In your Leading Article (January 30) you say, quite correctly, that Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government relies on the support of ultra-nationalists with no interest in a two-state solution. But a two-state solution is not the aim, either, of the factions comprising the Palestinian leadership.
Ever since 2007, when the extremist organization Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian people have been split in two. Hamas regards Israel as an interloper on Palestinian land and aims to overthrow it and gain control of the whole territory “from the river to the sea” – that is from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. Palestinians under Hamas’s control, or supporting the Hamas agenda, would never subscribe to a two-state solution, since one of the states would be Israel. World opinion has never faced up to the awkward truth that, in order to achieve a two-state solution, Hamas would first need to be disempowered.
Another uncomfortable fact is that even the more moderate elements within the Palestinian leadership share their ultimate aim with Hamas and differ only on the means to achieve it.
The Palestine Liberation Organisation under Yasser Arafat, and now under Mahmoud Abbas, is prepared to give lip-service to the two-state concept, but only as a stepping stone to the ultimate goal of gaining control of the whole of what was once Mandatory Palestine. Any Palestinian leader who actually signed a two-state agreement legitimising Israel’s right to exist would be instantly denounced as a traitor to the Palestinian cause.
Neville Teller
Published in the Daily Telegraph, 31 January 2023:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2023/01/31/letters-yet-another-health-secretary-looks-technology-save-nhs/
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