Hamas and the Palestinian Authority do not want a Palestinian state. They just do not want a Jewish one to exist. Why do Western leaders find this simple concept so hard to understand?
Nineteen Democratic Senators in the US have urged US President Joe Biden to publicize a framework for a Palestinian state, as if it can be willed into existence. In Canada, where Western civilization is in full retreat to the Jihadists, Parliament has passed a non-binding motion calling on the international community to work towards a two-state solution. Canada has suspended military exports to Israel. These people are divorced from the realities of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
There is already a framework for a Palestinian state. The Palestinian Authority rejected it in 2008. Here is a reminder. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered a near-total withdrawal from Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Israel was to retain just 6.3%, to keep the major Jewish settlements, and would swap land in exchange. Jerusalem would be divided into an Israeli city and a Palestinian city. A link between Judea and Samaria and Gaza would ensure contiguity for a future Palestinian state. Israel would relinquish sovereignty over the Temple Mount and the entire Old City, and a five-member, non-sovereign international trusteeship (Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, the US and Saudi Arabia) would oversee it.
Anyone serious about wanting a two-state solution would have grabbed this with both hands and never let go. It contained everything Western fantasists think the Palestinians want. It was rejected because it did not give the Palestinians what they actually want - no Jewish state existing.
This ought to be obvious given how many offers for peace and statehood the Palestinians have rejected. They rejected the very idea after the Peel Commission in 1937. They had a state in 1947, when the UN partitioned the British Mandate, which they refused to declare, opting to attack Israel instead. Then there was the Khartoum Summit after the Six-Day War in 1967, the Madrid Conference in 1991, the Camp David Summit in 2000, the Taba Summit in 2001, the Annapolis Conference in 2007, the Realignment Plan in 2008, the Joint Peace talks in 2010 and 2013, the Bahrain Workshop in 2019, and the Trump Peace Plan in 2020. I may have missed a few.
Thinking it will be different this time, when a hot war is raging after Hamas committed the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust, is wishful thinking absurdum.
While US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and his ilk are busy meddling in Israeli democracy, they seem blind to Palestinian politics, especially the level of popular support the Islamist Hamas enjoys.
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