The inconvenient truth about the Middle East conflict.
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This is an expanded version of my column in today’s Times (£) of London.
On Sunday, the Palestinian Authority claimed that Israel itself carried out the massacre of 364 of its own civilians at the music festival near Gaza on October 7. It claimed that “Israeli helicopters” had bombed Israeli participants after an Israeli decision to kill them all.
This abhorrent conspiracy theory — based on a twisted account of a discredited story in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz — was demonstrably contradicted by the testimony of survivors, the video evidence of the Palestinian paragliders gunning down festival-goers as they ran for their lives and the abduction of others into Gaza.
Given that the Hamas pogrom that day constituted the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust — and replicated its signature sadism and deranged barbarity — the PA’s claim was on a par with Holocaust denial.
This was hardly surprising, nor indeed new. The PA leader, Mahmoud Abbas, received his doctorate from the Soviet Academy of Sciences for a 1982 thesis in which he questioned not only the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust but whether the gas chambers even existed.
By his own testimony, moreover, his role model is Haj Amin al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jersualem in the 1930s who made a pact with Hitler that when he won the Second World War the Mufti would slaughter every Jew in the Middle East.
Yet the Biden administration wants the PA, run by a man who idolises Hitler’s Middle East partner in the Nazis’ “Final Solution”, to take over the running of Gaza when the war finally ends as part of the speedy creation of a Palestine state alongside Israel.
The American position reflects the widespread western belief that, while Hamas are “bad” Palestinians, the PA are “good” Palestinians who are entitled to a state of their own.
But officials in both the PA and its dominant Fatah party have responded to October 7 by urging more slaughter of Jews, calling for the end of Israel and expressing excitement over the Hamas atrocities as “a source of pride, heroism, and honour for the Palestinian people”.
Palestinian Media Watch reports that Fatah has urged everyone who owns a weapon to join the war against Israel. Its spokesman, Abd al Fattah Doleh, said:
We call on our brothers in Hamas to assemble a pure Palestinian front under the umbrella of the PLO, the sole legal representative of our Palestinian people, which will take action alongside those who are devoted to our people’s struggle and its right to freedom, a state, and self-determination, in order to invest in our people’s struggle and its resistance [i.e., terror] to the criminal aggression to which we are being subjected, for the sake of our people and the future of our existence and our cause in a way that will constitute a true deterring factor against the forces of evil and colonialism [i.e., Israel, US and European “colonialist powers”].
PMW also reports that PA official Hussein al Sheikh, who many see as the person Mahmoud Abbas may have designated as his successor, has announced that the PA’s “arms are still open” to Hamas. Another Fatah official, head of the Coordination Committee for the Factions in Bethlehem, Muhammad al Ja’afari, stressed the unity of all the terror organisations in the “fight” against Israel declaring:
Regarding the Hamas Movement and Islamic Jihad, they are part of the Palestinian political scene and part of the Palestinian campaign…
Moreover, the PA has presided over rising numbers of terrorist attacks in the the “West Bank,” the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria for whose governance it is responsible according to the 1993 Oslo Accords. For many months leading up to the Hamas pogrom, there were murderous attacks there every day against Israelis and many more terror plots that were thwarted.
Since October 7, these have intensified in seriousness as an additional front in the war against Israel, leading to battles between Israeli forces and Hamas and other armed groups resulting in both IDF and terrorist casualties.
Much has been made by the Biden administration of attacks on Palestinians by young Israelis known as “hilltop youth” living in the disputed areas. There is understandable concern that these aren’t being dealt with as toughly as they should be because Israel’s security minister, Itamar ben Gvir, is himself an extremist provocateur.
But these Jewish communities are themselves under unceasing and murderous Palestinian onslaught which security officials were warning before October 7 was posing an increasingly serious military threat. Daily attacks — in which numerous Israelis have been injured or murdered — include rock-throwing, Molotov cocktails, stabbings and involve weapons including M-16 assault rifles. Security sources estimate there are about 20 armed terrorist groups in these territories carrying out attacks. Yet somehow the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, forgot to mention this when he lectured the Israelis last week on the need to to take “urgent”action to stop “settler violence” against Palestinians in the “West Bank”.
There may well be Palestinians who want to live in peace alongside Israel. However, the evidence suggests that these are sadly in a minority. Opinion polling among Palestinians in the disputed territories and Gaza, conducted during the fourth week of the war by the Arab World for Research and Development, has revealed that 75 per cent support the Hamas atrocities of October 7 — with support among those living under rule by the supposedly moderate PA notably even higher, at 83 per cent, than in Gaza.
How indeed could these dismaying figures be otherwise, given that even the “moderate” PA unceasingly pumps out Nazi-style demonisation of the Jews, incitement to Islamic holy war to wipe them all out, and the brainwashing of Palestinian children to believe that their highest calling is to murder Jews and destroy Israel.
Who can be surprised therefore that, as PMW reports, videos of students in the disputed territories show their support for Hamas, the massacre of Israelis and slaughter of Jews, and the continuation of the war.
The dismal reality is that there is no Palestinian leader nor a majority of Palestinians who are prepared to live in peace with Israel.
Whatever PA leaders may say in English for naive western consumption, their real agenda — as has been stated by Palestinian activists themselves — is the “strategy of stages” in which a Palestinian state will be the means to destroy Israel altogether.
If only “two states” were indeed the solution. A Palestine state has been offered multiple times over the past century, most recently in 2008 when Israel offered a state on 93 per cent of the disputed territories.
On every occasion, the Palestinians have not only refused but stepped up their war of extermination against the Jewish homeland.
Yet not only is the Biden administration insisting that the PA rule Gaza once again but it is continuing to fund the PA — despite the fact that it handsomely rewards terrorists and their families.
The inconvenient truth is that the century-old Arab war against the Jewish state has been kept going by the west. Ever since the 1930s, when the UK tore up its legal obligation to settle the Jews throughout what is now Israel, the “West Bank” and Gaza to recreate their homeland and offered instead to divide the land between the Jews and the Arabs, the western powers have rewarded, sanitised and incentivised the Palestinian war against that homeland while pressurising Israel to compromise its security.
With the exception of Qatar, which created and heavily funds Hamas (but to which the west grovels on account of extensive Qatari holdings in western institutions) the Palestinians have virtually zero support among the leaders of the Arab world. The Palestinians’ principal weapon is the liberal west, which can be relied upon to disseminate their propaganda and demonisation of Israel.
The fact that this has become the cause of causes for progressives helps explain the shocking support for or indifference towards the genocidal chanting against Israel and the Jews on the streets of London and other western cities.
If the west were to wake up and tell Palestinian leaders that until they stop their incitement to destroy Israel and wipe out the Jews they will receive no funding, recognition or support of any kind, this terrible conflict would end.
And so too would the intellectual corruption that has knocked the west off its moral compass and brought it to the edge of the civilisational precipice. CT.
