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Give Deradicalization of Palestinians a Chance

(Telegraph-UK) Col. (ret.) Richard Kemp - The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a war over land, sovereignty or civil rights. The root of today's problem is a radicalized Palestinian population that for decades has been indoctrinated to hate Jews and taught that they have a religious duty to exterminate them and destroy their state. This has come from within Palestinian society and across the Middle East, often wittingly or unwittingly encouraged by the Western world. How often have we heard the lazy aphorism that you can't defeat an ideology? Tell that to the Nazi Party and Imperial Japan. As they were, Hamas and its fellow jihadists in Gaza are in the process of being militarily defeated, and when that is complete their ideology will no longer have the direct capability to inflict harm on their enemies. Rather than wringing our hands and repeating decades-old and demonstrably unachievable peace formulas, the civilized world should now unite in a concerted effort to deradicalize the Palestinians. By falsely blaming Israel for this conflict and making zero demands on the actual aggressors, they have encouraged the Palestinians to keep up a fight they should not be fighting. Continuation of the present misguided approach will condemn the Palestinians to a never-ending existence of unresolvable limbo, poverty and deprivation. In addition, the malignant and all-pervasive anti-Israel education, propaganda and preaching, often subsidized by the West, has to be ended. Giving deradicalization a chance has to be better than just repeating what has been done before and hoping for different results. The writer, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, was chairman of the UK's national crisis management committee, COBRA.
2025-04-10 00:00:00
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