2 weeks Ago By Special to National Post
Despite the October 7 terror attack on Israel, the two-state solution has been touted by the United Nations, the European Union, Canada’s Liberal government and others. Yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who previously supported the idea — has stated emphatically that the two-state solution is dead. Even many Israeli peaceniks living in the Gaza envelope who dreamt of coexistence are changing their politics.
The reason is simple: they are loath to reward terror. Part of the problem is that the two-state solution isn’t actually a solution — it’s a catch-phrase. It’s neither a proposal for reconciliation nor a path toward peace.
Presuming the only thing standing in the way of peace was land, three decades ago, Israel took the world’s advice and began giving land away — for peace. Yet if the “land for peace” theory had any merit, terrorism coming from Judea and Samaria (a.k.
a., the West Bank) should have decreased after Israel ceded Areas A and B to the Palestinian Authority 30 years ago, as part of the Oslo Accords. It didn’t.
Terrorism should have shrunk after Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. Very much the contrary. “Land for peace” thus became a meaningless slogan (or perhaps a clever marketing term).
Israel’s concessions didn’t even lead to an uneasy peace, only to more death and destruction. From the get-go, “land for peace” was flawed to its core, as it was premised on the notion that the onus is on Israel to sacrifice for peace — the corollary being that if Israel didn’t make concessions, it didn’t truly want peace. This rationale presupposes that the land didn’t belong to Israel in the first place, and infantilizes the Palestinians, who need to be bribed in order to agree to be peaceful.
What the world is asking now is that Israel try again, after the worst slaughter of innocents in its history, and not just to dip its toe in the water, but to give the entire house away. Israel has tried “land for peace” so many times. Perhaps, for once, the world should try placing the burden on Palestinian leaders by forcing them to clean up their act, in exchange for concessions from Israel.
Perhaps it’s time to flip the script to “peace for land.” And what, precisely, would Israel want to see, besides the obvious clamp down on terror attacks? For starters, there’s a niggling problem of incitement and widespread hate. After the Second World War, Germans had a day of reckoning, a moment of judgment and accountability, where actions were evaluated and consequences were faced.
They went through a process of denazification, where Nazi ideology was speedily scrubbed from the country’s discourse and replaced with western values. What we need today is a similar process to scrub antisemitism from Palestinian society. From the cradle to the grave, Palestinians are inundated with hatred that rivals Nazi Germany’s vilest antisemitism.
They’re taught that Jews are the cause of every ill in their lives. They’re taught that Jews are mosquitoes, to be killed with impunity. Children are brainwashed and propagandized to believe that their greatest and most heroic duty is to kill Jews.
If you don’t believe me, spend time surfing the vast media library compiled by Palestinian Media Watch , which has been tracking this material for decades. One might retort that there is plenty of hate coming from extremists in Israel. True enough.
But they are the exceptions, not the rule, and they are marginalized within Israeli society. One might also argue that we should expect this level of hatred from the Palestinians given the conditions they live in. But this presupposes that the extremists and corrupt Palestinian leadership haven’t villainized the Jews to deflect attention away from their own failures.
And it takes agency away from Palestinian leaders who have consistently chosen war over economic advancement. Nor has preaching hatred helped their case. Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates and Sudan have all made peace with Israel, because the alternative wasn’t worth it and the benefits were vast.
But things changed after October 7. Hate-filled sermons can no longer be ignored. It is clear that they have planted deep roots and borne violent fruit.
Many already knew this was not so much an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as it was an Israeli-jihadist conflict. That belief was hardened by polls showing that three-quarters of Palestinians support the October 7 attacks. And therein lies the crux of the problem: peace cannot be had when one side wants to kill the other.
No land bribes are going to appease the religious extremists. It will only result in more attacks on Israel. It’s a lie to say the Palestinians’ “armed struggle” and “resistance” is about land.
This is the narrative for useful idiots and naive westerners. This conflict is unmistakably religious and ideological. After all, whenever terrorists invaded Israel and slaughtered civilians — including on October 7 — they were screaming “Allahu akbar!” (Allah is great), not “Free Palestine.
” The terrorist groups chiefly responsible for the October 7 massacre were Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, which is an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement. Hamas’s leaders readily admit that the entire point is to destroy Israel and kill Jews — it’s right there in its charter. And it is no coincidence that Hamas named the operation the Al-Aqsa Flood — a reference to Islam’s third-holiest site.
(Can anyone even name Judaism’s third-holiest site?) In the lead-in to the one-year anniversary of the October 7 massacre, the two-state delusion is alive and well. Once upon a time, one could hope that the two sides could sit down and come to some sort of a deal. But giving it another go would be the very definition of insanity — i.
e., doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And given the new reality, it would also be the definition of suicide.
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