Earlier this month, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden instructed Israel how to live, or rather die slowly. Their amnesia was convenient.
They announced new trade restrictions on the Jewish state over expanding Israeli settlements on the West Bank. According to London, Paris, and Ottawa’s misinformation, the settlements — Jewish villages and towns — are illegal, and Israeli control of the territory is an occupation.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared an Israeli-Palestinian two-state solution in their respective countries’ national interest. Settlement expansion “posed a direct and urgent threat to that vision of peace.”
Former President George W. Bush shared the Burnham-Macron-Carney vision back in 2002. It was, he said, “two states, living side by side in peace and security.”
But Bush set a condition that the trio heading the diplomatic dirty dozen forgot. “There is simply no way to achieve that peace until all parties fight terror.” Palestinian Arabs required “new leadership,” the president stated.
They never got it. And during a century of killing Jews returning to part of the ancient Jewish homeland, they have shown little interest in doing so.
Bush spoke during the depths of the second intifada, 2000 to 2005, during which Palestinian terrorists murdered approximately 1,100 Israelis and visitors. Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, launched the intifada in violent rejection of the U.S.-Israeli offer months earlier of a “two-state solution” at Camp David. He continued it despite Washington and Jerusalem renewing the proposal at Taba in Egypt in 2001.
Hamas enthusiastically joined the relatively more secular PLO. Bombs, some filled with nuts, bolts, and nails, others with rat poison to increase bleeding, exploded in libraries, pizza parlors, and buses.
By the time Bush experienced his vision, the conflict had an 80-year history. Arabs in British Mandatory Palestine repeatedly massacred Jews in the 1920s. A two-day slaughter in Hebron in 1929 foreshadowed in microcosm Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, mass murders in Israel.
In 1936, Arabs in the Palestinian state began a three-year uprising against both continuing Zionist resettlement and Britain’s League of Nations Palestine Mandate. The following year, Arab leaders rejected the Peel Commission’s proposal to partition western Palestine into Arab and Jewish areas. Eastern Palestine had become British-created Transjordan (today’s Jordan) in 1921.
The United Nations succeeded the League of Nations, and in 1947, it proposed a new partition plan. The Jews accepted, but Palestinian Arabs and leaders of Arab countries rejected it. In 1948, they launched and lost a war against the new state of Israel.
Two decades later, Israel struck encircling Arab armies and triumphed in the 1967 Six-Day War. In doing so, it gained the West Bank, illegally occupied by Jordan, and the Gaza Strip, illegally occupied by Egypt. Israel then offered to withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines (the “Green Line,” within which it was barely nine miles wide just north of Tel Aviv) except for a reunited Jerusalem. The Arabs responded with “three no’s” — no negotiations, no recognition, no peace.
Egypt finally made peace with Israel in 1979. Jordan followed in 1994. But the Palestinians never have. Their terrorism sabotaged the 1993-1995 Oslo “peace process” even before the second intifada. Rejection of Israel’s 2008 two-state offer and refusal of a 2016 U.S. effort to restart negotiations extended what is now a century of bloody denial of Jewish sovereign equality.
There is still no Palestinian Arab commitment to two states, one Arab, one Jewish, side-by-side and at peace.
ISRAEL’S SIN WAS BUILDING A SHIELD INSTEAD OF DIGGING GRAVES
Meanwhile, Israel remains the obligatory military occupational authority in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria). And “close settlement by Jews on the land” is encouraged under Article Six of the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate and maintained under Chapter 12, Article 80 of the U.N. Charter.
While their militaries often cooperate with Israel’s innovative defense sectors, Burnham, Macron, and Carney, et al., apparently imagine feckless diplomacy might appease their anti-Zionist, antisemitic post-liberal Left and unassimilated Muslim minorities. But conjuring a long-bankrupt vision is not going to help them.
Eric Rozenman retired as communications consultant for the Washington, D.C.-based Jewish Policy Center. He is the author, most recently, of The David Discovery, A Novel of the Near Future.