In response to Israel adopting defensive measures in the wake of an unprovoked massacre undertaken by Hamas, a notion is gaining widespread international currency – that all would be well, if only the Palestinians were granted a state of their own. Supporters of such a view, be they individuals or nation states, generally look upon Israel as being responsible for the unfortunate lot of the Palestinians. That being the case, they maintain that the provision of statehood to the Palestinians is long overdue. The Palestinians would certainly welcome such a state provided they need not recognise the legitimacy of Israel and that they remain free to engage in an ongoing campaign to undermine and eventually destroy it.

Their obsessive desire to bring about the downfall of Israel is fuelled by two intermingling factors. One relates to their belief that Israel is uniquely responsible for their chronic statelessness. The other relates to their holding of an extreme, Nazi-like version of anti-Semitism. However, the historical records indicate that the current plight of the Palestinians is exclusively due to their outright rejections of proposals, submitted at various times, by Britain, the UN and Israel, all of which if adopted, would have facilitated the formation of an independent Palestinian State.

On May 17, 1939, Britain– which ostensibly was ruling Palestine in the interest of fostering a Jewish State there – abruptly reneged on its commitments to the Jews in order to woo Arab support in the light of a looming war with Germany. Britain presented the Arabs with an offer allowing them to form a Palestinian State in the entire area of Palestine that would come into existence within ten years. As for the Jews, 75,000 migrants would be accepted within a five-year period and thereafter, Jews could only enter Palestine if they obtained Arab approval. Nonetheless, the Arabs rejected the British offer outright on the grounds that they were not prepared to wait ten years and furthermore, they were not prepared to countenance even a token amount of additional Jewish migrants.

Shortly after the war, on being harassed by a Jewish underground movement, as well as being financially strapped, Britain began to consider extricating itself from Palestine. With that in mind, it approached the United Nations for advice and as a result, the UN established UNSCOP, that is, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, consisting of delegates from eleven member states. As a means of assessing the aspirations of the Jewish and Arab communities in Palestine, UNSCOP interviewed their respective leaders. The Arab spokesmen made it abundantly clear that they would insist on obtaining nothing less than Palestine in its entirety, from which every single Jew would be expelled. By contrast, the Jewish spokesmen indicated that although they felt entitled to all of Palestine, if need be, they would settle for a reasonable portion. The upshot of it all, is that the majority of UNSCOP’s delegates proposed partitioning Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish State and arranged for the UN General Assembly to ratify their decision. Accordingly, on November 29, 1947, the General Assembly adopted UNSCOP’s motion by a two-thirds majority. For the Jews, the General Assembly’s decision was music to their ears expressed by spontaneous street singing and dancing. As for the Arabs, they declared a three-day protest strike which rapidly degenerated into a state of chronic civil upheaval.

By December 1947, the British decided to terminate their Palestinian mandate and withdraw all their forces no later than May 15, 1948. On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was declared based on land areas on which the Jews already constituted the majority of the population. The very next day, the newly fledged Jewish State was assailed by the armies of Transjordan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon plus a small Palestinian contingent, all of which, bar the Palestinians, were members of a newly formed Arab League. Speaking on behalf of the League, its secretary General Abdul-Rahman proclaimed, ‘This will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre.’ Fortunately for the Jews, Rahman’s prophecy did not materialise. Instead, by desperately applying all their meagre military and manpower resources, the Israelis held the Arabs at bay. Finally, on February 24, 1949, Egypt brokered an armistice agreement with Israel, as did all the rest of the Arab invaders in the few months that followed. In the process, both Egypt and Transjordan held onto territory previously designated by the United Nations as components of a future Palestinian state. Specifically, Transjordan occupied the entire West Bank, which it annexed in April 1950 while renaming itself Jordan, while Egypt assumed full and exclusive control of the Gaza Strip.

For the next 18 years, the Palestinians living in those areas never once challenged the right of Jordan and Egypt to rule over them. In fact, it ultimately took the initiative of non-Palestinians to galvanise them into forming their own liberation movement, with the singular objective of destroying Israel. In January 1964, at an Arab League summit held in Cairo, president Nasser of Egypt persuaded his fellow delegates to sponsor the formation of a Palestine Liberation Movement under the leadership of Ahmad Shukeiry, who had previously served as the Saudi Arabian ambassador at the United Nations. By May 1964, in East Jerusalem, Shukeiry chaired the founding conference of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which drafted the movement’s uncompromising anti-Israel platform. However, the conference reassured Jordan that it had no intention of abrogating Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank. What the PLO did intend on doing to overcome Israel, was either to expel virtually all the all Jews living there or massacre most of them. On the eve of the Six-Day War, on being asked what was to become of the defeated Israelis, Shukeiry simply indicated that he did not expect any to survive.

