PM Benjamin Netanyahu interviewed by Tunku Varadarajan (WSJ): The Obstacle to Peace Is Not the Absence of a Palestinian State but the Opposition to a Jewish State
To "ensure that Gaza never again poses a threat to Israel" will require "durable demilitarization, which can only be carried out and sustained by Israel," along with "deradicalization," a cleansing of the ideological poison in Gaza that most Jewish Israelis on both left and right now regard as nonnegotiable preconditions for peace with the Palestinians.Bassem Eid: My Fellow Palestinians: It's Time to Get Rid of Our Leaders and Accept Israel's Offers for Peace
How is the campaign against Hamas going? "Better than many expected. It took the U.S. and its allies nine months to defeat radical forces in Mosul" in 2016-17 against Islamic State. "Mosul is smaller than Gaza and did not have the massive terror underground infrastructure. We're now in the fourth month."
Netanyahu, like most Israelis, is aghast at the way protesters in the West - especially on American campuses - demonize Israel and, in some cases, laud Hamas. "This is a problem not just for Israel but also for America....America is the vanguard of freedom and the guarantor of liberty in this century. If a younger generation emerges in America that supports the head-choppers, it is a problem for civilization."
Asked about Washington's push for a two-state solution while Israel is in the throes of an existential war, he says, "Anyone supporting Israel and who also supports a two-state solution should ask themselves some questions. Do they support the Palestinians having an army? The answer is of course not. Should the Palestinians be able to bring in weapons? The answer is of course not. Should they be able to make military pacts with Iran? Of course not."
"In any future agreement, the Palestinians should have all the power to govern themselves and none of the powers to threaten Israel." In any agreement, "Israel must retain overall security control over territory west of the Jordan River, and that includes Gaza."
"Some in the United States believe that the obstacle to peace with the Palestinians is - me. They don't realize that I reflect the view of most Israelis." Polls confirm Netanyahu's assertion and indicate that Israelis, far from clamoring for a two-state solution, are adamant that the war should be fought with intensity.
Most of his compatriots "understand that the problem is that the Palestinians don't want peace with Israel but peace without Israel." It's "not the absence of a Palestinian state but the opposition to a Jewish state that is the obstacle to peace."
When the United Nations General Assembly voted to divide the Mandate into Jewish and Arab states in 1947, the Jewish community joyously accepted their proposal. Yet tragically, the Palestinian Arab leadership again rejected even a small Jewish state in the territory. They then invited the armies of seven neighboring Arab countries to invade and destroy the newborn Jewish state in what became Israel's War of Independence.Bassam Tawil: Time to End UNRWA's Jihad against Israel
The trend continued with the Oslo Accords of 1993, in which Israeli leaders generously allowed a genocidal terrorist group called the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), run by the mastermind mass murderer Yasser Arafat, to take control over most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The year 2000 was a critical juncture. At the Camp David Summit, Israel extended an unprecedented offer of Palestinian statehood. They were once again met with Palestinian leadership's refusal—and the eruption of the bloody Second Intifada, a wave of suicide bombings that killed almost a thousand Israeli civilians.
The betrayal shattered any illusion of a commitment to a peaceful resolution from the Palestinian side.
Then came 2008, at the Annapolis Conference, where Israel once again reached out with a proposal for an independent Palestinian state. The refusal of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to accept this offer was not just disappointing; it was infuriating. Today, Abbas, who came to power in 2004, is serving the nineteenth year of his four-year presidential term, having suspended both elections and the constitution in the Palestinian territories.
Meanwhile, the Gaza Strip is ruled by the vile Hamas, the ISIS of Palestine, which, on October 7, 2023, invaded the communities of Southern Israel, murdering 1,200 souls in a single day of nightmares and taking more than 240 captives to Gaza. Alongside these murders were unspeakable acts of sexual assault and continuous abuses of hostages until today, a grim reminder of the human cost of this conflict.
The sworn objective of Hamas's founding charter is not coexistence but the obliteration of Israel. Khaled Meshaal, former head of Hamas and still one of its most senior leaders, clarified just this month Hamas's position on the idea of a two-state solution: "We reject this notion, because it means you would get a promise for a [Palestinian] state, yet you are required to recognize the legitimacy of the other state, which is the Zionist entity... We will not give up on our right to Palestine in its entirety, from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea." He insisted on his belief that Oct. 7 only "enhanced this conviction."
