PALESTINIANS MUST ABANDON THEIR QUEST TO DESTROY ISRAEL - If a real peace between Palestinians and Israelis is to take place

By: Joseph Puder

Friday, September 12, 2025

For reasonable liberal-minded people, the mindset of the European elites and their obsession with the Two-State Solution is an enigma. The European elites are unwilling to recognize Palestinian ideology for what it is – an unchanged effort to eradicate the Jewish state.

This ideology existed long before the State of Israel was established in 1948 and continues to this very day – rejecting the Jewish liberation movement known as Zionism and harboring age-old antisemitism. Some refer to this ideology as Palestinianism with its essence having been crafted by the Soviet Union during the 1960’s as a way to remove western influence from the Middle East and present the Palestinian Arabs as a people in search of self-determination - in opposition to western colonialism and Zionism.

The Arab Palestinians were not, however, interested in self-determination. Opportunities that were presented to them on a silver platter - under the Peel Commission of 1936-37 and, again in the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan - were rejected. What the Palestinians wanted, then and now, is the destruction of the Jewish state rather than living with it side by side in peace. 

It is therefore clear to anyone willing to be fair that there could never be peace until the Palestinians abandon their quest to destroy the Jewish state, find a solution for the Palestinian-Arab refugees within the Arab world and, recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people with the Zionist movement as the historical vehicle for return of Jews to their ancestral homeland.

The clamor by the Europeans for a Palestinian state after Hamas’ massacre of 1,200 Israelis and provoked the current war in Gaza (Abu Mazen’s Palestinian Authority never condemned the massacre and secretly approved the Hamas actions) amounts to giving a reward to Hamas’ terror. Their persistence only invites more such outrages in the future. Europeans are deliberately ignoring the fact that Palestinian elections will most certainly result in a Hamas victory. Such an outcome would constitute an existential threat to the people of Israel.  Hamas has repeatedly proclaimed its intention to perpetrate many more October 7’s. This is in accord with The Hamas Charter.

The crocodile tears shed by the Europeans over the Palestinian casualties in Gaza seems to happen only when Jews are involved. No tears were shed by the Europeans when approximately 150,000 were killed in Sudan.  We heard no demands from Brussels, London, Madrid or Paris for a Kurdish state in Syria following the brutalization of Kurdish civilians by Turkey’s Erdogan. The recent brutal massacres by Jolani’s jihadists of Druze and Alawites in Syria didn’t elicit European demands for an independent Druze and Alawite states. The hypocrisy of the Europeans is all too transparent and, in many ways, motivated by cowardice. Intimidated by Muslim rioters in their countries, they have succumbed to terror. The Europeans, together with the United Nations General Assembly, are using double standards when it comes to Israel, and by their own definitions, amounts to antisemitism. 

Proving Palestinian unwillingness to have a peaceful state alongside Israel is easy.  In July 2000, at the Camp David summit between Yasser Arafat, Ehud Barak, and President Bill Clinton, far reaching concessions were made to Arafat in order to end-the-conflict. President Clinton witnessed all of it and later commented that the Palestinians “walked away from a state.” In later years, Clinton has frequently expressed disbelief that Arafat rejected the deal. Speaking to a New York Times journalist in late 2024, Clinton described telling young people that Arafat “walked away from a Palestinian state with a capital in East Jerusalem.”

President Bill Clinton might not have grasped the fact that the essence of Palestinianism is the fight against the existence of the Jewish state. “Progressive” Democrats and the Europeans refuse to see the evidence hitting them in the face: Palestinians don’t want a state as long as a Jewish state exists.

Rather than demanding a two-state solution and a Palestinian state, European funds going to the PA and to Hamas-controlled Gaza should be invested in teaching the youngsters in Gaza and the West Bank the values of peace, tolerance, and the benefits of co-existence with Israel. In addition to changing the school curriculum, ending the vilification of Israel, Jews, and America, preached by the imams in mosques and in Palestinian media, must cease as well. Unfortunately, there are no men of courage among the Palestinians who are ready to defy this ideology of hatred.

Many in Israel as well as abroad thought that Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, (Abu Mazen) might have been that person. Then came his litmus test.  In 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas a comprehensive peace plan that included a near-total Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, a resolution for Jerusalem, which Olmert called the best deal Abbas would get. Abbas did not accept the offer, and the talks ended without a deal. 

Many anti-Israel critics claim that if only Israel would withdraw to 1967 borders, that would solve the conflict.  Yet, Olmert’s peace plan in 2008 was pretty much the closest thing to exactly that, which then begs the question: Why wasn’t it taken up?  The answer is simply that for the Palestinians an end to the conflict with Israel without the Jewish state being eliminated is no option for a Palestinian leader.  Generations of children have been instilled with the notion that their land lies between the River (Jordan) and the Sea (Mediterranean), and there is no room in it for a Jewish state.

The Europeans have only to look at the historical facts and the recent events noted above to understand that for the Palestinians any deal is a zero-sum game, where compromise does not exist, and terror is their instrument of “Justice” - a perversion the Europeans can apparently live with, but Israel cannot!