The failure to resolve the Israeli-Arab conflict is because the local Arabs refuse to accept the presence of Jews and believe that the Jewish State will eventually disappear. With such orientation, there is virtually no Palestinian interest in peace talks, and popular support is around “resistance” by “any means necessary” to rid the land of Jews.
Meaning, to kill them, or enough of them to make the rest scared enough to leave.
For those interested in resolving the conflict, Palestinian society must be instilled with basic truths:
Jews are indigenous to the holy land
Two Jewish Temples stood in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount
The land of Israel is, and always has been, central to Judaism
Jews are not going to leave; this is their homeland
These truths do not negate (or should not) negate a Palestinian narrative that they are also native to the land and have lived there for generations. However, it replaces the extremist vitriol prevalent among Palestinian leadership, radical imams, college professors (like Columbia University’s Joseph Massad) and the B.D.S. movement which are built on the foundation of antisemitism in advancing anti-Zionism.
In addition to reiterating these facts, governments and the United Nations need to take clear steps to advance peace:
Unequivocally support the Jewish State in fighting terror
Unequivocally condemn the recruiting, training, arming and using children as terrorists
Clearly label Hamas as not only an Islamic militant group but a designated terrorist group, no different than the Taliban, ISIL and Boko Haram
Palestine will be unwelcome to speak at the United Nations unless it ceases funding and inciting terrorist activities
Support Jews peacefully accessing and praying at their holiest site on the Temple Mount, a fundamental human right (reject the “status quo”)
Repeal UN Security Council Resolution 2334 which made it illegal for Jews – and only Jews – to live throughout their homeland
As long as the UN continues to waffle – and contradict – these moral points, Palestinians will continue to reject coexistence and pursue terrorism against Jews. The local Arabs believe that Hamas’s terrorism got Israel to leave Gaza in 2005, and the next generation of terrorists will ultimately chase Jews from their promised land.
The world is exacerbating Palestinian terrorism and destroying any path towards peace because it fails to address the root cause of the conflict which is Palestinians’ refusal to coexist with Jews. The flawed traditional bias of pressuring the more powerful party (Israel) and absolving the weaker (Palestinian Arabs) is exactly the opposite of what is required to form an enduring peace in the Middle East.
Zionists have not internalized the venom with which most Arabs view Jewish presence in the holy land.
Nazi Germany invaded France in May 1940 and the reaction was mixed. A minority saddled up to the Nazis and facilitated the enactment of antisemitic laws and rounding up Jews for deportation. Many French formed “resistance” groups to fight the invaders, and enlisted the help of foreign countries to rid the homeland of those interlopers. They used all means at their disposal to return France to its 1939 reality.
Street in Saint Maxime, France “Rise of the Resistance” against Nazi invaders in WWII (photo: First One Through)
Most Palestinian Arabs view Jews in the holy land the same way.
Arabs reject the history of Jews in Israel, especially in Jerusalem. They claim that the entire Zionist enterprise is a fiction of European creation. Palestinian leadership demands an apology from the United Kingdom for advancing the Balfour Declaration, and Hamas, the dominant political party in the Palestinian parliament considers killing Jews a “natural” response to the colonialist effort. They “resist” the Jews by any and all means possible, and polls show the majority of Palestinian Arabs support killing Jews inside of Israel. They are convinced that eventually these foreign Jews will leave and that the Jewish State won’t live to see its 100th birthday.
Anti-Zionist groups understand this. The Palestinian group Within Our Lifetime held a rally calling to use “any means necessary” (meaning violence) to liberate their land “from the river to the sea.” The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) told attendees at a conference that American Jews are “enemies” because they support Israel. Students for Justice in Palestine say Zionism is based on “racism, expansionism, [and] settler colonialism,” and the Palestinian Authority Minister of Culture called Jews “invaders.“
Palestinians aren’t frustrated by the lack of a Palestinian State on a fraction of historic Palestine; they are infuriated that the world would consider chopping up their homeland. They rejected the notion of a Jewish State in 1917, again at the United Nations in 1947, and to this very moment. They don’t think of a “Nakba” as an event in the past, but discuss an “ongoing Nakba” in Israel’s existence now.
