Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, who frequently opines on issues pertaining to Israel, Zionism, and anti-Semitism, has agreed to take part in a debate about the Trump administration’s new Israeli-Palestinian peace plan at the new website Pairagraph, which describes itself as “a platform for written dialogue between pairs of notable individuals” and “an online meeting place for the world’s most prominent figures across government, industry, academia, religion, and the arts.”
Hammer was previously scheduled to debate Palestinian-Arab activist Issa Amro, but Amro refused to respond to Hammer after his initial response. Pairagraph then secured Omar Baddar as a new debate opponent, and Baddar responded to Hammer on Sunday. The Pairagraph debate format consists of dueling 500-word entries.
Here is Hammer’s rebuttal to Baddar.
An old lawyer maxim goes: “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.”
Omar Baddar is pounding the table. He has doused a field of straw men in gasoline and applied an industrial-grade blowtorch.
Baddar embraces countless obfuscations and outright lies. There was no “ethnic cleansing” in 1948 — only the fateful Arab rejection of November 1947. Blame for the 1967 war lies squarely with Gamal Abdel Nasser, who repeatedly vowed to exterminate Israel and militarized the Sinai in defiance of the 1956 demilitarization. U.N. S.C.R. 242 has never been internalized by the Palestinian Authority, but Israel has frequently offered a generous Palestinian state (e.g., 2000 and 2008) hewing closely to 1948’s harrowing “Auschwitz borders.” Israel did not instigate the civilizational jihad that was Arafat’s Second Intifada; rather, the mentee of Hitler ally Haj Amin al-Husseini planned it while rejecting the peace offered at Camp David in July 2000. (“[Arafat] did not negotiate in good faith; indeed, he did not negotiate at all,” President Clinton said.)
Baddar and his ilk nonsensically shout “apartheid,” but if the Palestinian-Arabs wanted peace, they would have negotiated one of the sundry times Israel has offered statehood. Instead, the PA has become the laughingstock of the Arab world. The vile 1967 Khartoum Resolution is now the very distant past; following Trump’s peace plan unveiling, Saudi Arabia said it “appreciate[d] the efforts of President Trump’s administration to develop a comprehensive peace plan.” The UAE’s foreign affairs minister approvingly tweeted a Bret Stephens column decrying Palestinian rejectionism.
Historically, separatist movements are rarely successful. Those separatist movements — Tibetans, Kurds, etc. — that might be offered a state by the “international community” would gladly accept. That the PA, which names parks after suicide bombers and directly subsidizes murderous jihad via “pay to slay,” rejects such offers gives the game away. The PA’s ultimate goal is not peace, but to kill all the Jews. “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” a rally cry frequently associated with terror-sympathizing hate groups, is nothing short of a call to genocide.
The Arab world, sobered by Iran, finally sees the Palestinian ruse. It wants to finally resolve this issue. Accordingly, the Trump peace plan is emphatically reasonable. That the plan’s bare-bones preconditions to full Palestinian statehood — cease indoctrinating Palestinian-Arab children in Jew-hatred, oust Hamas, etc. — are viewed as non-starters in Ramallah says all one needs to know about the moral midgets of the PA.
There is zero — zero — compelling U.S. national security interest in carving out a PLO/PA jihadist state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The PA is fortunate that it has enough addlebrained leftists to carry its flag and keep viable the “two-state” solution paradigm. Israel has yet again stretched out its hand, but the PA is again poised to throw its own people under the bus.
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