THE ROOT OF THE CONFLICT

Defeating Hamas is a first step. Addressing generations of antisemitic indoctrination is next.

These look like people you could negotiate with …

It’s always Israel’s fault. Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is always premised on Israel giving up this, agreeing to that. Their failure to do so is always depicted, in the prevailing narrative, as the reason there is no resolution to the conflict. There is rarely any acknowledgement that Palestinians have obligations too.

The default for the Palestinian narrative is always that Israel holds the power and so the Palestinians get off scot-free.

But Palestinians do hold power. In some ways, they hold all the power. Palestinians are the only ones who can make peace – because they are the only ones making war.

Most of the narrative – the idea that all peace requires is for Israel to consent to flood the country with millions of Palestinian “refugees,” agree to a status quo ante that pretends the war of 1967 (or even the war of 1948) never happened, to agree, essentially, to whatever the Palestinians and their maximalist overseas allies demand – ignores the absolute nut of the problem.

This is relevant now because that nut, the real reason there is war and why there has been no peace for most of a century, has exploded onto the surface.

The current war has a single stated purpose: Eliminating Hamas.

But last week, Israel Defence Forces spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari basically said that war aim is unattainable.

“This business of destroying Hamas, making Hamas disappear — it’s simply throwing sand in the eyes of the public,” Hagari told a TV interviewer. “Hamas is an idea, Hamas is a party. It’s rooted in the hearts of the people — anyone who thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong.”

Yikes!

The voice of a democratic country’s military contradicting the core objective of a war in progress is a scary situation. Scarier still is the content of his statement: That this is a problem that even superior firepower cannot defeat.

Israel’s prime minister’s office predictably declared that “one of the war goals [is] the destruction of Hamas’s military and governance capabilities.” And the IDF spokesdude quickly fell in line (as he should).

“The Israel Defense Forces is of course committed to this,” a statement backpedaled. “Any claim otherwise is taking the remarks out of context.”

Uh-huh. But anyways.

Both sides are certainly correct. Eliminating Hamas is an unswerving objective. But it may also be unattainable, because Hamas is more than a terrorist military regime. It is an idea.

And this brings us back to the basic misconception at the nut of this conflict.

Listen to the average “pro-Palestinian” bloviator (those smart enough to do more than chant “Free Palestine”) and you will hear the practiced litany: There is no peace because (1) Israel won’t admit millions of Palestinian refugees (who have been indoctrinated for decades with genocidal Jew-hatred) to become citizens of Israel. (2) Israel won’t allow a militarized Palestinian state (which would almost inevitably see a Gaza-like terror regime in the West Bank, its borders snaking through the Israeli heartland). (3) Israel keeps building or expanding settlements in the West Bank (as if building stuff is the problem here). (4) Israel “humiliates” Palestinians with their permit system and checkpoints (as if Israel should permit everyone, including genocidal terrorists, to move about freely). (5) Israel insists that Jerusalem will remain the undivided capital of Israel (as if the Jewish-built Jewish city that the Jewish state reunified in a defensive war has no business being governed by Jews). And inevitably (6), (7), (8) and so on ad infinitum, listing off the endless sins of Israel that prevent the Palestinians from self-actualization.

This is not to dismiss these entirely. Each of these (to varying degrees) has some legitimacy. But, even taken together, they do not come close to approaching the root of this conflict.

The Palestinian (and larger Arab) refusal to live in coexistence with self-determined Jews is why this conflict started. And this conflict has become more and more lethal to people on both sides because that intransigent, xenophobic, antisemitic intolerance has been nurtured and coaxed into an overwhelming consensus in Palestinian society.

Palestinian society is fractious, divided among ideological lines, clans, militias and other cleavages. The one unifying thing? Antisemitism. (Let’s not split hairs here. We can call it anti-Zionism, but the root of Palestinian and Arab anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq were carved out of whole cloth in the same era as Israel and no one in that region questions their existential legitimacy. Why? They’re not Jewish.)

That is the root of the problem. All the rest is commentary.

Palestinian refugees? This is one of the most tragic situations imaginable – millions of people held in statelessness as a living testament to presumed Zionist crimes. But the resolution to Palestinian refugees is a Palestinian state. Any alternative is a no-go – and would serve as a reward for the Arab-initiated crime of the refugees in the first place, the explicit purpose of which was always to demographically overwhelm the Jewish identity of Israel.

