Blood Libel #11 | “Israel is the main obstacle to peace.”
Anti-Zionist:
Israel is the reason there’s no peace in the region.
Pro-Zionist:
Which side has said “yes” to peace plans — and which side has said “no”?
Because Israel has offered a Palestinian state multiple times — and been rejected every time.
(Let them try to shift blame.)
Pro-Zionist:
In 2000, 2008, and again with the Trump/Kushner plan in 2020, Israel offered to give up nearly all of the West Bank, evacuate settlements, and even share parts of Jerusalem.
Each time, the Palestinian leadership walked away — without even offering a counterproposal choosing instead to launch terror attacks.
Why? Because the goal for groups like Hamas, and often even the PA, isn’t peace with Israel — it’s a world without Israel.
And here’s the part most people don’t see:
Israeli society is deeply divided over how to make peace.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have marched for coexistence and diplomacy.
Civil society organizations, peace camps, and Arab-Jewish partnerships exist — even in wartime.
Many Israelis, especially younger ones, still believe in a two-state solution in principle, even if they doubt they have a partner to make it work in practice.
So no — Israel is not the obstacle to peace.
Terror, incitement, and the refusal to recognize a Jewish state are the real obstacles.
Israel has already made peace with Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco — and was on the verge of normalizing with Saudi Arabia when Hamas launched its October 7th war.
Ask yourself:
If Israel is willing to make peace with its former enemies — what’s stopping the Palestinians from joining them?
BEYOND THE TALKING POINTS
You start by acknowledging an irrefutable historical reality. This has never been about a two-state solution. It’s always been about the existence of a Jewish state.
Haviv Rettig Gur has offered a profound analysis of Iran’s animosity toward Israel. He is a credible source of truth in understanding the complexities of the Middle East. He does a credible job of explaining the theological underpinnings of Iran’s hostility. He argues that Iran’s regime perceives the existence of a sovereign Jewish state as a direct affront to the Islamic concept of divine supremacy. In this view, the Jewish people’s return to their ancestral homeland and the Arab defeat at the hands of the jews in ‘48 and their subsequent establishment of a thriving nation, challenges the narrative that Jews are meant to live in subjugation under Islamic rule1. This theological perspective fuels Iran’s ideological commitment to opposing Israel’s existence. This underpins the genocidal doctrines underlying our enemies and why it’s self-evident that Hamas doesn’t want peace. That the Palestinian Authority doesn’t want peace. That Hezbollah doesn’t want peace. That the Houthis don’t want peace. Radical Islam is not seeking peace with Israel. They are not seeking a Palestinian state. They are seeking the destruction of Israel and the genocide of the jewish people in their quest for Islam to rule the world. We cannot educate that out of them. We cannot bribe it out of them with economic incentives.
That’s not bigotry or “islamaphobia”, it’s history and it’s an acknowledgement of the nature of radical Islam. I want to be clear in distinguishing “Islamism” from mainstream peaceful people of Muslim faith. I stand in solidarity with Muslims who are themselves targets of jihadist ideology. Brigitte Gabriel is a staunch ally in this fight. Here she is on a panel discussing Benghazi.
Yes, it’s an ugly truth. Yes, it’s hard. But the history of the Arab/Israeli conflict has demonstrated rather unequivocally that our enemies do not want peace.
We must speak with a unified voice that Hamas, the Palestinian Authority and their allies aren’t fighting over land. It’s a religious, Islamist, Jihadist war to annihilate the Jews, destroy Israel and establish an Islamic Caliphate in the Middle East and eventually across the world. Consider the history of the State of Israel and the “peace process” that we’ve endured:
In 1947, the UN proposed a two-state solution—Jews accepted it, the Arab world rejected it and launched a full-scale invasion the moment Israel declared independence in an effort to annihilate the Jewish people.
