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Double standards on Israel
As the Chief Rabbi writes in his Comment piece today, truth is often the first casualty in conflict. Sadly, when the world’s only Jewish state finds itself at war, Israel is too often also the first to be blamed. So it has proved in the current struggle between Israel and Hamas.
Now, in the latest topsy-turvy framing, Israel is being accused of standing in the way of Palestinian statehood.
Yet the indiscriminate savagery of October 7, which the Hamas leadership has vowed to repeat again and again, made clear what the terror group thinks about living alongside the region’s Jews. Its founding charter declares Palestine an “Islamic land”, rejects peace deals and says that Islam will obliterate Israel. Similarly, the Houthis in Yemen, currently celebrated by anti-war protesters for their attacks on Red Sea shipping, chant “Death to Israel!” – and mean it. Behind both groups stands the implacable anti-Semitism of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a state on the verge of nuclear capability which is dedicated to wiping both Israel and its inhabitants from the map.
Even the so-called peace marchers, who are eager to denounce Israel week after week, do so under banners reading “From the River to the Sea”, a call for Israel’s erasure.
A two-state solution remains the obvious and ultimate answer to the tragedy of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. Yet for more than seventy years, every offer to make a deal of this kind has been rejected by the Palestinians’ representatives. It is not Israel that is intransigent, but Palestinian elites and their misguided Western supporters. Even the PLO, seen by some as a more tractable partner than Hamas, was founded on an eliminationist agenda. It refuses to condemn Hamas’s massacre, and the Palestinian Authority continues to pay bonuses to the families of “martyrs”.
The recent breakthrough of the Abraham Accords, which saw a number of Arab states belatedly accepting Israel’s right to exist, brought fresh hope. October 7 sought to bury that hope, and was launched by fanatics who refuse to accept any terms short of Israel’s annihilation. It is the fault of Hamas, and their Iranian paymasters, that peaceful coexistence is now further off than ever.
The path to mutual peace cannot be reached without defeating Hamas. Blaming Israel is an outrageous inversion of reality.
