OPINION
As international law expert Natasha Hausdorff admonished a right-on BBC reporter, when it comes to Israel-Palestine, a great many people are “desperately ignorant, yet highly opinionated”.
None more so than green-left politicians like Australia’s Mehreen Faruqi, who gibbers nonsense such as that Israel is a “coloniser”. A ludicrous nonsense which can only be believed if one is moronic enough to think that Israel’s history began in 1947. Faruqi is either completely ignorant of, or deliberately ignores, that Jews are the indigenes of the region, and that the Arab Palestinians only colonised it after the Islamic conquests violently displaced most of the Jews and condemned them to live under the brutal humiliation of dhimmitude.
Even before the founding of the modern Jewish state of Israel in the Jews’ homeland, Arabs visited frequent and appalling violence on Jews. Mobs of Arabs carrying clubs, knives, swords, and pistols went door-to-door in Jaffa, beating, raping and murdering Jews, including children. In an echo of the butchery of October 7, some of the victims’ skulls were split open.
As for the current “pro-Palestine” thugs’ wittering about a “two-state solution”, they are apparently blissfully unaware that it is the Palestinians who have routinely rejected it. Even before the creation of Israel, the UN partition plan proposed separate Jewish and Palestinian states in the land west of the Jordan River.
Jewish leaders accepted the plan. Arab leaders rejected it. The plan was never implemented. War broke out.
And so it has gone on, ever since. Palestinian Arabs have never accepted a two-state solution because they simply do not accept Israel’s very right to exist.
Aggression by its Arab neighbours in 1948, 1967 and 1973 attempted to wipe out the fledgling state of Israel but failed.
Subsequent peace attempts to create a Palestinian state, notably the Oslo Accords, the Camp David summit of 2000 and the Annapolis Conference of 2009, foundered on the rocks of Palestinian rejectionism, in which Hamas played a key role.
The last major peace effort, led by secretary of state John Kerry during the second term of the Obama administration, collapsed in 2014 after Hamas kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers before launching an assault against Israel from Gaza.
The October 7 pogrom is just the latest episode of Palestinian intransigence.
Its mass torture, killing and kidnapping of Israeli civilians, marks simply the latest attempt by Hamas to disrupt peace efforts in the Middle East.
In this instance, Hamas sought to derail the prospect of diplomatic normalisation between Israel and the de facto leader of the Arab world, Saudi Arabia, an agreement that would have set the stage for a broader settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Only a cretinous green could possibly delude themselves that Hamas has any intention of accepting a two-state solution.
As must now be clear to any observer, Hamas has no desire to seek an accommodation with Israel. It remains ideologically committed to the destruction of the state of Israel, the extermination of the Jewish people there and the establishment of an Islamic caliphate. In these aims it is supported by Iran.
Not that deluded wishful thinking is restricted to the green-left.
It is a stance that puts Hamas at odds with much of the Palestinian people.
This is, quite frankly, utter bollocks. A 2021 poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research showed that just 39% of Palestinians supported a two-state solution. Palestinian intransigence is only hardening with time. The most recent polls find that just a quarter of Palestinians would support it.
With Hamas gone, the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza could once again be governed by the Palestinian Authority, which supports a two-state solution and does care for the welfare of its citizens.
No longer at risk of being outflanked by extremist actors, the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas would have the scope to negotiate with Israel.
The Australian
Yeah, good luck with that.
These are the people, remember, who danced and cheered while the mutilated, raped corpse of Shani Louk was paraded through the streets of Gaza.