Golda Meir famously captured the futility of appeasing Arab rejectionism with this quote about Israel’s pre-1967 borders:
Why do people, good people, some Israeli’s was well, tell us if you had only gone back to the 1967 borders after the war. Then I always ask a foolish question, but I haven’t heard one single wise answer. If the ‘67 borders were so holy, why was there a war in ‘67? All these territories were in the hands of Arab countries. If Hussein hadn’t gone to war in '67, when he shouldn’t have, when Eshkol asked him not to go to war, the West Bank would have been in his hands. If Assad hadn’t gone to war, the Golan Heights would have been Syrian. If Nasser (Egypt) hadn’t gone to war in ‘67, the Sinai Desert and the Gaza Strip were in his hands.
This statement exposed the core hypocrisy of Arab rhetoric after the Six-Day War. The call to return to the 1967 borders was framed as a demand for justice—but Meir pointed out that Arab states tried to destroy Israel even when it had no “occupied territories.” In other words, their grievance wasn’t about borders—it was about Israel’s existence. This quote underscores the enduring truth: when your enemy attacks you before you have any so-called provocation, the issue isn’t what you’re doing—it’s who you are.
After the 1967 war, Israel offered land for peace; the Arab League responded with the infamous “Three No’s”: no peace, no recognition, no negotiations—followed by years of border raids and terrorism.
In 1993, the Oslo Accords created mutual recognition, but were followed not by peace but by the First Intifada, a wave of suicide bombings, bus attacks, and open incitement from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Arafat publicly shook hands with Rabin but privately described the deal as a temporary tactical maneuver—and terrorism increased.
In 2000, Israel offered a Palestinian state with 95% of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and a capital in East Jerusalem—Arafat walked away without a counteroffer, and within weeks, the Second Intifada erupted, claiming thousands of lives in a brutal campaign of suicide bombings and shootings.
In 2005, under the vision of Shimon Peres, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza—dismantling every settlement, synagogue, and military post and left Gazan’s with civilian infrastructure and businesses to give Palestinians a chance at self-governance. Instead, the Gazan’s elected Hamas who then violently seized control, murdered Fatah rivals, and transformed Gaza into a terror camp. The lie of disengagement has been utterly destroyed. It did not bring peace. It brought death, terror tunnels, missiles, and massacre. We paid for it with blood.
In 2008, Prime Minister Olmert offered a state with land swaps and shared control of Jerusalem—Abbas walked away.
In 2020, the Trump peace plan was rejected without discussion, with Palestinian leaders declaring it “dead on arrival” and refusing even to negotiate.
Each time, Israel said yes or tried to negotiate by offering land for peace and (another) Palestinian State; Palestinian leaders said no—and followed with violence. This isn’t conjecture. You can’t make peace with those who reject coexistence and respond to compromise with terror.
Shimon Peres, Israel’s former Prime Minister, once said:
You don’t make peace with your friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies.
This is a lesson that rings true in theory—and one we hoped would hold in practice. But what we miscalculated, where we were naive and what became clear 18 years after Israel withdrew from Gaza, is that we must accept an uncomfortable truth: we can’t make peace with an enemy that doesn’t want peace.
This is video from 2015 when Denis Prager was invited to "Debate" the following subject at the Oxford Union: "Is Hamas a Greater Obstacle to Peace Than Israel". Wow. The question itself belies logic. Denis nails it!
In writing this, I've tried to present as "balanced" an approach as I can. I know i have a bias, but I've also surfaced and included content that is contrary to my own beliefs.
For example, I will share Isaac Saul's commentary about Schumer's speech on the Senate Floor rebuking Bibi Netanyahu.
I know that folks like Isaac are well meaning and they are advocating for peace. Isaac asserts he is a Zionist and I believe him!
I also believe that there are some people like Isaac who believe that the path to peace (as well as Jewish safety globally) is being undermined by the war in Gaza. I empathize. And they might be right.
And peace has always been the goal. For thousands of years that's all the jewish people have wanted. To live in peace. But our enemies continue to persist in their hatred. I sincerely believe that it's a naive view to believe that the solution to defeating the ideology of hate emanates from love. The only conclusion that I can draw watching politics rip our country apart is that the human race hasn't evolved to a point where our primitive brains can put aside our tribal and violent nature. Sadly, history has shown the only way to defeat hateful and immoral ideology is with unrelenting force.
