What if Palestinians don’t want peace?
Dan Hannan
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A thought has been worming its way uncomfortably through my mind since Oct. 7. What if peace is impossible? What if there is literally no way to reach a lasting accord? What if one side will settle for nothing less than the destruction of the other?
My doubts began in the immediate aftermath of the atrocity as I watched the reaction of some Palestinians and some of their sympathizers, not least in the West. On that dreadful Saturday evening, there had as yet been no Israeli response. Protesters did not have the (perfectly reasonable) argument that the participants in later demonstrations had, namely that they were defending human rights in Gaza. No, this was exultation in the murder of Israelis, pure and simple.
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C.S. Lewis remarked that when the lights are flicked on suddenly, we see where the rats are hiding, and we saw them on Oct. 7. The Hamas volunteers boasting about rape and murder. The leftist academics queuing up to tell us that decolonization was not a metaphor. The delirious crowds celebrating the “resistance.”
These people were not demanding a two-state solution or calling for a different line on the map (the kibbutzim where the horrors took place were not settlements). They must have known, on some level, that the attacks would ensure a terrible retaliation. Yet they did not care as long as a blow had been struck against Israel. As one British-Arab TV reporter put it: “Nothing will ever be able to take back this moment, this moment of triumph, this moment of resistance, this moment of surprise, this moment of humiliation on behalf of the Zionist entity — nothing ever.”
Israelis have heard such talk before. Indeed, in one sense, the history of their country has been a series of struggles against neighbors who would rather fight than share. Since the 1937 Peel Commission, various plans have been put forward providing for partition. All of them have been rejected by Palestinians, who were happier to risk losing everything in a war than to accept the existence of a Jewish state.
In 1948 and again in 1967, coalitions of Arab armies attacked Israel with the declared purpose of annihilating it. “Our basic objective will be to destroy Israel,” Col. Nasser told a cheering crowd just before the Six-Day War started.
The calamities that have befallen the Palestinians stem from defeat in those two wars. Occupation, humiliation, hunger, emigration, and the failure, unique in the story of refugees, to be allowed to become citizens of many of their new lands (in marked contrast to 700,000-odd Jews who fled from Arab nations and who immediately became Israelis).
As the decades passed, and Israel’s existence no longer looked contingent, there was a hope that Palestinians might accept what their grandfathers had rejected, namely a division of the land. From 1993, the Palestinian territories began to acquire the attributes of statehood: a president, a parliament, a passport, postal stamps, police officers. Full sovereignty was due to follow, with land swaps giving the Palestinian Authority control over roughly the same territory as pre-1967, East Jerusalem as a capital, and the evacuation of many Jewish settlements on the West Bank. Instead, in 2000, Palestinian leaders rejected the deal and declared the second intifada (uprising).
It was, once again, calamitous in its consequences for the Palestinian people, 3,000 of whom were killed in the ensuing violence. The last chance for such a favorable deal evaporated as Israel began to fortify its position on the West Bank and to encourage further settlement.
Now, tragically, Israel has an annihilationist tendency of its own — people, that is, who have concluded from all this history that there is simply no way to live with Palestinians as neighbors and that the solution lies in removing them to other Arab countries.
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Peace deals happen when both sides see the proposed settlement as less bad than carrying on fighting. Often, one side has defeated the other; but both must still see the terms as preferable to continuing the war. If one side is primarily committed to the other’s eradication, if it would rather suffer harm than cease to inflict it, then peace is impossible.
On paper, it is possible to see all sorts of deals. But we need to face up to the fact that none of them has been accepted. Perhaps, instead of projecting our own reasonableness onto the belligerents, we need to face up to the uncomfortable possibility that they are marching to an older and harsher drum. If they are not primarily interested in a normal and peaceful future, it doesn’t much matter what the rest of us say.