Yet people talk about the “two state solution” as though it is something that needs to be imposed on Israel, when Israel is the party that has consistently tried to advance an enduring peace. It is the Arabs who reject the “invaders”, “colonialists” and “enemies” who have robbed them of their homeland.
One cannot advance actions for a “peace process” without interalizing that Palestinian Arabs continue to reject the basic presence of Jews. From the 1940s through 1970s, the Palestinians turned to fellow Muslim Arab countries to destroy the Jewish State. Now they turn to the global community to combat the “Zionist entity” and Zionists in the global community.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY16) told left-wing Israeli media Haaretz that he will be boycotting Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s address to a joint session of Congress next week. He offered “I’ve been very outspoken regarding the treatment of Palestinians. The United States is important in ensuring accountability and uplifting the human rights of Palestinians.”
It is a remarkable statement in light of Palestinian polls showing the prevailing attitude pushing for violence rather than peace.
In June 2023, Palestinians said the two most positive Palestinian events since the “Nakba,” the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 were the creation of the terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and the first and second Intifadas. A majority support another intifada and 57% support or strongly support killing Jewish civilians inside of Israel.
Not only is Bowman ignoring Palestinian thirst for Jewish blood, he is choosing to boycott a left-wing leader Israeli leader, who speaks to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas frequently. Such action sets back the cause of peace and empowers the Islamic Republic of Iran.
ACTION ITEM
EMAIL REP. BOWMAN “Israeli President Isaac Herzog is in favor of peace and dialogue with Palestinians. A decision to boycott him is not just an insult to the Jewish State and to a future of peace with Palestinians but is a vote to empower the dangerous genocidal regime in Iran.”
The United Nations is holding its 2023 Counter-Terrorism Week from June 19 to 23. It is an annual ritual held since 2001 which attempts to combat the violence plaguing many parts of the world.
Some countries like the United Kingdom spoke about terrorism being bred inside its borders, while others like those in Africa, noted that “the spill-over of terrorism from the Sahel to the northern regions of the West African coastal countries is no longer a risk; it is a reality.”
A few speakers spoke of “lone wolves” who become radicalized online in just days, as opposed to fifty years ago when it took months or years of planning by organized groups to commit an attack. Few commented that terrorism has become more institutionalized, capturing the attention and intoxicating academia.
The overall theme was that terrorism is not uniform but all of the countries fear its impact in the near and longer term.
So various nations came together to figure out how to prevent the scourge through the exchange of ideas, best practices and sharing of information. Topics ranged from stopping the flow of weapons and blocking financing for violent groups, to building forums for inclusivity and preventing poverty.
The UN said little about the appropriate penalties for terrorism. The global body relies on its “four pillars for combatting terrorism,” three of which are prophylactic and the fourth, a wrapper of respecting human rights.
It is a monstrous hole in its strategy, atop failed prescriptions, such as the notion that fighting poverty prevents terrorism which has been disproven in multiple studies.
It leaves the agency as unsullied, with an easy perch to admonish those who live in terrorism’s trenches of park benches.
Israel has faced Palestinian Arab terrorism since modern Zionism took root in the Jewish holy land in the 1920s. Instigated and rewarded by its leaders to this day, Palestinian individuals shoot, stab and run over innocent Israeli Jews because they object to the basic presence of these non-Arabs.
Israel takes a number of preventative measures to stop the terrorism, some within the UN playbook and others outside. It tries to stop the flow of weapons and financing to terrorist groups, while it also facilitates the flow of people and goods to help the local Palestinian economy.
