In a recent piece for The Guardian, opinion columnist Owen Jones expresses his ire about last week’s speech given by opposition party leader Keir Starmer to the Labour Friends of Israel.
In his op-ed, Denied a state, Palestinians are now denied a say in their own future, Jones manages to sidestep most of the salient facts surrounding the issue of Palestinian statehood in a bid to hammer home his simplistic central message: Palestinians are victims and Israel and its supporters are responsible.
Jones’ disregard for the truth is evident in his headline, which misleadingly implies Israel is somehow responsible for Palestinians being “denied a state.”
Yet, he neglects to mention why such statehood has not yet been actualized: the Palestinian leadership has repeatedly rejected all comprehensive peace proposals.
For example, at the Camp David Summit in 2000, then-US president Bill Clinton, with the backing of then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, offered Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat a deal that would have seen 92 percent of the West Bank and all of the Gaza Strip put under Palestinian control, with a plan to award territorial compensation for the remaining eight percent.
In addition, eastern Jerusalem would have been designated the new state’s capital.
Unfortunately for millions of Palestinians, Arafat rejected the proposal and, instead, unleashed the Second Intifada, a campaign of suicide attacks that killed more than 1,000 Israelis and injured thousands more.
Just three years after the bloodshed, a plan for peace and Palestinian statehood was back on the table.
In 2008, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was presented with a new offer. This time, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert suggested Palestinians should be given nearly all of the West Bank, bar 6.7 percent of the territory where Jewish communities existed. Finally, Palestinians would have all of Gaza, which would be linked to the West Bank, and Jerusalem’s Old City was to be placed under international control.
Yet again, the offer was rejected.
Indeed, any real attempts at peace have been consistently rebuffed by the Palestinian leadership, including initiatives by the United States to restart talks in 2014, 2016 and 2019 and the PA’s refusal to end its incentivization for terror attacks via its much-criticized “pay-for-slay” policy.
Furthermore, Jones’ confident assertion that Palestinians “are now denied a say in their own future” is, frankly, laughable considering the PA has not held elections in more than 15 years. Abbas is currently in the 17th year of his four-year mandate.
Apparently, Jones does not care about the curtailment of Palestinians’ democratic rights when their own leaders are responsible.
He then offers his view on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement:
BDS is a strategy called for by Palestinians that seeks to end the occupation, grant the fifth of Israeli society who are Palestinian equal rights, and achieve justice for Palestinian refugees… BDS is an entirely peaceful strategy and yet it is still dismissed as beyond the pale, raising the question: what exactly is a legitimate form of Palestinian resistance?”
However, the oft-parroted assertion that BDS actors are mounting an “entirely peaceful” campaign while seeking to “achieve justice for Palestinian refugees” masks the true intention of the movement: to dismantle the Jewish state.
Omar Barghouti, who is frequently cited as a BDS co-founder, has previously affirmed his support for “armed resistance,” while rejecting any suggestion of a two-state solution on the grounds that there could never be “a Jewish state in any part of [British Mandatory] Palestine.”
BDS activist and founder of the Free Palestine Movement, Paul Larudee, did not mince his words when he unambiguously summarized the true goal of the anti-Israel movement: “Our corporation boycotts all Israeli products and services, and encourages other institutions, companies and individuals to cease and avoid all economic, academic and cultural activity that supports the racist state of Israel until that state dissolves itself.” [Emphasis added]
What part of pushing for the Jewish state to be liquified does Jones think is “entirely peaceful”? And what does Jones think will happen to the nearly seven million Jews who live in Israel when the country is erased?
Jones then hits out Labour leader Keir Starmer’s claim that he is both a friend to Israel and the Palestinians:
[Starmer’s] position may sound eminently reasonable, but there is a huge gulf in power between an impoverished, besieged and militarily occupied territory and a powerful state with a hi-tech military that is backed by a superpower.
By trying to find equivalence, he downplayed the human rights issues at hand. He mentioned the killing of Israeli citizens in terror attacks, but only the ‘daily humiliations, constraints and restrictions’ endured by Palestinians, even though 22 times as many Palestinians were killed between 2008 and 2020.”
That Jones can blithely ignore the role the Palestinian leadership has in keeping its citizens in a state of chronic poverty is astonishing.
Gaza’s terrorist rulers Hamas, for example, currently hold interests in dozens of international companies, with an estimated value reportedly exceeding $500 million – not that any of this money is spent on much-needed infrastructure in the Strip.
Hamas is also well-funded by Iran, which has supplied the group with all kinds of state-of-the-art military equipment, including rockets and drones, that are then used to wage war against the Jewish state.
Jones notes the disparity in the loss of life in the conflict, yet ignores why this is the case: while Israel has an Iron Dome defense missile system that protects its citizens from indiscriminate rocket fire, Hamas uses its people as human shields by hiding its weapons arsenals in tunnels beneath schools and hospitals — a fact that even the United Nations, a frequent critic of Israel, has attested to.
By skirting facts and ignoring inconvenient truths, any point Jones thinks he is making is completely lost in this muddled op-ed.
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