Palestinian-Americans oppose peace

Like Hamas, Palestinian-Americans reject two states, insist on one state

Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin / The New York Times; Photography via Getty

For almost three decades now, the world has been in consensus that the two-state solution is the only way out of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), recognized as the representative of Palestinians globally, as well as the Palestinian Authority (PA), which represents Palestinians in the Palestinian Territories, have both signed on two-state. But Palestinian-Americans, from the comfort of their luxury life in America, oppose two-state, and insist on the one state solution.

Following in the footsteps of late Columbia professor Edward Said, Palestinian-Americans endorse one binational state, where both Jews and Arabs live as citizens with equal rights. Problem is, however, such state turns the Jews into a minority, and allows an Arab majority to transform Israel into Palestine. In effect, the binational solution becomes a temporary arrangement, more like a Trojan horse, where Palestinians use democracy to climb the ladder, then kick it away once they make it to the top. 

Said’s binational state does not differ much from Hamas’s vision for the future. The Palestinian terrorist group plans to defeat Israel militarily, destroy it, and replace with a single state, an Islamic one. Said wants this to happen peacefully, through the ballot boxes.

The only difference between the solutions that Said and Hamas offer to Israelis is the nature of the government of Palestine that will replace Israel. Said wants a secular government that treats Jews as equals, while Hamas wants to treat Jews as Dhimmis, second degree citizens as specified by Islam. In either case, Jews will be a minority. 

Palestinians who support the two-state solution, mainly Fatah and its various factions, make up close to half of the Palestinians in the territories. These insist on Palestinian sovereignty in their own state, next to Israel. 

While Palestine of Fatah is not Islamist, like that of Hamas, it is not secular either, and it retains many Islamic features, such as using a mosque as the emblem of the state. Also, inside the building of the Palestinian Legislative Council, behind where the speaker sits, the PA has inscribed a Hadith, attributed to Prophet Muhammad, on using consultation, or Shura, in decision making. Like most other Arab countries, the government and public space in Palestine, under Fatah, will not be neutral, and will bestow the status of minorities on non-Muslims, rendering them de facto second degree citizens. 

In the two-state solution, the Palestine that will rise next to Israel will be a state for the Muslim majority. It follows that the other state, Israel, will be one for the Jews. But no.

All Palestinians — the secular Said crowd, Hamas and Fatah — insist on “the right of return” of Palestinians, not to the Palestinian state to-be-created, but to Israel. If this ever happens, demographics will make the Jews a minority inside their own Israel, rendering the two state solution as follows: One Arab Palestine, and one half Arab and half Jewish Israel. 

In all three Palestinian offers for peace — binational, Islamist Palestine and two-state — Jews will be a minority in their state. When Jews refuse to concede their sovereignty inside Israel, Palestinian-Americans paint them as Apartheid (like the defunct racist regime of South Africa). For more dramatic effects, Palestinian-Americans have coined a term to describe Israel, “racist occupation,” which is an oxymoron. Racism implies discrimination between citizens of the same state. Occupation means an alien state occupying another. Israel can be either racist or an occupation, but cannot be both.

Also using American dogwhistles, Palestinians call themselves indigenous, oblivious to the fact that at least half the Israeli population is formed of Arab Jews, those who relocated from neighboring Arab countries to Israel (which makes these Jews as indigenous as the Arab Palestinians). 

In an article in The New York Times, Palestinian-American Yousef Munayyer argued for one binational state by citing polls showing that the majority of Americans support it. Why American public opinion is relevant in deciding how Jews and Arabs live in Israel and Palestine is unclear. 

What is clear, however, is that Palestinian-Americans found in “progressive” Democrats a useful tool with which to hit Israel on the head. Members of Congress, who cannot read an Arabic newspaper, are now berating mayoral candidates in New York City for Tweeting support for Israel “during Ramadan.” How is Ramadan relevant to New York’s mayoral race? 

Meanwhile, Rashida Tlaib, the Palestinian-American Congresswoman from Michigan, tries to hide her inadequate Arabic by inserting Arabic words, like sitty (Arabic for grandma) into her English statements. While on MSNBC, Tlaib said that when she was a little girl, she used to pray with her grandma at Alaska (she meant al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem). 

By meshing their case with domestic American causes against injustice, Palestinian-Americans wear victimhood on their sleeves and go after Israel. What these Palestinian-Americans never do, however, is that they never call for peace that preserves the existence of Israel. They want peace that makes Israel concede its sovereignty and for the Jews to become a minority, effectively finishing off Israel. They hide this kind of “humanitarianism” behind just American causes. This is what “progressive” Democrats are buying, wittingly or not.