By Rich Forer

Israel and its supporters vociferously complain that it is impossible to hold peace talks with an organisation that refuses to recognise the state of Israel and that calls for its eradication. According to their logic, Hamas’s 7 October assault on Israel validates that complaint. In other words, the more destructive your enemy is, the less important it is to make peace. Yitzhak Rabin said, “You don’t make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavoury enemies.” Despite its past call for the Jewish state’s eradication, Israel negotiated the Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Neither Egypt nor Jordan recognised the state of Israel prior to their negotiations, and Israel has never recognised a Palestinian right to a state. The complaint, therefore, is disingenuous. Moreover, as past talks have demonstrated, Israel is not interested in peace, not until it gobbles up as much land as it can, ethnically cleanses as many Palestinians as it can, and relocates the remaining population as far away from Jewish neighbourhoods as it can.

With the approval of most Israelis, Binyamin Netanyahu announced that Israel’s goal is to “kill every Hamas member”. On 30 October he rejected calls for a humanitarian ceasefire as a “surrender to [Hamas’s] terrorism”, preferring not to pause the obliteration of what he knew to be mostly innocent civilians, except that with his and his countrymen’s minds consumed with revenge, there are no innocent civilians in Gaza. As rabbis have said, “There is a reason to kill a child if it is clear that they will grow to harm us; in such a situation the attack should be directed specifically at them.”[1] Netanyahu’s fixation on crushing Palestinian aspirations makes him uninterested in peace negotiations that could significantly reduce future atrocities by either side. 

Israel has destroyed much of Gaza’s infrastructure, more than one million residents are displaced and, as I write, two-thirds of the 8,500 to 9,000 dead are women and children. When the body count of those buried under the rubble is included, the number of dead children is expected to easily exceed 5,000. None of that accounts for further bombings or Israel’s ground campaign. 

Another excuse Israel exploits to reject negotiations is the split between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Over the objections of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, in 2020 Netanyahu sent Mossad chief Yossi Cohen and former Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman to Qatar to beg the Qataris to continue funnelling money to Hamas that pays for fuel costs, civil servant salaries and aid to thousands of impoverished families. The Qataris were on the verge of ending their relationship with Hamas.

The Jerusalem Post reported Netanyahu saying, “whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for transferring the funds to Gaza, because maintaining a separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza helps prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.”[2]

In 2008, Shin Bet (Israeli Security Agency) head Yuval Diskin confirmed that Hamas was willing to accept a long term ceasefire on the 1967 borders.[3]

That same year, the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College determined that Hamas has “accepted the notion of a limited area of an envisioned Palestinian state, and in its calmings and truces which acknowledge (and therefore “recognise”) Israel in a de facto manner.”[4]

On 3 June 2009 Hamas sent US President Obama a letter explaining that it was,

committed to pursuing a just resolution to the conflict not in contradiction with the international community and enlightened opinion as expressed in the International Court of Justice, the United Nations General Assembly, and leading human rights organizations. We are prepared to engage all parties on the basis of mutual respect and without preconditions.[5]

When has Israel pursued “a just resolution” on the basis of an “enlightened opinion” by anyone? 

In 2009 Jimmy Carter wrote that Hamas “would accept any agreement that’s negotiated between the Israelis and the Palestinians if it’s submitted to a referendum in the West Bank and Gaza, and the Palestinians approve it. That means they would accept Israel’s right to exist”.[6]

Also in 2009, the New York Times reported that Hamas’s political director, Khaled Meshaal, “put in writing, that although Hamas would not recognise Israel, it would remain in a Palestinian national unity government that reached a referendum-endorsed peace settlement with Israel”.[7]

While Israel has never renounced its implicit goal of ethnically cleansing, by any means possible, the Palestinian people, in 2017 Hamas published a 42-point document that replaced its call for obliterating Israel with “a formula of national consensus” for “the establishment of a… Palestinian state… along the lines of the 4June 1967”.[8]

As the past 15 years demonstrate – and the 60 years before it – Israel has come up with one excuse after another to sabotage peace, choosing instead to live in a constant state of aggression that has led to the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands of Palestinians and Israelis. 

