About That Two-State Solution...

A follow-up to Friday’s offering: a collection of thoughts on the Hamas attacks. Today I focus on two groups - the unabashed Palestine supporters, and the people who qualified their condemnations (or mush-mouthed them into emptiness) with “both sides” arguments.

Across the past few days of surfing social media, I've witnessed good and proper outrage at the Hamas atrocities from a spectrum of denizens. Sadly, I've also found plenty of apologists, whatabouters, and "I side with Palestine" types ignoring those atrocities, claiming against mountains of proof that they didn't happen, or veneering over reality with several variations on a theme.

That theme is expressed in the form of "What choice did they have!?," as if the only way to achieve a Palestinian homeland is by burning Israeli babies alive. The utter moral vacuum this reveals also pulls back the curtain on a certain willful blindness.

Palestinians do have a choice. It's there, plain as day, and it has been there for decades. Want peace? Want freedom? Want a homeland? Affirm Israel's right to exist and dedicate yourselves to the two-state solution.

They had that choice back in 2006, when Gazans elected their parliament. They chose Hamas, which is not interested in a two-state solution, which is committed to the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews anywhere and everywhere, and which is accurately labeled a terrorist organization.

The Left looooves its buzzwords and catchphrases, and because so many of them get stale as people realize their hollowness, they're constantly creating new ones. So, the Left and Palestinian apologists (but I repeat myself), have rallied around their latest buzzword: "Decolonization."

History begs to differ, of course, but no matter. Those apologists, like so many others who chant "stolen land" tropes, engage in what has been called "snapshot geography." The "Decolonize!" bleaters choose a particular moment in the history of the region dubbed "Palestine" and... what, actually? There has never been a nation called Palestine. The region, originally populated by Israelites, Judeans, and Philistines, has been controlled by various empires across history, including the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, various caliphates, the Ottomans, and the British. The history of the world is one of ever-shifting borders, even today. "Decolonize!" is an Orwellian sheep-chant, something intended to drown out discussion and give shallow thinkers a nice-sounding rallying point.

Back to the "what choice did they have!?" question. Or, rather, non-interrogatory. The askers don't intend it as a question, just as they don't intend "Decolonize!" as an invitation to consider a reasoned argument.

Aside from the response I already offered, i.e. accept and embrace "land for peace," aka "stop shooting rockets into Israel from apartment building rooftops in Gaza," the "choice" includes "don't mass-murder Israeli civilians, don't rape, don't burn babies alive or butcher them." No sane person can look at that behavior and conclude that it would move the needle toward a peaceful resolution of the regional conflict.

As for harm to civilians in Gaza from an Israeli counteroffensive?

Israel notified Gazans to evacuate the northern part of the region, and gave them 24 hours to do so.

Hamas told the Gazans it governs not to leave.

Hamas put its headquarters in the basement of a hospital, knowing full well that it put Gazan civilians, including babies and the infirm, at risk.

Hamas launches rockets from civilian locations, including homes and schools.

Hamas has long use Gazans as human shields, and in telling a million in the northern region to stay put, is clearly doing so again.

We can only conclude that Hamas welcomes civilian casualties on its side of the border even as it inflicts them on Israel. Which answers, in part, the question of "why."

Why this attack? Why this level of barbarity? Aside from feeding the blood lust inculcated into many Arab Palestinians from birth, it invited a counterattack and the probability of much collateral damage, both in human life and in infrastructure. The end goal of Hamas, Hezbollah, and their puppeteer Iran is the end of Israel and the purging of all Jews from the region. The increased normalization of relations between Israel and Arab nations such as Egypt (1979); Jordan (1994); UAE, Sudan, Morocco, and (partially) Bahrain (2000); and the in-process normalizing with Saudi Arabia is, to the Palestinian extremists and the Islamic radicals, an affront of the highest order. A robust Israeli response and a re-assertion of control over Gaza might be the geopolitical goal, one intended to provoke the Arab world to a pull-back from relations. And, as I type this, reports suggest it's working. Some sources assert that the Saudis are pausing their efforts toward Israel and instead engaging Iran, their religious foe within the Muslim world.