However, that is not enough to stem the daily barrage. Israel actively monitors terrorists and launches raids to arrest them before the attacks. It punishes the terrorist by destroying their home, an action the United Nations condemns as “collective punishment” for the terrorist’s family.
Lost in the rebuke is acknowledging that terrorism is inherently a collective attack on a community, not just the parties personally injured. A proportionate response to terrorism must, therefore, include accounting for those who aided and abetted the crime.
The latest Palestinian poll of June 14, 2023 showed a familiar preference for violence that has been a constant sentiment for years. Now a new headline has emerged: that Palestinians think Israel will disappear within the next 25 years.
Preference For Violent Jihad
When asked about the most positive things to happen to Palestinians over the past 75 years since the reestablishment of the Jewish State of Israel in the so-called “Nakba catastrophe”, the number one response was the establishment of the terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Second, were the two “Intifada pogroms” which killed over 1,000 Israeli Jews. Trailing those responses was the creation of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority (PA) and last, the formation of the more moderate political party, Fatah.
A large majority of 71% are in favor of the formation of the newest terrorist groups “Lion’s Den” and “Jenin Battalion” which sparked the dramatic rise in deaths among both Israelis and Palestinians over the past two years. An incredible 86% of Palestinian Arabs think the terrorist groups should operate outside of the PA. Not surprisingly, with such support, 58% expect “these armed groups to expand and spread to other areas in the West Bank.”
When asked about the most effective means of creating a Palestinian state, “the public split into three groups: 52% chose armed struggle [aka violent jihad] (55% in the Gaza Strip and 49% in the West Bank), 21% negotiations, and 22% popular resistance.”
These findings are not meaningfully different than results of past polls. The alarming question about the preference to kill Jewish civilians inside of Israel was not asked in this latest poll. In March 2023, 61% were in favor of such terrorist attacks (question 70).
The End of Israel
The quarterly Palestinian poll occasionally introduces new questions based on recent events. For example, this poll asked about opinions related to the Iranian-Saudi reproachment. Last poll asked whether people were in favor of killing two Israelis who drove into the town of Huwara (a vast majority were).
In the latest poll, people were asked a more general question about the future of Israel as the country celebrated its 75th anniversary. In response to the question of Israel making it to its 100th anniversary, “two-thirds say Israel will not celebrate the centenary of its establishment, and the majority believes that the Palestinian people will be able in the future to recover Palestine and return its refugees to their homes.”
While the world debates how to set the “peace process” on track and solely blames the Israeli government for the failure of progress, Palestinians have mentally moved on, and see the end of the Jewish State in their lifetimes and its replacement with an Arab country.
ACTION ITEM
While the world debates how to set the “peace process” on track and solely blames the Israeli government for the failure of progress, Palestinians have mentally moved on, and see the end of the Jewish State in their lifetimes.
CONTACT Sen. Christopher Murphy (D-CT) “Palestinians polled themselves once again and not only show a strong preference for violence but see the end of Israel in the near future. Stop efforts to condition aid to Israel.”
On May 10, 2023, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) sponsored a resolution, “H.Res.388 – Recognizing the ongoing Nakba and Palestine refugees rights” which was co-sponsored by five fellow extremist members of Congress, Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Betty McCollum (D-MN), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Cori Bush (D-MO). The same cohort pushed a resolution last May called “H.Res.1123 – Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian refugees’ rights.” The two bills are similar but by no means the same, and the latest version reveals the deep toxicity of the current anti-peace anti-Israel narrative.
The insertion of one word in the resolution’s title – “ongoing” – captures much of the difference between the 2022 and 2023 versions of the bill. While the 811-word, May 2022 Res.1123 gave an alternative version of actual history, whitewashing the crimes committed by Palestinians in the 1930s and 1940s when it worked with the Nazis in Europe and British in Palestine to facilitate the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Holocaust and to launch a war on Jewish survivors in Palestine, the 2023 resolution claims that the war of Israel’s independence is very much part of the Palestinian psyche TODAY.
