Daily Alert Archives

Peace Won't Last until Palestinians Accept that Israel Is Here to Stay

(Telegraph-UK) Henry Donovan - Two years on from Hamas's massacre and with Gaza lying in ruins, the West still refuses to look the real problem in the eye. The obstacle to lasting peace between Israel and Gaza is a widespread conviction in the West Bank and Gaza (and on university campuses and on London's streets) that Israel is a mistake to be undone. Until that idea dies, no ceasefire and no "two-state solution" will hold. The belief that Israel should someday cease to exist - still widespread among Palestinians and their sympathizers abroad - is at the heart of the conflict. Hamas is merely the current, most violent, manifestation of this idea. As long as the fantasy endures - in classrooms, refugee camps and UN speeches - every truce is an intermission, not a peace. Believing that Gaza can be "rehabilitated," while its people are taught that their neighbor must disappear, is for the birds. Israel's demand is simple: to live without annihilation as a daily threat. The corresponding Palestinian demand is the reverse - to erase the Jewish state "from the river to the sea." The lives of millions of ordinary Palestinians have been ruined by this obsession. After 1945, millions of ethnic Germans were violently expelled from lands they had lived in for centuries: East Prussia, the Sudetenland, Silesia. The expellees built new lives in new homes and moved on. No international agency taught their grandchildren to dream of Breslau or Konigsberg. No politicians promised that someday the borders would be reversed. Out of that acceptance grew the stability on which modern Europe rests. The Middle East will find no peace until it learns the same lesson. Peace will come when Palestinian leaders, educators and activists have the courage to tell their own people what European leaders once told millions of their displaced: that history does not run in reverse and that compromise is the price of peace. Until then, every slogan about "resistance" is a declaration of permanent war.
2025-10-12 00:00:00
Full Article