None of this matters to the apologists, who choose to ignore the plain evidence of Hamas's cruelty and brutality, and instead usurp the spotlight so they can chant their chants, stoke their egos, and blame the victim. They assert that the Palestinians are the true “victims” (no matter that it’s of their own doing), and in doing so tacitly endorse the murdering of babies, all their whataboutisms and attempts to marginalize the barbarism out of the conversation notwithstanding.

These are the same people who wear Che Guevara t-shirts, no matter that he was a racist, homophobic mass murderer who copycatted Nazi concentration camps. I imagine such behavior (both re Che and re Hamas) is fed in many instances by in-group conformity, by seeing what the crowd they want to hang with is saying and doing, and aping it so they can be included.

There comes a time where a person needs to stand for what's right, not what one's peers think. Hamas seeks the destruction of Israel, full stop. It is born of that which is taught to many Muslims from childhood.

As a teenager in Nairobi in the 1980s, I joined the Muslim Brotherhood — the strict Sunni Islamist movement, founded in Egypt in 1928, from which Hamas ultimately descends. I vividly remember sitting with my female fellows in mosques, cursing Israel and praying to Allah to destroy the Jews. We were certainly not interested in a peaceful 'two-state solution': we were taught to want to see Israel wiped off the map. -- Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The “End Israel” crowd I at least understand - they are honest in their naked racism, bigotry, and hatred. But, I continue to ponder the motivations of the apologists who purport to “peace.” There are certainly "sheep" among them, as well as dummies, but there are also many very smart folks.

How many are trapped by cognitive dissonance into the position of having to defend savages?

How many refuse to see how the teachings of Islam produced this bottomless virulence?

How many are engaging in blindered confirmation bias, choosing to pretend away the horrors in favor of their long-held and immovable preferences and opinions?

How many , at their core, simply hate Jews??

To claim that the Palestinians don't have a choice but to engage in the vilest acts of terrorism imaginable when a two-state outcome has been at hand for decades tells its own tale, assuming we grant the claimers a degree of introspection behind that claim. If they have no "choice" but to act as they have, then we can conclude that the apologists reject a two-state outcome. That they, too, believe that what is currently the nation of Israel, a westernized democracy, should be converted into a nation called Palestine.

Given that the Gazans voted Hamas into power, and that Pew Research reports that 89% of Palestinians support Sharia, "Palestine" would be a repressive society, not only purging Jews, whether they be religious or secular, but subjugating women, murdering gays, empowering “morality police,” and engaging in other practices commanded by the Sharia interpretation of Islam.

I reiterate. The society that would be “Palestine” would, by many indications, be a repressive theocratic autocracy, one that would be judged utterly offensive by the social justice warriors, woke-sters, Best-and-Brightest, et al, if they pulled their heads out of their asses, stopped contorting themselves into defending repression with “it’s their culture” excuses, and lived up to the principles that they enjoy in the West.

After all, only idiots would voice support for a culture that would subjugate or kill them were they to live under its tenets, right?

Right?

A concluding thought for those who've played the "both sides" card and who support a two-state outcome. The Israelis have signaled their willingness to trade land for peace. The Palestinians have not. Even if the disputed lands (Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights) were completely ceded by Israel, with no assertion of air space control and no gate-keeping of any kind, it is beyond certain that Hamas and Hezbollah would continue their jihad against Israel. Their goal - to destroy Israel, subsume all its lands, and kill as many Jews as possible in the process - is overt, and will not change no matter what the Israelis do.

You cannot craft a two-state outcome when only one party is willing to abide by it.

And, a final thought for those who reject Israeli statehood, who embrace, openly or covertly, "From the River to the Sea Palestine Will be Free” and similar “End Israel” attitudes and actions.

That includes you, BLM, and your support for the mass murder of Israelis. You went from cause to movement to business to racket with breathtaking rapidity, and now you support terrorism and mass murder.

Go ahead and keep saying it. I'm a free speech absolutist, and will defend your right to say it, even as you advocate for a culture that would deny it to such as me. It's more honest than the "both sides" pretzeling, and it tells me all I need to know about you.