The Dream of a Lovable Palestinian State of Hamas and Others
A former Polish Jesuit writes that he is a skeptic, but does not say on what issue. He raves about an Irishman who claims that a book about the clash of civilizations has influenced American policy in the Middle East. I'm curious how this Irishman came up with this, but not enough to read his book. I thought the former Jesuit would share a secret with me, but the former Jesuit assured me that he was a skeptic, that the Irishman was good and did not support terror (which probably gives him carte blanche to write books based on false premises). The former Jesuit is convinced that thanks to people like this good Irishman, a peaceful solution has been found in Ireland and he hopes that such a solution can be found for Israel and the Palestinians. I like the former Jesuit very much, but I am very afraid that his steadfast struggle to create a lovable Palestinian State of Hamas and Others may be effective. In this fight, he has the powerful support of the U.S. administration, the United Nations, Western democracies, and millions of people of good will, with a solid portion not only of Diaspora Jews, but also of Israeli Jews.
The former Jesuit apparently doesn't have time to read Palestinian dissidents' reports on the extent to which Hamas represents the Palestinians (and that's information from Palestinian polling centers). It's not some kind of secret knowledge, it takes a lot of willpower to keep this knowledge away from you. And the essence of this support is best expressed by a telephone conversation between a Hamas murderer and his parents in Gaza, asking them to see for themselves how many Jews he had just killed with his own hands.
The former Jesuit wants to hope for peace, he has no desire for reality, so instead of blaming the poor Palestinians, he casts an evil eye on Prime Minister Netanyahu. He's not the only one.
On October 7, Nazi barbarians killed more Jews than during Kristallnacht, an event that shocked the media world for a few days, then supporters of the lovable Palestinian State of Hamas and Others reacted with increased hatred of Israel.
Israeli political scientist Shany Mor tries to explain this phenomenon in The Wall Street Journal, claiming that the phenomenon of increased antipathy towards Jews in response to the massacre of Jews results from the need to reduce cognitive dissonance. (Quoted by Adam Levick of Camera U.K.)
“Western activists for Palestinians”, he added, “are dedicated to two nearly theological precepts: that Israel is evil, and that no Palestinian action is ever connected to any Palestinian outcome”. Hamas’s gruesome attack, he concluded, “poses a threat to this worldview, and the only way to resolve it is by heightening Israel’s imagined malevolence. The terrorist atrocities don’t trigger a recoiling from the cause in whose name they were carried out; they lead to an even greater revulsion at the victim.”
Does that mean they're bad people? Not at all, they are permeated by an abominable goodness, the same goodness that fills the heart of Pope Francis.
On October 14, a well-known American journalist of Jewish origin, Peter Beinart, published an article in the New York Times about his hope for the liberation of Palestinians. He begins this article by reminding us that in 1988 in South Africa, the African National Congress renounced terror.
This American journalist realizes that Hamas is different, asserts that Hamas is terrible, and states:
Yet when Palestinians resist their oppression in ethical ways — by calling for boycotts, sanctions and the application of international law — the United States and its allies work to ensure that those efforts fail, which convinces many Palestinians that ethical resistance doesn’t work, which empowers Hamas.
The question of how he came to this wonderful conclusion is futile. How do you explain that 78 percent of the Mandate of Palestine was allocated to Arab Palestine (Transjordan/Jordan), where there was not supposed to live a single Jew, and the remaining 22 percent to the Jewish Home, where Jews were prepared to live in peace with their Arab neighbors? How do you explain to an American journalist that the Jews did not expel their Arab neighbors, that the Islamofascist nationalist movement called for the murder of Jews whenever possible? How do you explain to an American journalist that when 5 Arab armies invaded one-day old Israel, the organizers of this expedition (which was supposed to be the completion of the Holocaust) called on the Arab population to flee the area of military operations for a week? How do you explain to this man where the definition of a "Palestinian refugee" came from, as someone who lived for at least two years in the areas where Israel was founded, but even those who returned to the countries which they had left a few years earlier remained Palestinian refugees forever? How do you explain the fact that Israeli Jews today are mostly refugees and descendants of refugees from Muslim countries, where they have been deprived of property many times larger than all of Israel? How do you explain to this journalist that Palestinians who want peace with Israel are - both under Hamas and Palestinian Authority rule - persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and killed?
