A Statement on Gaza and Recognition of a Palestinian State
C. Gourgey, Ph.D.
Imagine that your neighbor living in the house next to yours hated you and made no secret of it. That he proclaimed your property should rightfully belong to him. That he taught his children you are Godless and a liar and a cheat and worse than scum. That he spent years stockpiling weapons, rockets and rocket launchers and all manner of explosives, for the express purpose of using them against you. That he fired those rockets frequently, doing damage to your house and injuring your family members. And finally, when he could no longer restrain himself, that he invaded your house, raped your wife, and kidnapped your child.
Would you sit back and do nothing?
This is truly a bizarre moment in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel faces an adversary that has attacked its civilians for decades, shows no willingness to let up, and is an avowed genocidal threat. Yet it is only Israel being demonized and accused of “genocide.” Hamas barely gets a mention from those too willing to embrace the Palestinian cause.
This month marks the two-year anniversary of the latest and most destructive Gaza war. There were four major Gaza wars preceding the present one, every one of them ignited by Palestinian violence. The Jews whom Hamas and its supporters (and there were many) attacked on 10/7/2023 were mostly peace activists, Israelis who wanted to make life better for their Gaza neighbors, even taking many of them for hospital care when they were sick. It didn’t matter. They were Jews. And the religion the attackers professed taught them that Jews are less than human. They even quote the Qur’an to prove it.
In fact, Gaza itself was constructed very deliberately as a war machine for the express purpose of attacking Israeli Jews. Virtually all of Gaza’s imports were diverted into war preparations, including rockets and rocket launchers, explosives, and five hundred miles of tunnels for hiding terrorists and weapons and infiltrating into Israel. Instead of benefiting the lives of Palestinians, all those resources went into plans for killing Jews. That became Gaza’s primary reason for being. Gazan society even recruits its children for this purpose: its educational and religious systems poison these children’s minds from their earliest years, not only against coexistence with Israel but against Jews as people. Children are trained early on to hate Jews and reject compromise. This has been documented. (See for example the research conducted by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education [IMPACT-SE]).
The news media today are reporting none of this. Instead, all we see are scenes of devastation in Gaza, and Palestinians suffering the effects of the war. It is no wonder that Israel is now demonized, both in the press and popular opinion. The suffering of the Palestinians is real. I have no wish to minimize it. I want to see it alleviated. I want this war to end. Now. But my concern in this article is not how to end the war, but how it is being reported. One-sided condemnation of Israel will not end this war. It will only prolong it. Because Israel, rightly, found this war a fight for its survival. You don’t give in to external pressure when your very existence is at stake.
Most Israelis are also sick of this war and want it to end, as do most Gazans. Israel has accepted the Trump peace plan now under consideration, and many Arab states have greeted it favorably. It remains to be seen whether Hamas will come around. One cannot escape the reality that Hamas’s persistent intransigence amounts to insisting on maintaining the right to pursue its genocidal intentions against Israeli Jews. Hamas has even said as much, for those who will listen.
On “Genocide”
A word should be said about the use of the term “genocide.” Genocide means (or should mean) the deliberate liquidation of an entire ethnic or religious group. This is what Hamas attempted on October 7: to kill everyone in sight, old and young, male and female, except for the ones taken hostage. The campaign affected Israel’s southern region, but the intent was not to stop there. Coordinating with Hezbollah in the north and Iran in the east, the plan was to extend the carnage to the entire country, infiltrating from north and south, then meeting in the middle. Fortunately Hamas acted impulsively, not coordinating efficiently with its partners, or the slaughter and destruction might have been unimaginably worse.
The popular press is not reporting this. It’s the part of the story people don’t think about. People see the devastation in Gaza and are outraged. Yet there were no mass protests when Hezbollah devastated Israel’s northern towns and villages, making them uninhabitable and displacing thousands. There is truly a genocidal movement within the Muslim world aimed at Jews, but it seems no one is paying attention. The slogan “Globalize the intifada” reflects an intention to extend these attacks beyond Israel’s borders; yet the significance of this is largely being missed.
October 7 proved the lethality of the threat Hamas poses right on Israel’s border. How does one respond to such a threat? Is there a clean way to do it? Not in the real world. Mistakes will be made. Excesses will be committed. Israel’s cutting off humanitarian aid to Gaza for three months was unconscionable. Such things should be criticized, and in extreme cases even condemned. But with balance. With full awareness of the context. We should remember that not only did Hamas start this war, it threatened even worse to come as soon as the opportunity should arise. And we should ask what would happen to Israel had it remained passive and accepted the aggression.
In light of this, accusing Israel of “genocide” is a misuse of language. A genocidal campaign does not warn in advance which areas will be attacked, does not try to create safe passages for civilians, and does not displace people away from zones of the most likely maximum danger. One may disagree with these measures Israel has taken to minimize civilian casualties; one may even vociferously object to them, but they do not constitute genocide.
