My latest article in @NYDailyNews — “War on Israel has failed, try peace.” For decades, Arab and Palestinian leaders have made the same mistake: attack Israel with dire consequences, regret it, only to repeat that mistake and attack Israel again a few years later. Egypt and Jordan have been notable exceptions. When it comes to the Palestinians, terror has been less a consequence of their circumstances than their circumstances have been a consequence of their terror. In the 1960s, the Palestinian cause was adopted by the Soviets. The KGB developed anti-Zionist propaganda that lingers to this day, creating the contemporary meaning for the word Nakba, which reflects a refusal to accept the permanence of Israel’s existence. It insists that those self-inflicted wounds of 1948, and all those since, will one day be triumphantly overturned through one final attack. The result is that every year, the Palestinian reality gets grimmer. Why for example, 77 years later, are Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza and elsewhere in the region still called refugees? I’m not talking about those suffering from the current war Hamas imposed on them. But why are permanent towns in Palestinian territories still called “refugee camps”? The assumption is: Israel is temporary, and we are therefore refugees until its destruction. But that assumption has not destroyed Israel. It has merely held back the Palestinians. In 2025, the path to prosperity and progress for Palestinians will not be paved by fantasies of undoing the outcome of the war of 1948, yet another war that Israel did not start but had to win. What is clear is that attacking Israel and seeking its destruction has not brought a single tangible gain for Palestinians, only self-inflicted Nakbas. Those in the West who support the Palestinians need to stop cheering on self-inflicted destruction and get real. Israel is not going anywhere. Attacking it has only made Palestinian reality worse with every passing year.
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