Philosophical Apprentice evaluates a Neo-Conservative’s fictional persona.

Headline: The Left Is Dooming Any Hope for a Palestinian State

The Reader confronts Stephen’s History Made to Measure :

Do the people chanting “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” have any idea of the irreparable harm they’re doing to any hope of Palestinian sovereignty?

For decades, the question of a Palestinian state has come down to two dates: 1948 and 1967. Most Western supporters of Palestinian statehood have argued that the key date is the Six-Day War of June 1967, when Israel, faced with open threats of annihilation, took possession of the Golan Heights, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula.

According to this line of thinking, the way to peace rested on Arab diplomatic recognition of Israel in exchange for the return of these so-called occupied territories. That’s what happened between Egypt and Israel at Camp David in 1978, and what might have happened at Camp David in 2000 if Yasir Arafat had only accepted the offer of full statehood made to him by Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel.

Yet there has always been a second narrative, which dates “the occupation” not to 1967 but to 1948, when Israel came into being as a sovereign state. By this argument, it isn’t just East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights that are occupied by Israel: It’s Haifa, Tel Aviv, Eilat and West Jerusalem, too. For Palestine to be “liberated,” Israel itself must end.

Starting in the 1970s, the 1948ers were known as the rejectionist front. More recently, they have become the axis of resistance. Membership includes Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Assad regime in Syria and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — a who’s who of designated terrorist groups and their state sponsors.

On October 7, The Zionist State was attacked by ‘the axis of resistance’ that used the most primitive equipment: the American supplied sophisticated armaments, were only used after the fact, to pummel Gaza into rubble, and to commit Genocide. Stephens as Neo-Con avoids at all costs the actual costs of battle and murder on an unprecedented scale committed by Israel. Stephens is after the real culprits:

But just as often they have done so wittingly. When Mohamed Khairullah, the mayor of Prospect Park, N.J., said “75 years of occupation is too long” at an October rally, he was embracing the 1948 narrative. When Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan congresswoman, posted that “75 years later, the Nakba continues to this day” and declined to accept Israel as a Jewish state, she was embracing it. When Judith Butler, the Berkeley professor, told an interviewer that “the roots of the problem are in a state formation that depended on expulsions and land theft to establish its own ‘legitimacy’” and supported a binational state, she was embracing it. When the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter responded to the Oct. 7 massacres with a Facebook post claiming, “When a people have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence, their resistance must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense,” it was embracing it. When the BBC Arabic service repeatedly described ordinary Israelis as “settlers,” it was embracing it.

Mr. Stephens finds it politically convenient to post this from Susie Linfield in Quillette :

“A left that, rightly, demands absolute condemnation of white-nationalist supremacy refuses to disassociate itself from Islamist supremacy,” “A left that, rightly, demands absolute condemnation of white-nationalist supremacy refuses to disassociate itself from Islamist supremacy,” Susie Linfield, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., wrote in an important recent essay in the online journal Quillette. “A left that lauds intersectionality hasn’t noticed that Hamas’s axis of support consists of Iran, famous most recently for killing hundreds of protesters demanding women’s freedom.”, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., wrote in an important recent essay in the online journal Quillette. “A left that lauds intersectionality hasn’t noticed that Hamas’s axis of support consists of Iran, famous most recently for killing hundreds of protesters demanding women’s freedom.”

…

When the left embraces the zero-sum politics of Palestinian resistance, it merely encourages the zero-sum politics of hard-core Israeli settlers and their supporters.

…

A third consequence is that it abandons the Palestinian people to their worst leaders.

…

It’s fine for Israel’s harshest critics to ask hard questions of Israel’s leaders. But when those same critics stop asking equally hard questions of Palestinian leaders, they are not advocating a cause. They are merely submitting to a regime.

…

Bret Stephens as The Voice of Reason :

The world, including Israel, has a common interest in an eventual Palestinian state that cares more about building itself up than tearing its neighbors down; that invests its energy in future prosperity, not past glory; that accepts compromise and rejects fanaticism. Since Oct. 7, the loudest professed champions of the Palestinian cause have advocated the precise opposite. It may be a recipe for smug self-satisfaction, but it’s also how to kill a Palestinian state.

Bret Stephens is a former employee of The Jerusalem Post and a Neo-Conservative.

A Zionist newspaper’s role As a voice emanating from Zion, the Post has inspired Jews and non-Jews alike across the globe, connecting them to Israel however distant they might be

By Michael Freund

December 3, 2022 02:36

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-723843