As it happened, The Six-Day War resulted in Israel assuming possession of the entire West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. In the war’s opening phase, Israel, not wishing Jordan any harm, implored it to remain aloof. But in paying no heed to Israel’s overtures, King Hussein responded by declaring, ‘We are engaged in a war of honour and heroism against our common enemy. For years we have longed to wipe away the shame of the past.’ Putting his sentiments into practice, Hussein oversaw the launching of over 6,000 shells into West Jerusalem causing extensive damage and injuries. In response, Israel overran Hussein’s forces and captured the West Bank.

During the following 36 years, in want of any Palestinian organisation willing to come to terms with its existence, Israel retained command over all the territories it had conquered. Then, on September 13, 1993, the situation surprisingly altered, for it appeared that Israel and the Palestinians had arrived at a general agreement, hammered out in Norway and known as in the Oslo Accords. At that time, the PLO’s stocks were very low. As a result of an Israeli incursion into Lebanon In 1982, the PLO leadership had been compelled to abandon its headquarters in Beirut and to seek refuge in Tunisia, far from its theatre of operations. Then, in 1990, the Palestinians sided with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, thus incurring the wrath of a number of other Arab countries. Finding itself boxed in, the PLO sought to achieve a temporary understanding with Israel. Falsely assuming that that the PLO had changed its spots, Israel permitted it to enter the West Bank and Gaza.

Among the items in the Oslo Accords, provision was made for Palestinians to obtain a degree of self-determination within the conquered territories, whereby a Palestinian Authority could oversee the domestic affairs of its people. Such an arrangement was meant to be provisional, for ultimately a full scale peace treaty was to be formularised and implemented. With that in mind, on July 11, 2000, President Bill Clinton hosted both the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak and the head of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, at his Camp David Retreat. The 14 days spent there turned out to be a sham, for it soon became evident that Arafat had not the slightest intention in forging peace with Israel. Essentially, while Barak offered to cede 91 per cent of the West Bank, to remove all Israeli troops stationed in the Jordan Valley, and to share sovereignty over the Temple Mount. Arafat responded by reaffirming a long standing PLO principle, that there could be no peace unless all the Palestinian refugees and their descendants were granted the right of return to Israel. Finally, Jerusalem, in its entirety, had to become an integral component of a future Palestinian State.

On returning to the West Bank, Arafat was awarded a hero’s welcome for his so-called steadfastness. Surrounded by a host of admirers, he called for the immediate onset of an intifada, which turned out to be a continuous chain of suicide bombings directed at Israelis of all walks of life. By the time the intifada was eventually quelled, over a thousand innocent Israelis were killed.

Meanwhile, in 2005, Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, distinguished for his hard-line attitude to the Palestinians, surprised everyone by his unilateral decision to totally vacate Gaza. In the process, both Israeli soldiers and settlers were removed, leaving Gaza under the exclusive control, first of the Palestine Authority and then in 2007, of Hamas.

A year later, on September 16, 2008, Ehud Olmert, Israel’s then-Prime Minister, after engaging in a series of private talks with Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the PLO, presented his interlocutor with Israel’s peace terms. For retaining 6.4 per cent of the West Bank, on which Israel’s prime settlements were located, Israel would forgo an area of land adjacent to Gaza that amounted to 5.8 per cent of the area of the West Bank. To facilitate Palestinian access between the West Bank and Gaza, Israel would be prepared to provide the Palestinians with a tunnel under their own control. Jerusalem would be shared, with Arab suburbs being part of a Palestinian state and Jewish ones part of Israel. Finally, the Temple Mount would be jointly administered by Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Palestinian State, Israel, and the USA.

Olmert’s offer was an extraordinary one. Without doubt, no other Israeli leader would be prepared to offer anything more than what Barak had offered and which was considered by President Clinton as being generous. Yet Abbas simply walked away from it by not upholding his promise to return later with his advisers. As Olmert put it, ‘I never saw him again.’

