Dozens of acres of Israeli forests and fields were burned in the past few days because of the so-called “incendiary kites” that Palestinians in Gaza have launched over the security fence. Meanwhile, on Monday, Mahmoud Abbas gave a speech to the Palestinian National Council—the congress of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)—in which he blamed Jews for bringing the Holocaust upon themselves with their usury and “social behavior,” explained that the Shoah was a Nazi-Zionist plot (a favorite subject of his), and decried the Jewish state as the extension of British colonialism. To Jonathan Tobin, the two events throw the choices confronting Israel in stark relief:
Israel is being asked to trade its only bargaining chips in the form of territory in exchange for something that—as even most peace advocates acknowledge—will be an armed truce at best, rather than peace. Abbas’s speech is a tip-off that the Palestinian state clamored for by peace advocates would be a stepping stone to new campaigns aimed at the end of the Jewish nation.
Israelis know this because they saw what happened the last time Israel gave up territory, when then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew every last soldier, settler, and settlement from Gaza in 2005. Instead of trading land for peace, Israel traded land for terror. Instead of protesting the Israeli settlements in their midst, Hamas-ruled Gaza now protests the “settlements” inside the borders of pre-1967 Israel.
The Friday “March of Return” demonstrations at the border between Israel and Gaza being orchestrated by Hamas are not civil-rights protests. The point of these weekly efforts, in which Palestinians armed with guns, Molotov cocktails, rocks, burning tires, and lit kites try to tear down the security barrier that protects Israel, . . . is to destroy the Jewish state. . . . Evacuating Gaza didn’t inspire its people to accept the notion of two states for two peoples. It merely whetted their appetite to continue their century-old war on Zionism which, contrary to the claims of some on the Jewish left, they have yet to concede is a lost cause.
So the question for Jews who carp at Netanyahu and claim that Israel is the obstacle to peace is: which Palestinian state do you want? The one in the West Bank led by a fanatical anti-Semite who is determined to whip up hatred for Jews among his people? Or the one led by Islamist terrorists in Gaza who are already actively seeking Israel’s destruction? If Israelis say, “no, thank you,” to either and insist that, as bad as things are, repeating Sharon’s disastrous Gaza experiment in the West Bank will make things infinitely worse, it’s because they are paying attention to what Abbas and Hamas are saying. American kibitzers and critics ought to do the same.
Read more on JNS: https://www.jns.org/opinion/meet-the-real-obstacles-to-peace/