In Response to “Free Palestine!”

When I first turned to the Opinions section last Thursday to see “Free Palestine!” plastered over the front page, I wasn’t entirely opposed to the opinion it expressed—there are legitimate issues the Palestinian people face that ought to be addressed, with widespread hunger and conflict among them. But then I read on, and realised that, as usual, it turned into just another rehashing of the same old story, oft-repeated in “woke” circles: that Israel, or the “Zionist regime,” as the author calls it, is engaged in an active campaign of oppression, crushing the hopes of the Palestinian people in the process. It even goes so far as to deny the legitimacy of the Israeli state in its entirety, calling for the establishment of a “free and peaceful Palestine stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”While I have great respect for the piece’s author, this line of thinking ignores the complexity of the Palestinian situation, and, dare I say, a thought-process counter-productive to peace. For starters, we should readily dismiss any rejection of Israel’s right to exist—the world’s only Jewish state is here to stay, and there is absolutely no way of creating a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea” short of a potentially genocidal war. Anyone who expects a peace process to include the destruction of Israel is lying to themselves—Israel has fought off invasion before and will do so again. It did so in 1948, again in 1967, and again in 1973, each time invaded by a coalition of Arab nations. The matter is simple—peace will happen when both sides learn to respect the sovereignty and rights of the other. That includes respect for Israel’s right to exist.For its own part, Israel has actually repeatedly made land-for-peace offers. For instance, consider when Israel offered the entirety of the Gaza Strip and 97 percent of the West Bank to a new Palestinian state in exchange for peace. The then-chair of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Yasser Arafat, rejected all proposals for compromise. And after Israel defended its own sovereignty in 1967, the infamous Khartoum Resolution was passed, establishing the “three no’s”: "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.It can be said that throughout history, there exists a consistent pattern: a group of nations teams up against the world’s only Jewish state, often on the basis of anti-Semitic beliefs (consider that Gamal Abdel Nasser, for instance, was a Holocaust denier), and Israel responds by defending its right to exist.Reaching even further back, we ought to remember that Israel was a nation founded by refugees, fleeing persecution from every country they came from, up to and including the most systematically cruel genocide in human history. After such an incident, there was absolutely a need for someone, somewhere to defend the rights of Jewish people to exist, and their right to a nation of their own in their Holy Land. That nation is Israel, and today by far the most free nation in the Middle East, the only one with free, fair, and universal elections, and the only one with an actual mechanism for gay and women’s rights. And yet Israel  is held to an impossibly high double-standard, one no nation could possibly meet. The “Free Palestine!” author brings up the United States’ defense of Israel in the UN, for instance, as an example of some grand Zionist conspiracy. But there’s a remarkably good reason for that defense—the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, itself a who’s-who of the world’s dictators (including in its ranks such esteemed states as Saudi Arabia, China, Cuba, D.R. Congo, and Pakistan) is remarkably anti-Israel. It has adopted a permanent agenda item to go after the oppression of the Palestinian people (a distinction no other conflict has received), and between 2006 and 2016 has passed 68 resolutions against Israel, a liberal democracy. How many has it passed against the rest of the world in this time? 67. Most of these resolutions, and much of the criticism against Israel at-large, centers around its actions in the Gaza Strip. Now, of course, the rockets fired into and out of the Gaza Strip are a human catastrophe, but we at times forget that they aren’t solely Israel’s fault. Hamas, a terror organisation who has decreed to “love death more than the Jews love life,” has built a network of tunnels in civilian neighborhoods, effectively using those civilians as human shields. In short, most of the attacks on Israel are part of a trumped-up double-standard that Israel’s enemies have used to demonize the world’s only Jewish state. And I should be the first to say that I very much long for the day when peace comes to the Middle East. But in order for that peace to happen, Palestine needs to play its part and accept Israel’s existence, working with it as a partner and not an enemy. The real tragedy here is that Palestine’s leaders are nowhere near accomplishing as much. Israel has reached out its hand before, and it’s been turned away. And it will again. But until that peace is brokered—one that respects both Israeli and Palestinian rights—there needs be organizations like the ADL to defend Israel.That’s not to say that Israel isn’t beyond criticism, of course. Its settlement policy poses a barrier to peace, for instance. But in the final analysis, most of the criticisms levied against Israel collapse under the lightest pressure.