A militarized Palestinian state? Hell no. Until the Palestinians give Israel and the world the remotest reason to believe they will live in peace, it would be suicidal for Israel to agree to statehood for a militarized Palestine. Get that idea out of your head.

Settlements? This is one of the most infuriating aspects of this entire discussion. It is the definition of a red herring – and yet it is probably the most frequently cited “barrier to peace.”

Israel has shown it will evacuate settlements in the faint hope of peace. They did it in Sinai and they did it in Gaza.

Yes, the bloviators respond, but there are 500,000 Jews living in the West Bank. True. And almost all of them live pretty close to the Green Line and a comparatively simple border adjustment with trade-offs will resolve that problem. Any person of good faith knows this. Settlements are not an obstacle to peace – and the thing that is most infuriating in the discussion around this is that Jews are condemned for building while Palestinians are rewarded for seeking to tear down, destroy and negate.

Israel’s “humiliation” of Palestinians? (I’ll be addressing this more in-depth soon.) Read almost any narrative around this presumed “humiliation” and what becomes clear real fast is the fury people feel around the inversion of dhimmitude. The “humiliation” seems to be based on the idea that Jews (never mind the military or geopolitical aspects of this situation) should have any authority over a Muslim Palestinian. That’s what this is about: Racism.

When Palestinians agree to live in peace, they will gain national self-determination and all these presumed “barriers to peace” will melt away. No settlements. No Arab-invented and -perpetuated refugee problem. No “humiliation.”

The root of this conflict was, is and, until there is a seismic shift in Palestinian society, will be the refusal of Palestinians to coexist with Jews.

The subtext of Hagari’s comments last week are this: Settlements can be evacuated. Minds are less easily de-occupied.

For eight decades, Palestinian society has been saturated in genocidal antisemitism. Politics, religion, education, news, weather and sports in Palestine have been soaked in the glorification of violent and antisemitic “resistance.”

And yet …

Recent history gives us some reason for hope.

I am not, by nature, an optimist. I smell flowers and I look around for a coffin. But, as with almost anything, you can train your behavior, including to seek out hopefulness. And there are precedents that should, or could, give us hope.

On the big picture … the idea that the conflict between Israel and Palestine seems intractable is undeniable. Perhaps never more so than today. But just remember: History (and people) can surprise us. Who among us while hiding under our desks to practice for a nuclear bomb imagined the Cold War would end in peace, not Armageddon? Who imagined apartheid would transition, without revolution, to multiparty democracy?

Cynics will point to imperfections in South Africa today and the, ahem, imperfect democracy in Russia and elsewhere in the former eastern bloc, to discredit this supposition. But human affairs are always imperfect. This is why anti-Israel voices can condemn all manner of things about Israel (this is easy because Israel is real) while ignoring all manner of atrocities in Palestine because when Palestine becomes “real,” it will be all rainbows and unicorns. Because an imaginary thing can be perfect while a real one is subject to the discerning eye.

For all their flaws, these examples are stunning precedents of the potential for seemingly insurmountable challenges to be overcome.

Consider something even more stunning. Look at Germany and Japan today. Two of the world’s most robust economies and most vibrant democracies. Both of them rescued from the oblivion of totalitarianism just 80 years ago. We have the model of societies with the capacity to reinvent themselves for the better. Yes, Palestinians have been indoctrinated with hatred and intolerance for three generations at least, whereas German and Japanese societies had different experiences. But the example remains relevant.

If the Palestinians began teaching coexistence to their children today, and if they began now sensitizing their population to prepare to live in peace, there might be peace in a generation or two. Maybe sooner, if something extraordinary happens, or some figure like an F.W. de Klerk or a Mikhail Gorbachev emerges on the Palestinian side.

I know, I know. Fat chance.

But we must live in hope.

In the meantime, let’s not delude ourselves to reality.

Two things can be right at the same time: Ending Hamas is and must be the objective of this current war. But even if the reality of Hamas is defeated, Palestinian people will not be free from the idea of Hamas.

That’s a problem. But a journey of many miles begins with a single step. Hamas is a symptom of Palestinian intolerance and antisemitism, not a cause. Defeating Hamas will not erase eight decades of inculcated fanaticism.

But it will be a move in the right direction.