What can be concluded from all of the above is that the Palestinians’ hatred of Israel does not stem from Israel maliciously depriving them of statehood. Rather it is due to a fanatical adherence to a unique form of anti-Semitism derived from both Islamic texts and secular sources. Unquestionably, the leading progenitor of modern Palestinian anti-Semitism was a Muslim cleric by the name of Haj Amin al-Husseini. In 1921, al-Husseini was appointed by Herbert Samuel, the British Governor of Palestine, to head the Muslim community. Samuel, who himself was Jewish, committed a fateful error of judgment, for not only was al-Husseini a rabid Jew hater, but by becoming president of the government-funded Supreme Muslim Council, as well as assuming control over the country’s Islamic courts, he was able to ensure that his congregants were thoroughly imbued with his prejudices. In the process, he instituted various attacks on Palestinian Jews, culminating 1929 in a deadly pogrom in Hebron. The second world war saw al-Husseini taking up residence in Germany during 1941. From there he broadcast Nazi propaganda to the Middle East, had an interview with Hitler, visited a concentration camp with Heinrich Himmler, and organised Bosnian Muslim battalions for the Waffen-SS. In 1944, during one of his broadcasts, al-Husseini declared, ‘Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them.’ Indeed, al-Hussein dearly hoped that the Palestinians would emulate the Nazis by doing unto the Jews of Palestine what the Nazis did to those of Europe. At the war’s end, al-Husseini managed to take up residence in Cairo and then in Beirut where he died in 1974. Although in his later years, he became somewhat quiescent, to this very day al-Husseini is lauded as a great Palestinian leader and a role model. His thoughts are positively highlighted in Palestinian school texts and as a result, his detestation of Jews has become impressed upon the minds Palestinian students.

During most of the latter part of the 20th Century, Palestinian nationalists were the main upholders and proponents of anti-Semitism. But by the closing years of the 20th Century, Hamas (an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement founded in 1997 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood), disseminated anti-Semitism in an Islamist garb. The Muslim Brotherhood, from which Hamas emerged, was founded in Egypt in 1928 to foster Islamist piety and the provision of charity. Over time, it spread worldwide to other Muslim communities. Influenced by the writings of their sage Sayyid Qutb, the Brothers believe that throughout Islam’s entire history, Muslims have continuously been at war with Jews, their principal enemy. What has made the war endless is the alleged deviousness and perfidious nature of Jews. For, as Qutb maintained, there are no limits to the evil acts that Jews are capable of undertaking. To drive his point home, Qutb wrote that the Jews ‘killed and massacred and even sawed the bodies of a number of their own prophets … so what do you expect from people who do this to their own prophets other than to be blood-letting and to target the entire humanity’. Be it noted that such Islamic anti-Semitism was being promoted 40 years before the establishment of Israel.

In 1998, Hamas released its Charter which, among other things, reflects Qutb’s views where in the preliminary section, it reads: ‘Our battle with the Jews is long and dangerous, requiring all dedicated efforts. It is a phase which must be followed by succeeding phases … until the enemy is overcome and the victory of Allah descends.’ The continuation of the battle in the present arises from the fact that all land ever occupied by Muslims is inalienable and therefore can never be forsaken. As the Charter explains, ‘Palestine is an Islamic Waaf (Trust)’ and it is not the right of any Muslim ‘to give it up nor any part of it’. The implication being that Hamas regards its struggle with Jews not as a conflict between two national parties vying for the same land but as a purely religious one, involving the forces of good over the forces of evil. Such an approach automatically rules out any prospect of a negotiated settlement. In stressing the extent to which Jews are capable of wielding inordinate power, Article 22 of the Charter lists some of their supposed accomplishments, these include being responsible for the French and Communist Revolutions as well as the first and second world wars. In addition the Jews have ‘controlled imperialistic nations and pushed them to occupy many nations to exhaust their natural resources’.

Fighting such a foe involves a battle to the finish with the enemy totally decimated. This is made clear in Article 7 ‘where the Islamic Resistance Movement looks forward to fulfilling the promise of Allah no matter how long it takes’. Should one wonder when the promise of Allah would be realised, the text informs us that it will not come, ‘…until the Muslims fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them, and the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim or servant of Allah there is a Jew behind me come and kill him.’ A 2011 poll of Palestinians in Gaza revealed that 73 per cent believed in Allah’s promise as described in the Hamas Charter. An indication of what was to be in store for the slaughtered Israelis was given by the Hamas cleric, Sheikh Ilyas Funun, who on Al-Aqsa TV, the official Hamas-run television channel, proclaimed that he would swear on the Quran, ‘That not a single Jew will remain on this land. We will not let a single one of you, alive or dead on this land. By Allah, we will dig up your bones from your graves and get them out of this country.’

