In Secretary of State and Professional Asshat™ John Kerry’s execrable speech on the Arab-Israeli conflict on Wednesday, the man whose face is a living rockslide declared that the true obstacle to peace was Israel building bathrooms in Efrat and East Jerusalem. Kerry repeatedly maintained that Palestinians want peace with Israel. That’s eminently untrue, and it’s been untrue for the entirety of the so-called peace process and long before.
Here are five demonstrations that the “Palestinians want peace” notion is an outright lie, and that Palestinians actually prefer a continued conflict that maintains the possibility of the full-scale destruction of the Jewish State.
1. Palestinian Response To Kerry Speech. Hilariously, just after Kerry ripped into Israel in unprecedented fashion and declared that if Israel stopped all settlement building and moved to reverse settlements, as well as splitting Jerusalem, Palestinians would embrace peace, the Palestinians openly scoffed at him. Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki immediately stated that Kerry had not proposed anything new, and refused recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. So much for Kerry’s proposed peace deal.
2. Palestinians Have Repeatedly Refused Kerry’s Deal. In 2000, far-left Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered over 90 percent of Judea and Samaria, all of the Gaza Strip, a land-link between the two, Palestinian control over the mosques on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, as well as cash for Palestinian refugees. Arafat ran away from the table. Even useful idiot Thomas Friedman stated about Arafat, “He came with no compromise ideas of his own on Jerusalem. He simply absorbed Mr. Barak’s proposals and repeated Palestinian mantras about recovering all of East Jerusalem.” Just months later, Arafat launched an Intifada. In 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered nearly 94 percent of Judea and Samaria, plus another six percent of Israeli territory, a link to the Gaza Strip, withdrawal from East Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods, and placement of the Old City under international control. Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas walked away from the table.
3. The Palestinian Unity Government Is Rooted In Anti-Jewish Terror. The Palestinian government is committed to the destruction of Israel. It is a tripartite unity government under the control of the terrorist group Hamas, the terrorist group Fatah, and the terrorist group Islamic Jihad. Not one of these groups recognizes Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. All teach, fund, and promote terrorism against Jews, as even Kerry acknowledged. The charters for each of these groups call for Israel’s full destruction.
4. Polls Show Palestinians Are Not Interested In A Durable Peace. Kerry kept saying that Palestinians want peace. That’s not what the polls say. A poll from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research as of September 2015 found that 51 percent of Palestinians rejected the two-state solution. A plurality, 42 percent, said that the best way of establishing a Palestinian state would be “armed action,” with just 29 percent saying negotiation. Polls also showed Hamas running evenly with the supposedly-moderate Palestinian Authority. Prior polls show that Palestinian willingness to accept a Jewish state would be only temporary anyway: a poll from 2010 showed that while about 60 percent of Palestinians supported a two-state solution at the time, they also thought that in the end, Israel would disappear. Just 23 percent said they believed in a right to exist for a Jewish homeland in Israel.
5. Israeli Attempts To Uproot Settlements Have Been Met With Violence. Perhaps the best evidence that Palestinians are not interested in peace comes courtesy of actual history: in 2005, the Israeli government forced 8,000 Jews from their homes in the Gaza Strip and handed all control over to the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinians promptly burned down every resource left by the Jews, then turned around and elected the terrorist group Hamas, which proceeded to arm and then attack Israeli civilians, use funding to build terror tunnels designed for kidnapping and murder, and attempt to ship in more armaments from Iran and Turkey. Again, Hamas was elected. They now sit in the unity government with the Palestinian Authority and Islamic Jihad.
So no, the Palestinians are not interested in peace. They never have been. Israel accepted UN borders in 1947; the Arabs declared war. Israelis accepted the armistice lines of 1949; the Arabs created the Palestine Liberation Organization to “liberate” Palestine – meaning all of Israel, including Tel Aviv and Haifa – from Jewish rule in 1964, before the so-called “occupation.” In 1979, the Jews handed over the Sinai for promises of peace with Egypt. In 1993, the Jews signed the Oslo Accords. The Jews have made concession after concession, and each new concession has been met with a wave of violence.
But it’s the Jews’ fault, according to John Kerry and company. To believe that, you merely have to be ignorant of history, reality, and decency.