injured. The former checkpoints were put back in place.
With Palestinian supporters in the West screaming, “From the river to the sea…” and “By any means necessary…”, they have shown that they have utter contempt for a two-state solution. The designation of the over 1,000 Israeli civilians barbarically murdered on 10/7 as “settlers”, “combatants”, and “colonizers” makes it crystal clear that the Palestinian supporters on college campuses and in major cities throughout the West, including Washington, do not see any legitimate place for Israel on a map of the Middle East. They are not holding up detailed maps showing a carved out West Bank and Gaza as “Palestine” but rather demand that the Jews vanish or be made to disappear so that the Palestinians would get the whole lot, including very Jewish cities such as Tel Aviv, Beer Sheva, Haifa, Tiberias, and Jerusalem. What these college-trained morons and their Islamist friends ignore is that even if the Jews were to simply go someplace else tomorrow, the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon would be on the move to grab those same cities and as much land as they could. Then when those armies beat and kill Palestinians, it would not even make it to the evening news broadcasts.
But our Western agitators in their tens of thousands are telling us much more. When they put a keffiyeh on statues in Washington, such as that of Ben Franklin, or put “Free Palestine” graffiti on the Cenotaph honoring World War I dead in London, they are telling the West: we are coming from you. Statutes and monuments in major Western capitals have nothing to do with Jews but a great deal to do with Western ideals and freedoms. They are the milestones of Western culture, and by defacing them, the howling crowds are giving a heads-up that their goals do not end with Israel. When there were settlers in Gaza, no attack like 10/7 took place in Israel proper. And even some on the left in Israel realize that the settlers on the West Bank protect greater Israel. Well, Israel protects the greater West. If they take care of Israel, they will come for Europe and America to add them to their dream caliphate.
By screaming wildly for the genocidal end of Israel, the Islamo-lefties have done Israel a bit of a favor. The West has made a practice of bending itself into a pretzel in order to convince themselves and us that the Palestinians, or at least the Palestinian Authority (PA) wants peace. But do they? I wrote previously about Hussein Al-Sheikh. He met with Tony Blinken this past summer in Washington. He also was directly involved in a suicide bombing in which our oldest son and I were wounded in 2002. All of my requests to the local US ambassador, the FBI, the Department of Justice and the State Department not to let this terrorist into the US fell on deaf ears. “He wants peace!” “He’s a diplomat!” “He is heir apparent to doddering old Abbas!” “Look, he wears a suit and tie like we do!” All of these self-deceptions worked until the sixth of October this year. But from the horrific, barbaric murder of 1,400 Israelis on 10/7 to the foaming mouth support of students, Islamists and lefties in the West, the old idea that there are two sides to the Palestinians’ position is over. People on the far left here in Israel today use words like “lish'chot” which means to slaughter or “le’hashmid” which means to wipe out completely when talking about what to do with Hamas in Gaza. Do you think that anyone will invite Gazans to work in Israel again? Do you think that some political party will suggest making peace with the Palestinians any time soon while the blood is not yet dry and civilians are still in captivity?
The fact that Hamas and its supporters in Gaza butchered young men and women at a rave and mutilated bodies of babies and their parents has left Israelis stunned and furious. The videos of murder and torture were supposed to break the Israeli spirit; it has done the opposite and united the Israeli population like it has never been united before. 300,000 Israelis have returned since the attack. That the Palestinian Authority never denounced the butchery and immediately provided payments to the families of the terrorists who died practicing jihad only goes to show that even those peddling peace are going to have a hard sell of “Hamas bad, PA good” that they have claimed for the past thirty years. My lawyers uncovered mountains of terrorist testimonies with instructions from Marwan Barghouti and other PLO commanders on how to increase terror activity during negotiations between Israel and the PA in the early 2000’s, when Israel did not agree to Palestinian demands for a right of return or control over Jewish holy sites. Those on the right have always known that the PA is no less determined to wipe Israel and the Jews off the map than is its Islamist sister, Hamas. Now lefties and Islamists in the West have jumped on a Jewish massacre in order to tell the world that they want Israel gone and the Jews dead. Period, full stop.
So does this mean that Israel is saved from the peace nudniks who will again push her towards committing suicide by giving land and legitimacy to people who want to perform genocide? Probably not. History has shown that the clowns at Foggy Bottom and at the British Foreign Office cannot control their desire to tell Israel to make peace with murderers and their supporters. Maybe some time will pass, a year at most, but some Western politician or diplomat will get in front of a microphone and demand that Israel make peace with the Palestinians. I saw a CNN article saying that the war in Gaza is a waste and that Israel should negotiate with Hamas. Hello? Hamas does not recognize Israel and has only negotiated indirectly through Egypt on subjects such as captives. But they’ll pressure Israel again. Barack Obama left his multimillion dollar oceanside mansions to tell everybody that both sides are guilty and each side should hear the other out. Hard pass. Killing babies and grandmothers is not the same thing as wiping out terrorists wherever they choose to hide. Obama and his ilk will never allow themselves to accept the fact that there is nobody with whom to make peace, only a wild bunch of 7th Century barbarians and their Western enablers. If the Palestinians really wanted peace, the details could be worked out in a day. But as long as they want to do to all of Israel that which they did in the south of the country one month ago, there will never be peace with them. The time has come to wipe out the terrorists who wish harm to Israel and the Jewish people. If it’s not taken care of now, then Europe and the US will be the next ones doing the fighting.