Senator @ChrisVanHollen, with respect, you don't understand us - or the Palestinians. You seems to think that the belief that Jews have some "Biblical right" to Judea and Samaria is unique to Smotrich and Ben Gvir. Senator, I too believe Jews have a right to the Biblical heartland where the Jewish story was born. Most Jews for most of Jewish history believed that in one way or another. This belief has been central to Jewish worship and ritual for a couple of millennia and counting. For all the great Jewish debates about this land, there's no debate over the basic Jewish attachment to it and yearning for return, or the simple fact that it is a foundational and ancient article of Jewish faith that our redemption is situated there. The notion that this belief is somehow unique to Smotrich or Ben Gvir is an insult. Senator, a great many Israelis have been willing over the years to divide this land with the Palestinians, but not because they didn't believe it was part of their historic homeland. Our right to it, they believed, clashed with a more urgent Palestinian right to independence. This was the view of a very large part of the Israeli left back when the left still won elections. That belief eroded only when the Israeli left collapsed as a political force in the wave of 140 suicide bombings that Palestinians call the "Second Intifada." The trouble, senator, our great confusion, lies in the fact that the Israeli left's willingness to compromise is understood by a great many Israelis, include ex-leftists, to have been the cause of that wave of brutality. We learned about this connection from Palestinians themselves. Palestinian ideological elites, in countless explicit, public statements, explained to their people that the willingness of many Israelis to compromise over what they claim as their homeland was proof that the Jews secretly knew the land wasn't truly and authentically theirs, and therefore would abandon it if faced with sufficient bloodshed and brutality. This argument is still very widely held and constantly repeated among Palestinian ideological elites. Just dip a toe into pro-Palestinian Twitter for two minutes and you'll see it everywhere, especially in Arabic: The idea that the Jews are something artificial, that their identity is fake and thin, that their attachment to the land is conditional and easily broken. The willingness to compromise, in other words, has long served as evidence to Hamas and its ilk that the destruction of Israel was possible - and if it is possible, Hamas argues, it is immoral not to reach for it. Senator, on the altar of this theory of us, Hamas and others have spent nearly four decades going to war against every peace attempt and rejected and still reject, openly and explicitly, any permanent compromise. And if you understood this thorny little catch-22 of the Palestinian political imagination, if you actually listened to Palestinian discourse rather than the apologia of diaspora elites and their progressive "allies," you'd be less interested in gotcha questions and more keen on separating the Palestinian cause from its catastrophically self-destructive standard-bearers. Study the bloody, tragic tale of the collapse of the Israeli left, senator, and you will understand why the Palestinian national movement keeps destroying itself.
See Tweet