Rewarding Hamas

Prime Minister Netanyahu issued the following conditions to end the war in Gaza on Saturday night:

“We will agree to an agreement in which all the hostages are released at once and according to our conditions for ending the war, which include the disarmament of Hamas, the demilitarization of the Strip, Israeli control of the perimeter, and the establishment of a governing authority that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority, and that will live in peace with Israel.”

Given sufficient time for the wounds of war to heal, and for a generation of non-belligerent Palestinian Arabs to evolve, it is possible for a normal nation-state to emerge in the foreseeable future. But none of Israel’s stated conditions to end the war today should be objectionable to people who genuinely want to begin to live side by side with Israel in peace.

However, undermining any possibility of a peace agreement was the completely unnecessary grandstanding by a succession of naive Western leaders, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and Australia announcing their intention to recognize a Palestinian state at next month’s meeting of the UN Security Council. The pitfall of their intended action encourages Hamas’s terrorist leadership to continue to hold fast to a hardline position along with keeping the hostages as a perpetual bargaining chip.

Thanks to the spinelessness of those Western leaders, who like Neville Chamberlain, are pursuing a course of appeasement, there will be no end to the Islamic war against Israel. A war whose origins began in 1948, when five Arab nations, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq attacked Israel, thus rebuffing the UN’s partition plan to establish a Palestinian Arab state to co-exist in peace, alongside a Jewish state. Israel won the 1948 War of Independence but not the peace.

Considering the current situation in Gaza, rewarding Hamas and their Palestinian Arab allies with a state on the heels of their perpetration of unspeakable atrocities, the taking of hundreds of hostages, and their continued stated intention to continue waging war against Israel, is unconscionable.