Accusing Israel of genocide is dangerous. It puts Israel on an even lower moral level than Hamas, which is clearly unacceptable. Whatever one may think of the IDF, it does not do to Palestinian civilians what Hamas and its allies do to Jewish ones. Not even close. The “genocide” label applied to Israel - and especially only to Israel, ignoring the actions and intentions of Hamas - is a blood libel used for antisemitic purposes: If Jews are no better than Nazis, then they deserve the Nazis’ fate. This sentiment has been voiced in parts of the Muslim world, together with the slogan “Hitler should have finished the job.”
We still need to address a new pressing concern: the unilateral and unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state by an increasing number of countries who want the world to think they are acting virtuously.
On the Recognition of a Palestinian State
One would have to be willfully ignorant not to realize what would happen if at this time in history a Palestinian state were to be established based on unilateral recognition with no conditions placed on Hamas and on Palestinian society. By now it should be clear what the slogan “Free Palestine” means: it is not “free the West Bank,” now occupied by Israel as the result of a defensive war. It means “Free Palestine” as Palestinians understand Palestine, which means all of Israel, which Hamas has explicitly stated belongs to the Palestinians and must be taken by force if necessary.
A society that has institutionalized anti-Jewish hatred and is led by a truly genocidal organization, Hamas, will without a doubt make of an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank what it made of Gaza. It will become another front in the war to eradicate the state of Israel. The West Bank is already full of weapons smuggled by Iran, ready to be used if the area acquires sovereign power. But, one might ask, what about the Palestinian Authority? Hamas would no more allow the Palestinian Authority a share of power in a unified West Bank-Gaza than it did in Gaza alone, when, refusing to share power, it chased out the PA in a violent civil struggle. An independent Palestinian state under current coditions will not bring lasting peace, but another war making the current conflict in Gaza look like a schoolyard brawl.
If any Palestinian state is ever established, it must not be before the Palestinians themselves make, and actually act upon, some necessary concession. These would include releasing all of the hostages, agreeing to demilitarization, and putting an end to anti-Jewish incitement in the Palestinian education system. The failure to mention any such concessions in the current bid to recognize a Palestinian state constitutes a reward to Hamas for the atrocities it committed on October 7. The message this sends is clear: if you want to gain acceptance in the international community, you can’t go wrong by killing Jews.
The One More Thing Needed
I mentioned earlier that a greater thing is needed, the one thing most noticeably absent in this conflict so far. And that is empathy. We must learn to affirm each other’s humanity. This applies to both sides. The Palestinian educational system must be reformed and completely overhauled, or it will continue to provide fuel for future conflict. Preaching hate in Palestinian mosques must become taboo. On the other side, settler violance against Palestinian civilians must be - and already often is - roundly condemend by Israeli society, and this must be followed by prosecution of the perpetrators. Israelis must also recognize that Palestinians are a real people with legitimate national aspirations
It may not be possible to satisfy those aspirations now, not as long as Palestinian society continues to pose a lethal threat to Israel, which it still does despite popular impressions. That is the great tragedy of this conflict: it will have no solution until its spiritual roots are addressed and healed, and trying to impose a solution, such as unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state, will only make things worse. It will enable extremists on the Palestinian side to continue their unending quest to destroy Israel. Rachel Goldberg-Polin, whose son was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas, has stated that if you grieve only the lost children on one side, your moral compass is broken. We need to take her words seriously.
In this war both sides have made mistakes and have committed actions that are unacceptable. But we need to remember how this war began. It was nothing less than an attempt by Hamas and its Palestinian sympathizers - and there are many - to destroy Israel’s Jewsh population. And until that is recognized, those efforts will not stop. That is why unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state is a prescription for endless war - just the opposite of what the recognizers say they want. If you want to know what Palestinians without constraints and conditions will do with a new Palestinian state, look at what they did with Gaza. I still maintain that the root of this conflict is Islamic antisemitism, the motivation for the Palestinian rejection of peaceful coexistence over and over again, including the UN partition that would have given Palestinians a bigger state of their own than they can now hope to achieve. Blaming Israel exclusively or even primarily for this fiasco is a gross distortion of reality and a miscarriage of justice, and in my experience, those who do so are unaware of much of this conflict’s history.
With God’s help true peace activists will arise, people on both sides reaching out to each other with respect for the other’s humanity and legitimate aspirations. There are already groups of people doing exactly this. Unfortunately, you are unlikely to hear of them in campus demonstrations or on the evening news. Perhaps we can lend them our support, in spite of the human tendency to prefer dwelling on blame and resentment rather than constructive cooperation. Are any reporters listening?