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Arab Intransigence, Not Settlements, Block Peace

(Spectator-UK) Melanie Phillips - Hamas set out to "disrupt" the negotiations taking place in Washington between Israel and the Palestinians by murdering Israelis. Hamas knows that its murderous attacks upon Israeli civilians inevitably results in pressure by the "civilized" world not on those who wage such terror campaigns but on their Israeli victims. It is not Hamas or the Palestinians who are punished by America, Britain and Europe for murdering Israelis, but Israel for either defending itself against them or refusing to make more suicidal "concessions" which expose yet more of its civilians to murderous attack. The obsessional focus upon the settlements has allowed the Arabs to pretend that the core issue is indeed the settlers, and if only they were removed from the territories there would be peace. The slightest acquaintance with history shows that this is a ludicrous analysis. The Arabs have been waging a war of extermination against the Jewish presence in first Palestine and then Israel from the 1920s onwards. The proof that the settlements were not the issue came when Israel evicted the settlers from Gaza - to which the reaction was not peace or nation-building towards a state of Palestine, but thousands of rockets fired from Gaza at Israel. The settlers are said to have stolen land from the Palestinians. This is false. The land never belonged to a sovereign country of Palestine because there was none. It was "no man's land," illegally occupied for a while by Jordan. Nor was it "stolen" from individual Palestinians since most of it was empty space, or bought from Arabs, or it was land originally owned and lived in by Jews.
2010-09-03 08:51:25
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