The May 2023 1,327-word Res.388 claims the so-called “nakba” “is the root cause” of the Palestinian conflict and that there will not be peace “without addressing the Nakba and remedying its injustices toward the Palestinian people.” The resolution holds the United States accountable that it must force the State of Israel to accept millions of Stateless Arabs whose parents or grandparents left Israel while they waited for five Arab armies to perform a second genocide of Jews in a generation.
Both the Democratic and Republican Parties were historically very clear on the issue of “refugees.” The 2008 Democratic platform specifically said “The creation of a Palestinian state through final status negotiations, together with an international compensation mechanism, should resolve the issue of Palestinian refugees by allowing them to settle there, rather than in Israel.” The 2004 letter from U.S. President George W. Bush to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said almost the exact same, that “It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel.” The entire idea of a two state solution is a Jewish state and an Arab state, not a bi-national state of Israel and an Arab state of Palestine.
Palestinian polls, as recently as January 2023, show that Palestinians believe that the conflict started with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, promoting a Jewish State, together with the immigration of Jews. Relatively few blame the conflict on the 1948 or 1967 wars. It is the presence of Jews that is the core problem for Palestinian Arabs, not Arabs being unable to live in the same apartments as their grandparents had lived in.
If the 2023 resolution simply misrepresented the core of the conflict or misquoted bipartisan policy for the descendants of Palestine refugees, that would be bad enough. The resolution went much further.
The resolution called upon the president to use the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 2018, named after a Jewish Holocaust survivor, against the Jewish State in regards to its treatment of Arabs. The fact that Hamas, a political-terrorist group governs half of the Palestinian Arabs and has over half of the seats in the Palestinian parliament is ignored, as is its antisemitic charter which calls for a jihad on Jews and destruction of the Jewish State. Today, nearly two-thirds of Palestinians (61%) support killing Jewish civilians inside of Israel. Somehow, this resolution turns an act meant “to prevent and mitigate acts of genocide and other mass atrocities against civilians” AGAINST THE DEFENDERS OF CIVILIANS IN FAVOR OF THE PERPETRATORS.
Nearly two-thirds of Palestinians (61%) support killing Jews inside of Israel, but Rep. Tlaib and her antisemitic squad want to use the Elie Wiesel Genocide Prevention Act to protect Arabs killing Jews
The “Nakba” was a self-inflicted event in the 1940s when Arabs rejected coexistence with Jews and launched a war to destroy Israel, which they fortunately lost. Outrageously, on the 75th anniversary of the rebirth of the Jewish State, six extremist members of congress put forward a resolution asking the United States to join the Arabs to continue their fight to end the Jewish State.
ACTION ITEMS
EMAIL REP. JAMAAL BOWMAN (NY16) “Your ongoing extremism and co-sponsorship of an ‘ongoing Nakba’ resolution at Israel’s 75th anniversary is both a whitewashing of the contribution of Palestinians to the deaths of thousands of Jews in the 1940s, and a hostile action to dismantle the only Jewish state today.”
EMAIL SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY) “The Nakba Resolution put forward by two New York Democratic members of congress is appalling and offensive. To mark the rebirth of the Jewish State in the shadow of the Holocaust in this way, as nearly two-thirds of Palestinians polled say they are in favor of killing Jewish civilians in Israel is sickening.”
EMAIL SEN. KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND (D-NY) “The Nakba Resolution put forward by two New York Democratic members of congress is appalling and offensive. To mark the rebirth of the Jewish State in the shadow of the Holocaust in this way, as nearly two-thirds of Palestinians polled say they are in favor of killing Jewish civilians in Israel is sickening.”
EMAIL WHITE HOUSE “The Nakba Resolution put forward by two New York Democratic members of congress is appalling and offensive. To mark the rebirth of the Jewish State in the shadow of the Holocaust in this way, as nearly two-thirds of Palestinians polled say they are in favor of killing Jewish civilians in Israel is sickening.”
