Hi Friend,
Why has the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians persisted for so many years? Why does it seem so unsolvable?
One of the major reasons why is that most of what people think they know about the conflict just isn’t true.
To illustrate, the standard narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that we hear in the mainstream media goes something like this:
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During the Mandate era, after Great Britain liberated Palestine from Ottoman rule during World War I, Arabs opposed Jewish immigration to the territory because of their anti-Semitism, which hatred was manifested in murderous riots in 1920, 1921, and 1929.
Then in 1937 the proposal was made to partition the territory into separate Jewish and Arab states, but the recalcitrant Arabs rejected this offer because of their hatred for Jews.
In 1947, the UN adopted the partition plan, but in May 1948 when the Jews declared their state’s independence in the Jews’ historic homeland, the Arabs once again rejected this solution in favor of starting a war to destroy the new state and expel Jews from the land.
The state of Israel prevailed against this aggression, however, and the resulting Palestinian refugee problem was simply a tragic result of the Arabs’ refusal to reason and resort to violence.
Then in 1967 Israel successfully defended itself against another genocidal threat of extinction, defeating the combined Arab armies in just six days and establishing military control over the West Bank and Gaza Strip as an unfortunate but necessary measure for national security.
Starting in the early 1990s, the US mediated repeated peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, establishing the Palestinian Authority (PA) as an interim measure with the aim of implementing the two-state solution favored by virtually the entire international community.
Toward that end, Israel made enormous concessions, but the intransigent Palestinians repeatedly refused generous offers for a state of their own because they simply reject Israel’s right to exist.
In 2005, Israel ended its occupation of Gaza as an act of pure benevolence, but all it got in return was incessant rocket fire from Hamas, and then in 2007, Hamas committed a violent coup against the PA to take over total control of Gaza.
Consequently, to defend itself, Israel implemented a blockade to stop arms from being imported to the Hamas terrorist group, and it has had to repeatedly launch military operations in Gaza to defend itself against Hamas’s attacks.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas invaded Israel, perpetrated horrific massacres of Israeli civilians, and took many Israeli civilians as hostages back into Gaza. In response, Israel has launched a defensive military operation to target Hamas and rescue hostages. Many Palestinian civilians have died as a result of Israel’s operation, but this is just the tragic consequence of Hamas using them as human shields.
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Virtually every aspect of the narrative I’ve just presented to you is demonstrably false.
It is the type of information that most people believe about the conflict, but this is only because Western governments and the mainstream media parrot Zionist propaganda as though representative of historical reality.
Want to learn the truth?
Want to understand the conflict’s true nature and its true root cause?
Want to know what needs to happen for a just peace to be realized?
If so, I dare say, you can’t do better than reading my book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
It is what the great libertarian foreign policy analyst Scott Horton has recently described as “the definitive scholarly account of the American role in the entire
disaster.”
You can get a print or Kindle edition from Amazon, but signed copies are available exclusively when you cut out the middleman and purchase a hardcover or paperback directly from me on my website:
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