Up until 2006 I relentlessly defended Israel from criticism. Like today’s loyalists, my objective was neither historical accuracy, peace nor security. It was to preserve my self-image by being right. Being right is an existential condition, an obsession even, that can override our hopes for peace and security, and it affects everyone to varying degrees. For some, accuracy in assessing disagreements on the basis of reliable evidence is a vital element of self-imagery, but in its more intransigent form, being right is the reason not a single loyalist out of hundreds I’ve spoken to has been willing to study the history of Israel and the Palestinian people, or even admit their statements of “fact” are nothing more than fabrications concocted by their self-imagery. 

Israeli loyalists reject my premise that impartial research combined with self-reflection can release them from pathological fear of the other and the illusion of victimhood. Their state of denial induces them to accuse me of dishonesty and one-sidedness for exposing their dishonesty and one-sidedness. Not only are their accusations projections, they are contrived because as long as they refuse to research the subject, they have no way of knowing who is or is not dishonest and one-sided. Facts and logic are often the first casualties in emotionally charged disputes. The compulsion to believe what we want to believe and to reject what we don’t is so forceful as to drown out rational thinking. Whenever research contradicts cherished beliefs, loyalists fabricate, deny, or decontextualise history. No matter if they block all paths to peace, they will incorporate their inaccuracies into an historical narrative of Israel-Palestine. Loyalists are driven by an internal logic that denies the dehumanisation that is intrinsic to Israel’s matrix of control over the lives of Palestinians.

Predictably, accusations of anti-Semitism follow criticism of Israel. Afraid to ask why someone would criticise Israel, and insensitive to the humiliations Israelis subject Palestinians to every day, accusers vilify anyone who questions their narrative. Abdicating responsibility for their fear, confusion, and anger, they project those feelings onto critics, then attempt to blackmail them into silence by accusing them of anti-Semitism. Their scheme is to delude themselves into believing that neither they nor Israel has done anything that poses a challenge to the unexamined images of fairness and humaneness they desperately cling to. It is true that a small percentage of critics is anti-Semitic, but most just want Israel to comply with international law. They don’t want to harm Israelis; they want to prevent Israelis from harming Palestinians. But even compassion for Palestinians is conflated with anti-Semitism. If such compassion is proof of anti-Semitism then virtually all Palestinians are, ipso facto, guilty of anti-Semitism, and if criticising Israel for its human rights violations is anti-Semitism, what is turning one’s back on the suffering of millions? And where is the real bigotry?  

Therefore, for the Israeli government and its loyalists, the proof that one is not an anti-Semite is that they deny documented fact, remain callously oblivious to the suffering of millions, and accept Israeli justifications for its endless human rights abuses. Doesn’t that logic characterise the Jewish people as inhumane? But such a characterisation would itself be considered anti-Semitic. This unveils an absurdity: the proof you are not an anti-Semite proves that you are an anti-Semite! 

The real conflict, then, is not Israel versus the Palestinian people or Israel versus a hostile world. The real conflict is the refusal to integrate the hard-to-believe but unmistakable reality of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with unquestioned loyalty to the Jewish state. One consideration recognises Israel’s dark side. The other denies the dark side exists.

Richard Forer is the author of Wake Up and Reclaim Your Humanity: Essays on the Tragedy of Israel PalestineandBreakthrough: Transforming Fear Into Compassion – A New Perspective on the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

^[1]. Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur. The King’s Torah (Torat Hamelech), Part One: Laws of Life and Death Between Israel and the Nations (Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva, 2009), 207.
^[2]. Lahav Harkov, “Netanyahu: Money Hamas part of strategy to keep Palestinians divided,” Jerusalem Post, March 12, 2019.
^[3]. Johann Hari, “The Nightmare of Netanyahu Returns,” February 6, 2009, The Independent.
^[4]. Sherifa Zuhur, “Hamas and Israel: Conflicting Strategies of Group-Based Politics,” December 2008, fas.org/man/eprint/zuhur.pdf, 15.
 ^[5]. Letter signed by Dr. Ahmed Yousef, Deputy of the Foreign Affairs Ministry, Former Senior Political Adviser to Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.
^[6]. Storer H. Rowley, “Jimmy Carter on the Middle East,” Chicago Tribune, February 1, 2009.
^[7]. Roger Cohen, “The Fierce Urgency of Peace,” New York Times, March 26, 2009.
^[8]. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full.