There can be no peace so long as Palestinians want to annihilate Israel
Abu Daoud, the man who planned the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, remained unrepentant to his dying day. In an interview in 2006, he expressed pride in the act, calling it a “strategic success”, because “we were able to force our cause into the homes of 500 million people”.
And yet, decades after this “strategic success”, the Palestinian “cause”, despite continuing to enjoy global support and attention, seems to have gone nowhere. The reason is that the “cause” has never been the one so many Westerners created in their minds.
Almost always, when foreign commentators or diplomats seek to justify the latest Palestinian attack against Israel, they will use phrases that begin with “a people fighting for its freedom…”, or “given the years of occupation…”, or “in a desire to end the blockade…”, blithely assuming that those are the goals for which most Palestinians are fighting and which explain the most recent act of violence.
I empathise. It is understandable that the West wants to believe that many Palestinians engage in violence because they seek “freedom from occupation”, or are “angered by settlements”, or “want to improve conditions in Gaza”. Those are rational, limited, and understandable goals that Westerners can feel good about supporting. But they are projected goals, inventions of a Western mind.
The vaunted Palestinian “cause”, of which Abu Daoud spoke, and which Hamas has dutifully pursued, has never been about any of those goals. Its followers have made it clear, for more than a century, in words, actions, and strategic decisions, that their “cause” was always one: the prevention, and then the destruction of a Jewish state in any part of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Hence “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the Sea”.
Had Palestinian leaders ever sought only an independent state in part of the land, had they only wanted to end Israel’s military occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank (which began in 1967, whereas the organisation to “Liberate Palestine” was established in 1964), had they wanted to improve living conditions in Gaza, had they truly pursued the rational goals the West had projected on them, they would have achieved them a long time ago. The Palestinians could have been celebrating 75 years of independence next to the Jewish state of Israel.
But the Palestinian “cause” was always singularly and consistently about nothing less than ensuring that the Jews have no state in any part of the land.
This western tendency, which I have come to call “westplaining”, seeks to explain away what many Palestinians clearly say, so as to avoid having to deal with the consequences. It is the reason that the chant heard in rallies for decades “Itbah al-Yahud”, slaughter the Jews, has been translated to the more palatable “resist Israelis”. It is why BBC scripts translate a Palestinian saying “Yahud” as Israelis.
“Westplaining” rests above all on an inversion of cause and effect. Israel’s extended military presence in the West Bank becomes the cause of Palestinian violence – “occupation” – rather than the outcome of an ideology that refuses any agreement that would end Israel’s military presence in the West Bank if it means accepting the legitimacy and permanence of free Jews living in their own state in the remaining part of the land. The maritime partial blockade of Gaza becomes the cause of Palestinian violence, rather than its outcome.
I understand the deep desire to look away, to appease, to rationalise away such an annihilationist cause. Having recently read Tim Bouverie’s superb book Appeasing Hitler, I could understand why many in Britain at the time had so wanted to believe that the Nazis had limited, understandable goals – reversing the Versailles Treaty or consolidating ethnic Germans under one government – that they discounted and looked away from the true nature of Nazism, until they could no longer do so.
Once Great Britain ended appeasement, once a wartime leader was elected on the basis that he, unlike so many others, saw Nazism for what it was, Britain went on to fight gloriously “on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields, in the streets and in the hills”, ultimately imposing total defeat, unconditional surrender, occupation, de-Nazification and re-education on Germany. Germany emerged from this process to become a contributing, peaceful pillar of Europe and the international community.
Today only those truly determined to deny the largest, most brutal, massacre of Jews since the Holocaust will look away from the slaughter of October 7. It turns out that, indeed, when given the chance, when Israel’s military fails to stop them in time, many Palestinians do mean to carry out, literally and gruesomely, “Itbah al-Yahud” – the slaughter of the Jews.
It is time to stop looking away. It is time to end appeasement. For too long, Palestinian groups have been nourished, indulged and sustained by their enablers to keep fighting for an annihilationist cause, rather than moving on, and creating prosperous lives for themselves.
If anything is to emerge from this hellscape, it should be a true reckoning with what the Palestinian “cause” has been for over a century. Nothing less than its complete defeat, and the reprogramming of its ethos away from destruction and towards construction will do.
Einat Wilf is a former Labor member of the Knesset. She is co-author of ‘The War of Return’
