No Jews, No Jews, No Jews
“We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for the Jews. ... They will have no choice but to leave.”
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This is a guest essay written by John Matthews, a journalist and author of 24 books.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
“No Jews, No Jews, No Jews”
This is a play on words on the often-seen notice in UK boarding house windows between the 1930s and 1960s — “No Blacks, No Jews, No Irish.” However, if played out today in Palestinian boarding houses, it would without doubt say: “No Jews, No Jews, No Jews.”
In the early 1990s, not long after the Oslo Accords1, then-chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization Yasser Arafat proclaimed to colleagues and the Arab press, “We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for the Jews. ... They will have no choice but to leave.”
The initial stated plan for this was through psychological and propaganda warfare combined with population explosion — the Palestinian population has increased from 945,000 in 1945 to 5.5 million today — but this quickly evolved into violence with two armed uprisings (intifadas) and a chain of suicide bombings, which ultimately led to security fences and walls being built between 2003 and 2006 to divide Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
Until then, there was far more open passage between the two regions. The same is true of Gaza. Initially, there was a fairly open passage between Israel and Gaza, but with increasing incursions and suicide bombings from Hamas militants, secure fences and barriers were constructed. So this continual bid to rid the area of Jews by making “life unbearable” for them has each time backfired on the Palestinians and restricted their free movement through increased security and protection.
Though, again, little is made of what has caused these increased security divides in the Palestinian and Arab Press. The picture generally painted is that Israel has created these barriers and divides purely as a way of making the Palestinian people suffer, of further oppressing them.
So much will be made in news programmes by focusing on a handful of Palestinian farmers who have found their land divided by these security barriers, complaining that it now takes them 30 to 40 minutes to get to those extended pastures, whereas before it took them only five minutes.
The whole programme couched as a terrible and unfair imposition by the Israelis — as if the suffering of that extra 30 minutes travel by those farmers was far more important than the many hundreds of Israeli lives saved.
Did the programme-makers even realize how callous and thoughtless this might appear? Or was this simply an overt reflection of David Baddiel’s titled book, “Jews Don't Count”? Palestinian militants were even more pointed in their complaints about the divide, as if saying: “How dare you construct a fence and walls to stop us killing Jews when we want?!”
I personally can’t imagine an hour-long BBC or CNN news programme dedicated to interviewing people complaining about the extra hour wait at airports in boarding queues or the fact that they’re not allowed to carry liquid in bottles anymore, or the extra time queuing at music venues; everyone perfectly understands that it’s due to extra and very necessary security.
To say otherwise would be like callously suggesting: “My time is more important than passengers getting blown out of the sky or young teens getting blown apart at concerts.” Yet there was no hesitation about such programmes and comments being made about the Israeli security divides.
This aim of “No Jews” continues to this day with Palestinian Authority President Mohammed Abbas insisting that the final divide agreed between Israel and a Palestinian state will not take place “until every Jew is the other side of it.”
Such a Judenrein2 stance hasn't been seen since Nazi Germany, or more recently, Gaza, when in 2005 all the Israeli settlers there were removed by Israeli forces. Abbas, of course, is talking specifically about the 520,000 Israeli settlers currently in the so-called “West Bank” — given that for many years the Palestinian Authority has labelled the settlers “illegal” and much of the international community has gone along with that, a not unreasonable demand.
But when we set that against the fact that within Israel resides 1.78 million Arabs, mostly Muslim, 21 percent of the Israeli population, the fact that zero Jews are allowed to reside on the other side in Palestinian territory seems starkly unreasonable, and puts the lie to the claim that Israel has a racist/apartheid agenda, when we see from these numbers that it’s entirely the opposite. It’s the Palestinians who have this agenda.
Though to avoid this label, very craftily, the Palestinians insist that the settlers being unwelcome there isn’t because they’re Jews, but because they’re aggressive and troublemakers. Regular reports appear in Electronic Intifada or Mondoweiss of Israeli West Bank settlers attacking Palestinian land or people.
Yet, when the full story emerges, nine times out of 10 it’s as a result of an earlier attack on settler land or people, and only the defence or reprisal is reported or filmed.