Non-Hamas Palestinians, by contrast, have tended to associate with the PLO and the Palestinian Authority under the chairmanship of Mahmoud Abbas. They purport to be essentially nationalists striving for an independent Palestinian State. However, they too are anti-Semitic but unlike Hamas, they draw much of their inspiration not only from the writings of al-Husseini but also from classical anti-Semitic libels. For example, in May 2016, Mahmoud Abbas, in a speech delivered to the European Parliament, maintained that, ‘Only a week ago, a number of rabbis in Israel demanded that their government poison the water to kill the Palestinians.’ Similarly, in October 24, 2000, Colonel Nadir- al-Tamimi, of the Palestinian Liberation Army, recounted on television that, ‘Jews suck the blood of Arabs for use on the holidays of Passover and Purim.’

Although the Palestinian Authority has not committed a massacre of Israelis akin to that what Hamas did on October 7, 2023, it has neither condemned it nor expressed any sympathy for the victims. In fact, there is reason to believe that Palestinians in the West Bank take kindly to such atrocities. To substantiate that assertion, we first need to recall what took place during the pogrom that occurred years ago in Hebron. In 1929, al-Husseini, in preaching to his adherents, convinced them that the Jews were plotting to seize the Jerusalem Temple Mount in order to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Consequently, on August 24, a highly charged arms-bearing mob, numbering 3,000 men, converged on Hebron’s Jewish community. As Yardena Schwartz described the scene, ‘They went from house to house, raping, stabbing, torturing, and in some cases castrating and burning alive their unarmed Jewish victims.’ All told, 67 Jewish lives were lost, with many more seriously injured. To their great credit, some ‘two dozen Muslim men and women risked their own lives in order to rescue their Jewish neighbours’. Acting fairly swiftly, the British police identified and arrested three key instigators of the pogrom, who were put on trial and subsequently hanged. Years later, the Palestinian Authority, under the leadership of Mahmoud Abbas, instead of taking pride in the humane Palestinians who lent assistance to imperilled Jews, deemed the murderers in question to be Palestinian martyrs worthy of praise and emulation. Each year, on the anniversary of their hanging, the media of the Palestinian Authority extols the murderers as the noble heroes and role models of Palestine. Moreover, the Palestinian Authority routinely awards financial assistance to any family that encounters a loss of one or more its members who are either killed or imprisoned on account of indiscriminately murdering Israelis, as they innocently go about their daily lives. By virtue of their ideologies and behaviour, it is reasonable to conclude that the Palestinian authorities in both Gaza and the West Bank primarily serve as vehicles for destroying Israel. Neither of them place any special emphasis on enhancing the economic and social wellbeing of their subjects, who are essentially looked upon as potential cannon fodder. Nor do Palestinians under their sway enjoy the rights of free speech and the privilege of choosing their leaders at the ballot box. To buttress their dictatorships, the security forces in both Gaza and the West Bank freely resort to indiscriminate torture. According to the Human Rights Watch, detainees are frequently subjected to severe beatings and whippings, as well as being subject to painful stress positions entailing the ‘hoisting of their arms behind their backs with cables or ropes’.

Maliciously turning a blind eye to the true nature of the Palestinian leadership in both in Gaza and the West Bank, the United Nations General Assembly, on December 3, 2024, called upon Israel to fully withdraw from both Gaza and the West Bank as a prelude to the creation of an independent Palestinian State. To facilitate the formation of that putative state, an international conference is scheduled to convene in June, 2025, in New York. Nonetheless, given the current aspirations of the Palestinians, the chances of them accepting any statehood which obliges them to live peacefully side by side with Israel, is most implausible. For if truth be told, the Palestinians’ preference is for a one state solution, that is, a state located between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean devoid of Jews. Given the Palestinians’ insistence on securing such a state, those who wilfully or naively lend them support, are effectively accomplices in the undermining of Israel’s security.

Leslie Stein is the writer of The Hope Fulfilled: The Rise of Modern Israel, The Making of Modern Israel and Israel Since the Six-Day War