Hope of a moderate Palestinian state living side by side crashed with the smashed down fence on October 7.
By David E. Kaplan
I stood with my oldest childhood friend visiting from the US at the lookout of the hilltop ruined fortress of Yodfat in Israel’s Lower Galilee. Looking down, Michael and I imagined how terrifying it must have been in 67 A.D. for the defiant Jews being besieged by 60,000 Roman soldiers, their silver plated-armor glistering in the baking sun, the mass of red tunics massing nearer with each passing day alongside their menacing siege machines. Facing the formidable father and son generals of Vespasian and Titus – both future Roman emperors – the Jewish defenders knew they were ultimately facing death or slavery. It took 47 heroic days of fierce fighting for that deadly dawn to arrive.
Another ”deadly dawn” two thousand years later, Israelis have no less illusions of their present enemy or their intentions. October 7 hit Israelis like the proverbial Roman battering ram. When Hamas’ ‘legions’ of supporters abroad brandish banners such as ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, today’s beleaguered Israelis understand it is not fine ideals of freedom these campus cohorts are pursuing but a final end of the Jewish state. Other banners at these global protests only reinforce their true nefarious intent:
- “Red, black, green, and white, we support Hamas’s fight!”
- “Hitler, Hitler, go back home! Palestine is ours alone!”
- “Globalize the intifada!”
- “One, two, three, four, Israel will be no more! Five, six, seven, eight, Israel we’ll eliminate!”
- “Say it loud, say it clear: we do not want Zionists here!”
- “Oh, al-Qassam, you make us proud! Kill another soldier now!”
- “Resistance by any means necessary!”
- “Palestine is our demand! No peace on stolen land!”
- “We say justice. You say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!”
- “We don’t want no two states. We want all of ’48”
“Israel we’ll eliminate”, “Burn Tel Aviv” and “We want all of ‘48” are precisely the war cries that resonated in the frenzied minds of those Gazans that perpetrated the October 7 massacre. The pretense of a peaceful Palestinian state existing side-by-side with Israel was swept away by the sheer savagery of the massacre and the carrying off of the spoils of war – human hostages, including as young as a 9-month-year-old baby, Kfir Bibas. As I write, Kfir was buried today along his brother Ariel and mother Shiri, who were literally snatched from their beds and brutally taken from their kibbutz, Nir Oz, to Gaza and there murdered – the two red-headed babies strangled. What kind of depravity has taken root in a people to behave in this monstrous way that deliberately murders babies with no reproach from their community but quite the opposite – approval and celebration? Micah Halperin in his disturbing article ‘Simply put, they hate us”, (The Jerusalem Post, February,25), explains it this way:
“Hamas and the others like them have been indoctrinated to believe that all Israelis and all Jews are sub-human. And as sub-human, Jews should be killed – much like vermin and other irritating animals. We have seen this before – that is how Nazis successfully trained their murderers to participate in the mass murder process.”
At the end of a long day – of the Bibas funerals, where Israel came to a halt as people poured out onto the streets, holding Israeli flags and crying – the bodies of four more hostages were released. Three of them – Tsachi Idan, Itzhak Elgarat and Ohad Yahalomi had all been murdered in cold blood, while in captivity. The oldest hostage, Shlomo Mantzur 85, a survivor of the Farhud in Iraq in 1941, was slaughtered on October 7, his body taken captive.
With this embedded mindset and its consequent horror, where is the evidence of Gazans aspiring to a Palestinian state living peacefully alongside a Jewish state? One only has to think back to the proposed plan in 2008 of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who offered PA President Mahmoud Abbas, concessions that would appear today as nothing less than astonishing! Under Olmert’s plan, the Palestinians would have received:
- a state on more than 94% of the territory acquired during the Six Day War
- with an additional 5% of Israeli territory tacked onto their state along the edges of Judea, Sameria (West Bank), and Gaza
- Jerusalem would have been divided, with a Palestinian capital in the eastern section
- the Old City – including the Temple Mount and the Western Wall – would have been come under international administration made up of trustees from Israel, Palestine, the US, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
- a highway link or tunnel would have connected Gaza with the West Bank
One would reasonably expect that those desirous of an independent state would have jumped at acceptance or at least come up with an alternative but Abbas never responded to the offer. Instead, Israelis received Hamas’ uncompromising brutal offer of October 7 – the completion of the job of Vespasian and Titus.
Following our visit to Yodfat, it was hard not to escape the comparison of the depraved celebratory Hamas behavior at the humiliating handover ceremonies of the hostages – those dead and alive – with perhaps the most iconic image in Roman art – that of the spoils of the Jerusalem panel on the arch of Titus at Rome, memorializing a key moment in Vespasian and Titus’ triumphal parade of 71. Like Hamas in Gaza, the triumph over the Jews was celebrated in Rome like a gala affair presided over by Vespasian and Titus. As described, it featured piles of booty, including gold relics taken from the destroyed Jewish Temple, paraded through the streets. Floats depicting key engagements of the war enthralled the cheering crowd. Thousands of hapless prisoners, reduced to slaves, were displayed.
Sound familiar?
So yes, no more illusions of glib political proposals for Israelis and Palestinians suggested by European leaders who are themselves in panic mode in scrambling to get their own crumbling house in order. By redefinition, Israelis are at present facing implacable enemies not prospective peace partners.
When those barbarian hords came crushing through the security barriers on October 7, 2023, they crushed too any viability of the Two State Solution for any foreseeable future.
As we bury our hostages, we buried too not only a part of ourselves, but little hope for true peace in our time.
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