Many anti-Zionists point to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 (Britain), the San Remo Resolution of 1920 (Britain, Italy, France and Japan), and the United Nations Partition Resolution of 1947 as examples of foreign intervention against the will of the region’s inhabitants. While the Jews had thousands of years of history in the land and a religion which is uniquely tied to the land, the local Arabs did not want Jews in their midst. The Palestinian Arabs’ desires were ignored because foreigners sought to help Jews reestablish their rights in their homeland.
Those same anti-Zionists don’t pause in their push to ignore the will of local Israelis today who do not want millions of Arabs from abroad to move into their country. Not only do the pro-Palestinian advocates ignore the will of millions of Israeli citizens, they dismiss that Israel is a sovereign country with its own laws, something that was never true of Palestine before the creation of Israel in 1948.
Those same individuals point to United Nations Resolution 194 of 1948 Article 11 which states that refugees should be allowed to return to their homes if they are willing to live in peace. Somehow they ignore three critical items: 1) Palestinian Arabs refuse to coexist in peace, as shown in their terrorism and quarterly polls; 2) there are only a few thousand refugees from 1948, not millions of people which include descendants of people who left the region, many taking citizenship elsewhere; and 3) that resolution was for a moment in time and no longer relevant. For example, Article 8 says that greater Bethlehem and greater Jerusalem should be under United Nations control – are they advocating that Bethlehem be stripped from Palestinian Authority control?
The Ottomans and British may have ignored the wishes of the local Arab population in Palestine but they had the authority to do so. Today, there is no basis for the United Nations, the European Union, or anti-Zionists in the US Congress to impose their will over the common position of both the Israeli government and Israeli population.
As Israel celebrates its 75th birthday, it is appalling to watch Palestinian Arabs and their supporters turn the remarkable and historic reestablishment of the Jewish state into some sort of offense against Arabs. The inversion of facts turning the Arabs into the victims is a modern day blood libel, attempting to whitewash the historic crimes committed by Palestinians.
Consider the leading anti-Israel voices in the U.S. Congress, Ms. Tlaib (D-MI), Ms. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ms. Omar (D-MN), Ms. McCollum (D-MN), Ms. Newman (D-IL), Mr. Bowman (D-NY), and Ms. Bush (D-MO) who put forward a resolution in congress to commemorate the “Nakba”, which called for 7 million descendants of refugees to be pushed into Israel, ending the two state solution. The anti-Zionist Congresspeople noted that “on November 29, 1947, [the United Nations voted] to partition Palestine into two states against the wishes of Palestine’s majority indigenous inhabitants,” but they simultaneously ignored that the majority of Israelis today are against allowing 7 million Arabs who never lived in Israel a so-called “right of return.” These same Congresspeople claim that the Nakba continues today, with the “ongoing process of Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land.”
The Palestinian Arabs committed massacres against the Jews in Palestine in the 1930s, and effectively got the British to stop Jewish immigration just as the European Holocaust was starting. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem met with leading Nazi Heinrich Himmler to encourage his genocide of the Jews. Himmler sent a telegram to the mufti on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, noting that both the Nazis and Palestinian Arabs were partners in a fight to eradicate the Jews.
After the slaughter of 6 million Jews, the Arabs in Palestine did not let up on the local Jews nor Holocaust survivors who had lost everything. The Arabs continued to reject a Jewish presence in the Jewish historic homeland. They voted against partitioning the land and giving a slice of the Jewish holy land for a new Jewish state. They opted to wage a war to annihilate the persecuted Jews. Thousands of Arabs left the field of battle as they encouraged five Arab armies to converge on the nascent Jewish state to annihilate the Jews completely.
