Thoughts on Peace

 13 Oct 2023  6 min read

In the wake of the Hamas pogrom on the 7th of October, I was asked by someone on Facebook how to work towards a lasting peace. Below is my response in full.

Please accept my apologies for taking so long to respond. I’m sure you’ll understand that this is a difficult time for all Jews, and I have been anxiously trying to confirm that my personal friends in Israel are safe. But also this is a much harder question to answer. I know a great deal about the current situation, and about the history, both ancient and modern, which led to this situation. Sadly that doesn’t mean I necessarily have answers on how to achieve peace, but I will share some thoughts here.

I, and most fellow leftist Jews, support a two-state solution. To that end I would like to see an immediate halt to Israeli settlement in the West Bank as a show of good-faith and willingness on the part of Israel. However, and this is important, I do not think that the existing Jewish residents there should be expelled, as they were from Gaza in 2005. Hebron is one of the Jewish people’s four holy cities (the others being Jerusalem, Safed and Tiberias). It has an ancient Jewish history, and its Jewish population long predates the Arab conquests of the 7th century that brought Arab Islamic hegemony to the Levant. Israel’s population today is roughly 20% Arab, so I see no reason why a future Palestinian state should not welcome a Jewish minority. Violence and vandalism by Israelis in the West Bank must be strongly and unambiguously condemned by Israel’s government, and the perpetrators must be brought to justice by Israel. It cannot be one rule for Jews and another for Arabs, as it so often seems today. Jewish offenders must be treated the same as Arab ones. I do not trust Netanyahu’s government to carry this out, but the work of Israeli human rights NGOs such as B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, and Tag Meir give me some hope.

It is difficult to imagine a Jewish minority population in a Palestinian state being safe under the current leadership of the Palestinian Authority. President Mahmoud Abbas’ PhD dissertation was essentially a piece of Soviet Holocaust denial and antisemitic historical revisionism. As recently as August of this year Abbas was on record saying that Hitler wasn’t antisemitic, and that he killed Jews because of their ‘social role’. The PA continues its ‘pay for slay’ Martyrs Fund program, whereby families of suicide bombers, and others, are given generous lifetime pensions. Abbas himself has an estimated net worth of $100m, he has been accused of embezzling public funds, and his son Tareq was implicated in the Panama Papers. There has not been a PA presidential election since Abbas was elected in 2005, despite the official term limit being four years. The only way for the PA to improve is for the international community to apply diplomatic and economic pressure to Abbas and to hold him and his leadership accountable for their corruption and antisemitism, and their complicity in preventing a lasting peace.

Hamas must be destroyed. They are a religious fundamentalist terror organisation, whose founding document is completely open about their genocidally antisemitic goals. Previously a distinction has been made between Hamas’ military wing and its political wing. It is an open secret that this distinction is meaningless, and after the attack on Israeli civilians last weekend, the world cannot continue to pretend otherwise. I do not wish to see innocents in Gaza killed, injured, or homeless. I do not know what will fill the power vacuum in the Strip following the removal of Hamas. But Hamas cannot be tolerated by the international community any more than ISIS, Boko Haram, or Al-Qaeda. If you know of a way to remove Hamas, and safeguard Israeli civilians, while also ensuring no civilian suffering in Gaza, I would very much like to hear it. I regret that I do not.

Categorising Israel’s entire military as a ‘terrorist organisation’ is neither accurate nor constructive, and it implies a moral equivalence which doesn’t exist. However, the IDF must, as always, be held to account for its conduct by the international community, as well as by Israeli civil society. IDF fighters and commanders who breach international law must be prosecuted by Israeli military courts for doing so. No ifs, ands or buts.

Palestinians living in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria should be naturalised and given full citizenship immediately, and those states should therefore take responsibility for their welfare. This will render UNRWA entirely redundant, and it should be shut-down, just as the UN Korean Reconstruction Agency was. Any Palestinians who qualify for refugee status per the Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951) will be eligible for support from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which is the UN agency responsible for all refugees globally. The legal definition of a refugee is as follows:

Someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.

Despite what is often claimed, Israel is under no obligation per international law to accept UNRWA’s 5.9 million ‘Palestinian refugees’ as citizens. Nor is there any precedent for this claim in historic or modern international law. The continued claim by Palestinians of a ‘right of return’ is one of the biggest obstacles to a two-state solution today. The two-state solution is predicated on an acceptance of the legitimacy of both Jewish and Arab rights to statehood in the former British Mandate for Palestine, ie. ‘two states for two peoples’. Is it reasonable to expect Jews to accept minority status under Palestinian Arabs in their own state, while also living alongside a sovereign Palestinian Arab state? This is a complete non-starter, and the Arab world knows it. As Dr. Einat Wilf, a former Labor MK, recently wrote:

When I say that the Palestinian ethos at its core negates Jewish self determination in any part of the land between the river and the sea, many challenge me arguing that I exaggerate and that there is a wide range of view among Palestinians. My response is always that by making such a broad claim I have made it easy to disprove me, and so I ask those who challenge me to bring me publicly stated words (not mediated) by a Palestinian that say “we Palestinians recognize the equal right of the Jewish people, as a people, to self determination in their historic homeland. We seek nothing more than a state of our own in the West Bank and Gaza next to the Jewish state of Israel. We understand that this means that we will never settle inside Israel in the name of ‘return’ and that all such talk of ‘return’ is over.”

Not one of those who have questioned my analysis has been able to come back with such a statement. On the contrary, the responses they do bring always confirm the thesis by including various forms of railing against Israel, Zionism and insisting on ‘return.’ The day we will hear Palestinian voices publicly and clearly recognizing the equal Jewish right to self determination in at least part of the land is the day we will have peace.

The international community, particularly the media, needs to stop uncritically parroting the Islamic assertion that Jews praying at the Temple Mount constitutes a ‘provocation’. The second Jewish temple stood in Jerusalem until it was destroyed by the armies of Emperor Vespasian in 70 CE, during the First Jewish-Roman War. This is not mythology, this is an historical fact. The site itself is the holiest in the world to Jews, which is why we have always prayed facing towards it, just as Muslims pray facing towards Mecca. In the late 7th century, following the Islamic Conquest of the Levant, the Dome of the Rock was constructed under the orders of Abd al-Malik, the fifth Umayyad caliph (religious, political, and military leader of the Islamic empire), directly on the site of the Jewish temple. The Jewish state has always allowed Muslims to pray at their mosque on the site, but when Jews want to pray there the Islamic world cries in outrage. This ‘status quo’ of religious subjugation of Jews, in the Jewish state no less, cannot continue to be used as a pretext for anti-Jewish violence by Muslims the world over.

Yours is an incredibly complex question, to which there is no simple answer. Countless essays and books have been written on the subject. I could go on almost indefinitely, but I think I have covered what I consider the most pressing obstacles to peace. Please feel free to come back to me with any other questions you might have.