Peter Beinart is too good a man to want to know that. A man with a bizarre internet pseudonym asked me once which verses of the Qur'an encourage the conquest of the world. I recommended several books to him by authors who had been brought up in the Islamic world and in the Islamic religion. He replied that he would not read them because they were people who did not like Islam. I didn't mean to convince him, but for the benefit of other readers of this thread, I wrote that Al-Azhar University is the equivalent of the Catholic Vatican, and its Sheikh Ahmad Al-Tayyeb is the equivalent of Pope Francis. Ahmad Al-Tayyeb has never condemned al-Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban, he has never condemned ISIS, he has never condemned the genocide of Christians by Muslims in Africa, and he has never condemned Hamas (neither after October 7 nor before). Muslims (not Pope Francis or any American president) asked him to declare that ISIS is not Islamic, that it is against the Qur'an. The main authority of Sunni Islam dismissed them with contemptuous silence (knowing full well how much these Muslims wanted to get him to tell untruths). Egypt's President Sisi appealed to him to change the teachings of Islam so as to eliminate calls for hatred against infidels and calls to proselytize by violence. The greatest Sunni religious authority rejected the idea. It is difficult to accuse the good Sheikh of disliking Islam, and it is also difficult to deny his knowledge of the Qur'an and other holy scriptures of his religion.
Of course, no one asks Ayatollah Khamenei such questions, because that would be very dangerous. On his part, the repeated cries of "death to America, death to Israel" and the assurance that the Qur'anic call to "sow terror in the hearts of the infidels" is the very basis of the religion of peace, are proof that Ahmad Al-Tayyeb is a moderate Muslim next to him.
Pope Francis is friends with this good Sunni Sheikh (he also made a pilgrimage to a Shiite imam in Iraq) and is honestly convinced that Islam is a religion of peace. He is not bothered by Nazi salutes, nor by the murder of Christians, much less by the murder of Jews. He is a very good man, this Catholic Pope.
Peter Beinart is not only an American, but also a Jew, and he cannot bring himself to show such tolerance which Pope Francis is serving up to the world. Beinart has seen the true face of Hamas, although he does not suspect it has anything to do with Islam.
He is rather suspicious of the "cycle". (The interesting thing about these cycles.)
The savagery Hamas committed on Oct. 7 has made reversing this monstrous cycle much harder. It could take a generation. It will require a shared commitment to ending Palestinian oppression in ways that respect the infinite value of every human life. It will require Palestinians to forcefully oppose attacks on Jewish civilians, and Jews to support Palestinians when they resist oppression in humane ways — even though Palestinians and Jews who take such steps will risk making themselves pariahs among their own people.
The immensity of the goodness of this Judeo-American humanist is frightening. I have the impression that Peter Beinart is guessing that it is impossible to build a lovable Palestinian State of Hamas and Others. A Palestinian state must be built by peaceful Palestinians. He doesn't explain which ones, he doesn't explain how they are supposed to get rid of Hamas and others, he doesn't have a clear idea of who these "others" are. In his view, ugly Israel, with America's help, was undermining the position of the Palestinians, who sought to end the Israeli occupation through negotiation or peaceful pressure. An interesting vision of this "aspiration" pursued by the rulers of the Palestinians, first Arafat and then Abbas. Pope Francis is not the only good man who imagines Abbas to be an "angel of peace."
Peter Beinart, in one of the most important newspapers in the world, ends his poem by writing:
,,… when it finally becomes hideously clear that Hamas cannot free Palestinians by murdering children and Israel cannot subdue Gaza, even by razing it to the ground, those communities may become the germ of a mass movement for freedom that astonishes the world…
Another standard-bearer of peace, UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutterres, uses a moral compass of the same make as Pope Francis and the Judeo-American humanist when he says:
"Even in this moment of grave and immediate danger, we cannot lose sight of the only realistic foundation for a true peace and stability: a two-State solution."
Earlier, this standard-bearer of peace, who heads an organization of peace-loving nations, deigned to say that the events of October 7 "did not happen in a vaccum" (no, he did not mean that they were preceded by tens of thousands of rockets and terrorist attacks on Jews with the logistical backing of anti-Israel UN resolutions, or that the Islamic Republic of Iran is behind Hamas's actions), nor that this war on the Jews is constantly instigated by the "liberal" Western press, repeating the propaganda of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.)
Not surprisingly, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations decided that from now on, he and his team would move around the organization's buildings with yellow Stars of David pinned to them.
Source: Video screenshot from Giliat Erdan's X account
The Polish former Jesuit is truly a wonderful man, he still dreams of a Church with a human face and still wants to believe that Pope Francis is a more moderate Catholic than his predecessors. Like Guterres, he also does not want to lose sight of "the only realistic basis for true peace and stability: a two-state solution."
The dream of a lovable Palestinian State of Hamas and Others is shared by hundreds of millions of good people, and maintaining this dream requires firmness, a firm refusal to believe that Islam is waging a religious war in which Jews are only the front lines, where victory depends on the strength of the support of people of good will around the world.
Translation: Małgorzata Koraszewska and Sarah Lawson