Israel ignoring lethal enemies a ‘foolish’ idea

The one idea Zaid Jilani holds in his mind in his Monday column “Palestinians will never lose their spirit” is this: the state of Israel is morally equivalent to the apartheid government of South Africa.
Lest he lose the ability to function, he refuses to let a second, opposed idea trouble him: Palestinian society has become so radicalized and full of Jew-hatred that Israel has no legitimate negotiating partner.
Jilani is right that the Israeli settlements are illegal under most rubrics of international law and were notably declared to have “no legal validity” by the United Nations Security Council.
A map of the West Bank shows Israeli settlers have encroached upon Palestinian land far beyond the 1967 borders in an absurd, Swiss cheese fashion.
Yet there are complications.
When Israel dismantled its settlements in the Gaza Strip (often using the army to drag its own citizens from their homes and back into Israel) and withdrew completely, the elections that followed produced a victory by Hamas.
Hamas was founded in 1988 and its charter states, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
The charter continues: “After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.”
Hamas has hunted rival Palestinian parties, begun setting up a theocracy and intermittently fired rockets into Israeli civilian areas.
Now we have two opposed ideas and an apparent test of intelligence: the Israeli settlements are illegal land grabs that should be dismantled, and the dismantlement of Israeli settlements and withdrawal of Israeli troops exposes the violent religious extremism in Palestinian society and subjects Israeli civilians to sudden and often inescapable attacks.
The easy answer is that the Israelis should dismantle the settlements and the Palestinians should stop firing rockets into Israel, but this cannot happen until the fundamental source of the conflict is addressed.
Large portions of Palestinian society are in the throes of horrifying religious extremism.
Paramilitary groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah reject Israel’s right to exist. They draw material support from Iran and Syria. The support they receive from some on the Left reinforces their determination to ruin the peace process.
Until the sectors of Palestinian society that promote Islamic supremacism and believe in discredited anti-Semitic forgeries are marginalized and disarmed, it would be foolish and suicidal for Israel to behave magnanimously and pretend it has no lethal enemies on its borders.

Andrew Widener
Senior, Sharpsburg, Ga.
International Affairs