The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict regarding a two-state solution reveals a harsh reality: Israel has consistently made genuine efforts toward peace, only to be met with rejection, treachery, and blood-curdling violence by the Palestinian side. This pattern of refusal, particularly epitomized by groups like Hamas, has been the real obstacle to peace.
It's time to acknowledge this truth bluntly. Those who claim to desire peace must confront and challenge the rejectionist elements within Palestinian society, including Hamas. We need to get rid of the Palestinian establishment who have ruled for 15 years without actually representing the Palestinian people. Only then can we hope to forge a path toward a peaceful, two-state future.
"Hamas is involved in everything. Hamas has their hands on UNRWA administration workers. Hamas manages UNRWA. They are those in charge in the agency. From the day Hamas came to power, they took control of everything. The UNRWA employees are from Hamas. The heads of the departments and the senior staff are Hamas members." —Palestinian from the Gaza Strip to an Israeli officer in a recorded call, X (Twitter) December 27, 2023.UNWRA was established to aid Jewish as well as Arab refugees
It is now clear that the UN heads were lying when they said they were unaware of the involvement of their employees with terror groups. In fact, they knew but did their utmost to appease Hamas.
In a moment of rare honesty, in 2021 the UN acknowledged that UNRWA's school curriculum referred to Israel as "the enemy," taught children mathematics by counting "martyred terrorists," and included the phrase "Jihad is one of the doors to paradise" in Arabic grammar lessons.
"Before UNRWA, this terrorist accomplice [Abdallah Mehjez] worked for the BBC..." — Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch.
"Now is the time for reform. Reform for rehabilitation - so that the minds of Palestinian children can no longer be poisoned. So that there can be a shared vision of peace in this land." — Lt. Col. (res.) Peter Lerner, X (Twitter), January 27, 2024.
Western taxpayers should not be funding terror groups disguised as humanitarian organizations.
UNRWA was established to support the relief and human development of Palestinian refugees, not to support the development of terrorism.
Following evidence that it has colluded with Hamas in Gaza, several countries have withdrawn or paused their funding to UNWRA, the UN agency tasked with giving relief to Palestinian Arab refugees* fleeing in 1948 from what would become Israel. But there is little discussion of why an agency set up as a temporary measure should still be giving relief to ‘refugees’ 75 years later. It is not generally known that UNWRA was established with the aim of helping refugees on both sides of the conflict, but no one today talks of Jewish refugees, who have been fully absorbed.
According to Don Peretz (Who is a Refugee?) initially UNRWA defined a refugee “as a needy person who, as a result of the war in Palestine, has lost his home and his means of livelihood.
This definition included some 17,000 Jews who had lived in areas of Palestine taken over by Arab forces during the 1948 war and about 50,000 Arabs living within Israel’s armistice frontiers. Israel took responsibility for these individuals, and by 1950 they were removed from the UNRWA rolls leaving only Palestine Arabs and a few hundred non-Arab Christian Palestinians outside Israel in UNRWA’s refugee category.
At the time there was no internationally recognised definition of what constituted a refugee. In 1951, The UN Refugee Convention agreed the following definition:
“A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”
This definition certainly applies to the 850,000 Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Arab countries, synagogue burnings, arrests and riots. Returning to these countries would have put – and still does -their lives at risk.
The burden of rehabilitating and resettling the 650,000 Jewish refugees who arrived in Israel from Arab countries was shouldered by the Jewish Agency and US Jewish relief organisations, such as the Joint Distribution Committee. They were shunted into transit camps or ma’abarot. The conditions were appalling.
The American aid earmarked to solve the issue of Middle East refugees was supposed to have been split evenly between Israel and the Arab states, with each side receiving $50 million to build infrastructure to absorb refugees. The money to take in the Arab refugees was handed over to the U.N. agency founded to address the issue of Palestinian refugees, and the Americans gave Arab countries another $53 million for “technical cooperation.” In effect, the Arab side received double the money given to Israel, even though Israel took in more refugees, including ones from Arab nations – Jews who had been displaced by the regional upheavals. The bills presented to Congress in 1951 included a bill to send Israel aid to take in refugees. It was the first and last time that any mechanism was established for the Jewish refugees. The amount Congress allocated to provide for Middle East refugees – Jewish and Arab – at the request of then-President Harry Truman was equal to $1.5 billion today.