by Giles Fraser, UnHerd
Hamas could stop this war tomorrow and so end the horrendous suffering of the people of Gaza. Lest we forget: on October 7, following the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Hamas kidnapped 251 men, women and children and hid them away in tunnels as human bargaining chips. Some 50 of them are still being held in Gaza — though over half of these are probably now dead.
For Israelis, this war is about two things: destroying Hamas and returning the hostages. They won’t fully achieve the first objective because this most brutal of wars is only fuelling the kind of burning resentment against Israel that recruits for terrorism, for Hamas or its eventual successors. But until the hostages are released, Israel will continue to fight to get them back, and rightly so. Peace cannot come without the hostages being freed. And nothing Keir Starmer can do will change this logic. He can make things worse, though — and he just has.
Like Starmer, I support a two-state solution. And by the way, if you do too, that makes you a Zionist, because to be a Zionist is simply to believe in a state for the Jewish people in their historic homeland. But Hamas has never believed in a two-state solution. It wants to destroy Israel and eradicate it “from the river to the sea”. These are not just cheap words on a protest poster. In 2017, Hamas revised its original charter (though it did not revoke it) to take away references to the fight against Jews. Instead, it re-described the policy as a national liberation struggle to establish a state of Palestine “which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras Al-Naquarah in the north to Umm al-Rashrash in the south”. That is: the entirety of Israel. This is a blueprint for the total annihilation of a country. And the reason Hamas may seek the temporary advantage of what we in the West think of as a two-state solution is simply because it serves as a bridgehead for the eventual destruction of Israel.
Diplomatic Terrorism?: France’s Recognition of an Imaginary Palestinian State, Gatestone Institute