A Movement for the Jewish State's Destruction
One cannot accept the Palestinian narrative without admitting the core destructive aim at its heart.
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This is a guest essay written by Pat Johnson of Pat’s Substack.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Does the date September 28th, 2000 mean anything to you?
It should.
That was the date the Second Intifada began — and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process ended.
It was also the moment when the global Left went off the rails by making a minor compromise on our values of negotiation over violence and began a quarter-century of aligning with the most atrocious Palestinian terrorists, burrowing down antisemitic rabbit holes and generally defiling everything we progressive antiracists claim to venerate.
So it is a date that should live in infamy.
If we are not familiar with the events of that time, we cannot approach an understanding of the headlines we see every day nowadays of thousands of people dying in the Hamas-initiated war.
So let’s open “The Big Book of Mostly Forgotten Recent History.”
The manufacture of a revisionist narrative began almost immediately. When a huge segment of the political spectrum almost unanimously forsakes everything it claims to believe — such as peace, negotiated resolution to conflict, equality for women and LGBTQ+ people, and anti-racism — obviously, a pretty intensive propaganda factory is needed to paper over this egregious moral carnage.
No problem! The violence-apologists of the West were ready with justifications just as the participants in the intifada were ready with stockpiles of stones to supply their “spontaneous” uprising.
Rachelle Marshall, writing in 2000 for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, declared that: “The explosion of Palestinian anger … put an end to the charade begun at Oslo seven years ago and labelled the ‘peace process.’”
“In 1993,” she continued, “Palestinians, along with millions of people around the world, were led to hope that Israel would withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza within five years and that Palestinians would then be free to establish an independent state. Meanwhile both sides would work out details of Israel’s withdrawal and come to an agreement on the status of Jerusalem, the future of Israeli settlements, and the return of Palestinian refugees. Because of the lopsided balance of power, negotiations went nowhere and the Palestinians’ hopes were never fulfilled.”
This first draft of history, though massively removed from reality, has nevertheless stood the test of time. Then-Palestinian leader (and mega terrorist) Yasser Arafat may have walked away from negotiations and started blowing things up, but it was, of course, Israel’s fault.
Marshall’s make-believe was part of a cottage industry of obfuscation, inventing explanations for the inexplicable. The Palestinian rejection of the peace plan was so counterintuitive that observers had to contrive fables and myths to explain it rather than simply acknowledge the core truth that had been out there all along. The Palestinians did not want, as the world had gullibly accepted, a nation in the West Bank and Gaza. All the negotiations over borders and tradeoffs and details were just Arafat playing for time.
The Palestinian movement was never and is not now primarily a movement for national liberation of “Palestine.” Palestinianism is a movement for the destruction of Israel.
We cannot appreciate the facts of the conflict, understand the actions of the parties, or move ahead to any sort of resolution while staunchly denying this troublesome truth.
Arafat could not accept a negotiated peace and neither can his successors, because to accept the “victory” of a Palestinian nation astride Israel, rather than instead of it, would be to admit failure. The very thing that Western observers have been conditioned to believe would be the ultimate Palestinian victory — an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip — is seen by Palestinians themselves as total failure.
The naïve Western assumption is that the end goal is two states for two peoples, but what Arafat was after was two states for one people — and that once-shrouded goal is now shouted unabashedly by marching millions chanting “From the River to the Sea.”
The cognitive incompatibility of the world’s gullibility with the truth of the maximalist Palestinian objective necessarily begat outlandish revisionism that attempted to paint the 1990s Oslo Accords “peace” process as a fraud, a conspiracy with some ominous thumb on the scale tipped to Israel’s advantage, a massive intrigue to screw Palestinians out of what was rightly theirs.
It is a symptom of the character of Western leftists that we almost universally adopted these misrepresentations and it is why we now find ourselves down a road of moral catastrophe from which it will be difficult to reverse.
Historian Ilan Pappé wrote of the peace process: “Israel used it as a means to grab more land, build more colonies, and annex more space. The status quo was the solution … the basic Zionist quest is for control, direct or indirect, over the whole of Palestine.”
Like much of the narrative, this is a direct projection. The peace process ended because the Palestinians demanded all of “Palestine” — and all of Israel. To paper over this fact, it is necessary to recast the Israelis’ offer as a Zionist land grab, even though Israel offered 97 percent of the West Bank, all of Gaza, territorial tradeoffs to compensate for the three percent of the West Bank that Israel would retain, and $300 billion in “symbolic” reparations for the “right of return” of “refugees.”
It is difficult to conceive of any people but Jews being accused and convicted by global opinion of offering nothing when they offered everything.
The fact that what Israel was willing to give them was everything the world assumed the Palestinians wanted is apparently irrelevant here.
As Rachelle Marshall wrote, at the core of the emerging progressive narrative around “Palestine” was a “lopsided balance of power,” the premise that the Palestinians were inherently disadvantaged partners at the negotiating table.
So they should have been. The very fact of their statelessness was a result of the Arab world’s successive attempts at annihilation of Israel and Israelis. But after Israeli victories in the Arab-initiated wars of 1948-1949, 1967, and 1973, Israel had control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and should have rightfully held the upper hand. The defeated rarely get to set the terms of peace.
Despite this, Israel had agreed to effectively ignore the fact that these exterminationist wars had occurred, to wipe the slate clean, and agree to a status quo ante that no nation on earth has ever been so generous to undertake.
The collapse of the Oslo Accords “peace” process makes more sense when you read Ilan Pappé, Noam Chomsky, and other “pro-Palestinian” commentators. They openly seek the destruction of Israel. They believe the Palestinians deserve both “Palestine” and Israel. They, like many other voices in the Palestinian movement, endorse a one-state “solution” that would dissolve (in the best-case scenario) the Jewish state.
So one cannot accept the Palestinian narrative without admitting the core destructive aim at its heart. Yet Western progressives, at least the relatively moderate ones, have continued to side with the Palestinian narrative while credulously claiming that they support Israel’s right to exist.
At the end of the peace process, a whole propaganda hoopla was invented to hide the reality that the “Palestinian liberation” movement was a “Israeli destruction” movement all along.
That charade is over. “From the River to the Sea” is now the unavoidable cry of the activists.
Which puts leftist progressives who believe in peace, coexistence, and negotiation over violence in a bit of a tough spot. As usual, this has not proven a problem. Because while adherence to peace and a revulsion for violence used to be a core tenet of leftist ideology, those days are gone.
When it comes to Israel (and Jews), everything they claim to believe goes out the window.
Like all of the rest of the lies we’ve been fed, this one needs to be done. Over. Israel blowing up terrorists’ pagers…magnificent strategy. Almost zero collateral damage so the lies of lotsa babies can’t be used as propaganda. By the way…why would an ambassador have a terrorist pager?
This is an outstanding summary of how the fake peace process was designed from the first as a Trojan horse to bring down the Jewish state. Since Oct 7th it's become nearly impossible to pretend that all the Palestinians want is to live in peace and dignity. The ""core destructive aim" of the Palestinian narrative has been laid bare for all to see. Those who persist in pretending that a two-state solution is just around the corner are either blind, ignorant or malicious in their motivations.