There’s a regular YouTube channel titled “The Ask Project” by Corey Gil-Schuster, where he interviews on camera Jews and Arabs in Israel and the West Bank, asking them specific questions. In one of those videos, he interviewed numerous Israeli settlers in the West Bank and asked them, “How do you justify settlers killing Palestinian children?”
In general, the respondents were hard pushed to think of any examples of settlers harming or killing Palestinians or their children, one teen girl finding the question so ludicrous that she starts laughing, while behind her someone calls out, “Candid camera!”
Even the one example finally hit upon was shrouded in doubt. Whereas, the other way, Palestinian terrorists harming Israeli families, a number of examples arose. Yet from the media, particularly online, settlers are without doubt painted as the main aggressors.
However, a picture of constant aggression and conflict, regardless of which side was the initial instigator, would be misleading. In another Corey Gil-Schuster video, he asked Israelis, “How much do you hate Palestinians?” Having already asked Palestinians how much they hate Israelis, the Palestinians interviewed were generally more condemning, ranging mostly from 5 to 8 (out of 10) on the hate scale, with a handful only notching up 3 or 4.
But the Israelis asked hardly expressed any hatred for the Palestinians, with scores ranging generally from 0 to 4. The last three elderly Israelis interviewed, responded, “Why should we hate them?” They expressed fondness for Palestinians, many of whom worked in their businesses.
One professed that he’d lived in a West Bank settlement, Ariel, for 10 years, and had many Palestinian friends. So from this we get a sense of harmony and accord, even from within West Bank settlements.
Indeed, this sense of harmony can be witnessed at Ariel University, where a number of Palestinian and Arab Israeli students study alongside Jewish students. So, despite this leading university being on West Bank land, so ostensibly “illegal,” it does shine a beacon for possible future harmonious integration.
Glimmers of hope for future accord can also be seen from the Palestinians who declared their main income came from working for or with Israelis. They said, “The Palestinian Authority has done nothing for us, so working with Israelis provides our main income and way of getting ahead.”
A number of Palestinians, when asked their view about the Israeli settlements, claim that they welcome them. Some 70 percent of the labour force used to build the settlements is Palestinian, usually at 50-to-80 percent above the rates paid by Palestinian Arab companies. This provides much-needed income, plus a number of Palestinians work in West Bank Israeli companies, sometimes at management level.
While admitting they welcome this income, many of these interviews take place off-camera, as admitting such could be viewed as “collaborating with Israel,” the enemy, a crime carrying anything from a lengthy prison term to death.
Sadly, the overriding theme of many interviews with Palestinians, especially when asked their views on a possible “two-state solution” and a future Palestinian state, revert to a “No Jews” stance.
Between 55 and 60 percent of those interviewed see a future Palestinian state with no Jews present and Israel ceasing to exist. All of the land from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea shall be theirs. We see from this that the chant, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine shall be free!” It isn’t just empty rhetoric.
This is possibly why Yasser Arafat, when at Camp David and subsequently Taba was offered 97 percent of Palestinian land back to the established Green Line and the remaining three percent settled with other land or financial compensation — the closest any Palestinian leader has come to a peace deal — he refused.
Perhaps he feared that he was betraying the “at heart” wishes of the Palestinian people, plus he would also be going back on his firebrand comments to his followers and the Arab press:
“We shall never stop until we can go back home and Israel is destroyed. … The goal of our struggle is the end of Israel, and there can be no compromises or mediations. … The goal of this violence is the elimination of Zionism from Palestine in all its political, economic and military aspects. … We don’t want peace, we want victory. Peace for us means Israel’s destruction and nothing else.”
Within that fiery declaration, we have the roots of the various intifadas against Israel since and, indeed, the attacks of October 7th. Arafat spelled out the goal of all Palestinian terrorist groups decades ago, and that stance of “No Jews” sadly still remains today.
A pair of interim agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization
From which Jewish people are excluded (originally with reference to organizations in Nazi Germany)
 | A guest post by
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All you have to do if you are too lazy to study history is read the two Hamas charters of 1989 and 2017. And if you choose to read history to count the at least 6 times that Arabs have refused two states.
Its like Alice in Wonderland. Everything the Arabs are guilty of they accuse the Jews of.