UN Watch
UN leaders lit an eternal flame for Imad El Samhouri, a longtime UNRWA school principal.
But he was a Hamas terrorist.
We call on UN Secretary-General António Guterres and UN General Assembly President Annalena Baerbock to retract their tribute, apologize to Hamas’s victims, and investigate.
Watch the UNRWA principal’s shocking Hamas martyr video, and see which Western countries funded him: https://unwatch.org/un-leaders-lit-an-eternal-flame-for…/
The view expressed is that of the writer only:
My whole life, I have supported a two-state solution, certainly conceptually.
I’m not religious, and for me, this isn’t about the Torah promising us this land. But I do support 100% the existence of a Jewish homeland, the State of Israel, and I also believe that Palestinians, like Jews, have some legitimate claim to that land.
If I could go back in time to 1947–48, I would have liked to see the Palestinians accept the UN partition plan. It was an imperfect solution to an extraordinarily complex problem, but I believe that had they accepted it, we would be living in a far better world today. Sadly, that wasn’t the direction they chose.
There were, of course, a lot of factors involved. Other Arab states had their own ulterior motives. There was the Cold War with the Soviet Union and fighting over spheres of influence, and their use of widespread anti-Israeli propaganda around the world as a cudgel against the West. There were a lot of moving pieces and parts, and I think the Palestinians, to a large extent, were manipulated by foreign elements. There were also Nazi and pro-Hitler elements within Palestinian society, particularly the faction that supported Amin al-Husseini.
That is a significant part of the history, and I think it needs to be acknowledged honestly. To this day, he is regarded as a hero across the Palestinian world, as is Hitler.
But all of that said, in principle, I continue to support the long-term goal of a two-state solution. Short term, however, we can’t make believe. We don’t live in fantasy land; we live in the real world.
There are genuine and legitimate existential security threats that Israel has to deal with. And if there were a Palestinian state that was run by a society still deeply radicalized after generations of indoctrination, raising children to glorify bathing themselves in the blood of Jews — not “Israelis”, not “Zionists”, but “Yahud”, Jews — then a sovereign Palestinian state would be — in and of itself — an existential threat.
If that state were genuinely sovereign, it would, by all rights, have an international airport. You could have jumbo jets pretending to be commercial airliners flying in from Iran, Turkey or elsewhere, bringing in advanced missile systems, military technology, or other weapons. You could have drone factories being constructed. You could even have old-school artillery installed in the central highlands overlooking Israel’s coastal plain, from which, at any point, Israel’s airports, commerce, infrastructure, and civilian population could be subjected to sustained attack.
We also have to deal with the unfortunate reality that if the Israeli military were ever defeated, this would not be a traditional military defeat, where the losing side surrenders some territory or treasure to make peace, and then life goes on.
Israel is surrounded by hundreds of millions of people, a great many of whom are radicalized by hatred of Jews.
And if the gates were ever kicked in for real, you would see people from across that region jumping on motorcycles, riding buses, hitchhiking, riding donkeys, walking — whatever they had to do — to get to Israel with a knife, a meat cleaver, or whatever else they could find, and simply fall upon the Israeli population and slaughter millions of people.
After, of course, first raping and torturing them, and then, after death, defiling the bodies, etc.
That’s the reality of what Israel is facing.
That isn’t a theoretical concern that can simply be wished away. It’s insanity to pretend that these security realities don’t exist.
We can’t allow our desire for peace to manifest itself in fantastical thinking. A two-state solution is a political goal; it isn’t a magic wand that makes the underlying security problems disappear.
So, to those in this group who share the idea of long-term, equal coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, and broader peace, cooperation and friendship between Jews and Muslims — as I do — that’s great. I support that principle. I support that as a goal. But we also have to be willing to take legitimate real-world constraints into account.
We’re not playing a game here.
Israel cannot simply be expected to accept a sovereign Palestinian state while the population remains radicalized to the degree that it currently is and while there is no credible assurance that such a state would not become a military platform for Israel’s utter annihilation.
These are the central facts that have to be confronted.
I don’t think acknowledging it means abandoning the two-state solution, at least in the long-term. I think it means taking the two-state solution seriously enough to understand what would actually be required to make it work.
I don’t see anyway to get there unless and until Palestinian society is thoroughly de-nazified. This is the central issue — and there will be no easy road to get there.
Pretending that Palestinian society is not as deeply radicalized as the Hitler Youth were, and all that is required is a big hugging it out session for there to be peace and sovereignty is a fools errand, and a dead end.