This is the vile truth of the Arab war against Jews before, during, and in the shadow of the Holocaust. No amount of NakbaWashing will remove the indelible stain of Palestinian Jew hatred. The current pathetic attempts at Nakbawashing are a latest form of antisemitism, disgustingly turning the Jews into aggressors and Palestinian Arabs as peace-loving victims.
The Arab-Israeli conflict gets so much ink and analysis because the region is always in flux.
Yet some things remain constant.
The Israelis and Palestinian Arabs poll themselves frequently about sentiments on a variety of topics. Occasionally, they conduct joint polls as occurred on January 24, 2023. The Palestinian Center of Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) and Tel Aviv University’s International MA Program in Conflict Resolution and Mediation (Israeli Pulse) issued their report as Palestinians and Israelis engaged in a series of attacks. The joint poll is another tool to assess how Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs and Palestinian Arabs (there are no Palestinian Jews anymore, as Palestinians exclude Jews from the definition) consider different aspects of living together, and how trends in such attitudes change.
In many ways, the groups agree on much: only about one-third of Israelis and Palestinians supports a two-state solution, a percentage that has continued to decline since 2016. About 85% of both Israelis and Arabs do not trust each other, and 84% of each considers themselves the victim in the conflict. About 60% of each group fears for their safety, roughly 93% of each group believes that they are the rightful owners to all of the land, and about 70% of each thinks the conflict is a zero-sum relationship, in that what’s good for one side is bad for the other.
The areas with some gap in sentiments includes engaging in an all-out war, with an estimated 40% of Palestinians and 26% of Israelis in favor, and roughly one-third of Israeli Jews willing to share the land with Palestinians but only 7% of Palestinians willing to share any land with Jews.
That last figure – only about one in fourteen Palestinians Arabs are in favor of sharing any of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea – is frightening and should be read in the context of another question in the joint poll.
“When did the conflict begin?”
To read the news and consider the ideas floated to bring peace to the region, one would imagine that the respondents would answer “the 1967 Six Day War,” to the question when the conflict originated, as that is when “occupation” began and those are the contours proposed in the Saudi Peace Plan. Yet only 8% of Palestinian Arabs and 5% of Israeli Jews believe that is the beginning of the conflict.
A majority of both Palestinians and Israeli Jews (60% and 52%, respectively) believe that the conflict began with the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the Zionist immigration wave. It is the increased presence of Jews in the region – with international support – that is the core of the conflict, and why only 7% of Palestinians would consider sharing any of the land with the Jewish “colonialists.”
Only Israeli Arabs don’t hold this position, as they believe the conflict began with Israel’s declaration of independence, which makes sense as that is when their reality began. Similarly, they are the group most likely to promote good relations between Jews and Arabs (70%), followed by Israeli Jews (56%). Almost no Palestinians want to promote good relations (22%), as it has been blacklisted under the banner of “normalization.”
Palestinians do not believe that the Arab-Israeli conflict is about land or religion. They believe it is about the physical presence of Jews in the land they view as singularly theirs. Until the world focuses on changing this jaundiced Palestinian viewpoint, there is no hope for a peaceful resolution.
The “cycle of violence” is continuing in the holy land, in a phrase that inappropriately conveys similarity.
Last week, the Israel Defense Forces went after a terrorist cell in Jenin which was planning attacks against Israelis. The gun battle resulted in nine dead Palestinians, seven of them terrorists.
Hours later, a Palestinian Arab shot and killed seven innocent Jews coming out of synagogue on the Jewish Sabbath. The terrorist was killed. The following day a 13-year old Palestinian shot and injured a father and son walking on the streets of Jerusalem on the Sabbath. The perpetrator was taken into custody.
There is no moral equivalence between the actions of Palestinians attacking innocent Jews and Israel defending its citizens. There is no equivalence of intent which is lost in the phrase “cycle of violence.”
While Israel has created a multi-ethnic democracy which has tried to live in peace with its neighbors, Palestinians continue to demand a purely Arab and Islamic region, ethnically cleansed of Jews.
