Why There is Never Peace Between Israel and the Palestinians
Hint: it’s not about negotiations over territory.
By Robert Spencer
In its analysis of the war that has begun between Hamas and Israel, CNN noted on Saturday that the Biden regime was just in the process of pressuring Israel to make a series of concessions to the Palestinians in order to further the cause of normalization of ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia. In this, both the sinister establishment media propagandists of CNN and the sinister kleptocrats of the Biden regime betrayed their fundamental failure, or refusal, to understand why there is this apparently endless conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in the first place.
CNN reported that “as recently as this week, Biden had hoped to be nearing the completion of a major agreement with Israel and Saudi Arabia to establish formal diplomatic ties, potentially transforming the entire Middle East. The expectation had been that the deal would include agreement from Netanyahu on certain concessions to the Palestinians, including potentially freezing settlements and agreeing to an eventual Palestinian state.”
The universal assumption is that freezing settlements and agreeing to a Palestinian state (which the Palestinians have previously rejected on numerous occasions) will bring peace. Yet this is not true, and the Palestinians themselves have made that clear on numerous occasions over the years. Back on Oct. 5, 2018, on “Not a Neighbor,” a program on official Palestinian Authority television, Sharia judge Muhannad Abu Rumi denounced the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was about territory and could thus be subject to negotiations:
People could be deluded or think…that we have no way out with the Jews…The liberation of this land is a matter of faith, which will happen despite everyone. The Jews leaving this land is a divine decree…The war is not only over this strip of land, as you all know the Jews want everything and not just a part. They want to subjugate us, and that we be slaves to their command…
Just a week after that, during a Friday sermon at the Islamic Center of South Florida, Imam Hasan Sabri offered a succinct encapsulation of the principle of “Drive them out from where they drove you out” (Qur’an 2:191): “If a land is occupied or plundered, it should be liberated from its occupiers and plunderers, even if this leads to the martyrdom of tens of millions of Muslims.”
Sabri ridiculed the very idea of negotiations: “Take the Palestinian cause, for example. It is not being plotted against with a deal they call ‘the Deal of the Century.’ Why do they call it a ‘deal’? Because whoever is involved in this treason is not a man of principles. These are peddlers, not men with a cause. All they want are positions and jobs. That is why for them, the cause is nothing but a deal, a matter of give and take. For them, it is nothing but a deal.”
To this, Sabri contrasted the “position of a believing Muslim about the Palestinian cause,” which he characterized in this way: “That Palestine in its entirety is Islamic land, and there is no difference between what was occupied in 1948 and 1967. There is no difference between this village or that village, this city or that city. All of it is Islamic waqf land that was occupied by force. The responsibility for it lies with the entire Islamic nation, and the [Palestinians] should benefit from this land. If a land is occupied or plundered, it should be liberated from the occupiers and plunderers, even if this leads to the martyrdom of tens of millions of Muslims. This is the ruling, and there is no room for discussion or concessions.”
There is no room for discussion or concessions because of the nature of the foe as they communicate it to their people. An Egyptian Muslim cleric, Sheikh Masoud Anwar, on Al-Rahma TV on Jan. 9, 2009, also stated that negotiations with the Israelis were worthless because Jews could not be trusted. He declared: “The worst enemies of the Muslims — after Satan — are the Jews. Who said this? Allah did.” Indeed he did: it’s in the Qur’an (5:82).
Numerous Muslim clerics have for many years contradicted the general assumption that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict was over land and could be settled through negotiations. As Barack Obama pressed Israel to resume peace talks with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, in the summer of 2013, Sheikh Hammam Saeed, the leader of the Jordanian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, thundered that eradicating all Jewish presence from the Holy Land was a matter of Islamic law. He termed the idea of a negotiated settlement “heresy, according to Islamic law, because Allah says that Palestine belongs to the Islamic nation, while they say that Palestine belongs to the Jews. Anyone who says that Palestine belongs to the Jews has no place in the religion of Allah, and no room in this creed. This is an issue of heresy and belief.”
Examples of this kind of rhetoric could be multiplied endlessly. Yet in the next few days, Biden and his cohorts will demand that Israel stop defending itself and return to the negotiating table. You know, some men you just can’t reach.