We didn't defeat the immoral ideologies of Naziism or the ideologies in Japan leading up to World War II with love and compassion. We defeated them with brutality. We met brutality with brutality. If anyone wants to be honest with themselves... study any war that's ever been fought and you will conclude that Israel is fighting the most moral war ever fought. That's for another post.
Sadly, the hatred that we are seeing today has been there all along. It's been hiding in the shadows after the Allied victory in WWII and now it's just been brought into the light of day. It has festered on the "alt right" and it's festered on the "progressive left". It's festered in our education system having been financed by our enemies in Iran and Qatar. That said, I actually believe that it is a net positive that the hatred is out in the open because I believe it's the only way we can defeat it. We need our enemies to show themselves and show their hatred and immorality to the world. Now we can finally confront it.
Now we can expose it and shine a bright light on it. I pray that morality carries the day. Good once again triumphs over evil! The vision/mission of the United Nations has failed. The desire of the world after WWII to prevent future wars through the UN was a utopian fantasy that failed to acknowledge human nature. So let's confront it. Open our eyes and ears. Let's realize that the ideology behind radical islam is not one of peace. It's a culture of death and martyrdom that is hell bent on the destruction of our liberal democracies and the obliteration of all "infidels".
It starts with the jews and the audacity that we have shown to dare to build a country on our ancestral lands. Radical Islam sees that as an affront to Alah that Jews should live in what they consider "muslim land". But if you think it ends there you are wrong. Please understand that I am not condemning the Muslim faith. In the same way that I abhor and speak out against extremism in politics .... I am speaking here. I don't care what religion or political party you subscribe to. If you lack common sense and are "bought in" to extreme ideologies... I am going to call it like I see it. Radical Islam is dangerous and a threat to our way of life. I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a religious theocracy of any kind. Not Christian, not Muslim, not even Jewish orthodoxy. I want to live in a secular world rooted in common sense, morality, freedom and liberty. That's why I choose to live in America. We can never abandon our liberal democracy. I will never stop speaking out against extreme dogmas.
Let's go even farther down the rabbit hole regarding morality and the question of "radical islam". No one I know has done a better job than Sam Harris in his Making Sense Podcast. This is a brilliant discussion he calls: "The Sin of Moral Equivalence".
If you are unfamiliar with Brigitte Gabriel, you need to be! She is a US-based journalist and news producer who started her career as an anchor for World News, an evening Arabic news program. As a terrorism expert and the founder of the nonprofit organization ACT! for America, Brigitte Gabriel travels widely and speaks regularly on topics related to the Middle East. She has addressed audiences at the FBI, the United States Special Operations Command, the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, and the Joint Forces Staff College, among others.
Brigitte Gabriel lost her childhood to militant Islam, when militant Muslims from throughout the Middle East poured into Lebanon and declared jihad against the Lebanese Christians. Because They Hate warns that the US is threatened by fundamentalist Islamic theology in the same way Lebanon was― radical Islam will stop at nothing short of domination of all non-Muslim countries. Fiercely articulate and passionately committed, Because They Hate tells Gabriel's personal story as well as outlines the history, social movements, and religious divisions that have led to this critical historical conflict.
Here is a talk at the Heritage Foundation in 2006 regarding her book "Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America"
Here are some quotes from Amazon about her book:
Publishers Weekly
"Her writing is eloquent and her passion tremendous."
Robert Spencer, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)
Brigitte Gabriel's words should be read, and studied carefully, by all the law enforcement and government officials of the West -- as well as by everyone who values freedom.
She talks about what happened to Lebanon when Lebanon welcomed Palestinian refugees.
Brigitte's point about the peaceful majority is never more evident than herein this letter from over 1470 Muslim Imams and Scholars condemning Hamas. It is comforting on many levels... but will it matter to the 180-330 million jihadists that Brigitte references?? Unfortunately not.
When considering the question of morality, we must also consider the fragile state of America's experiment with "liberal democracy."
If you are not a subscriber to Bari Weiss' The Free Press, you are missing one of the last bastions of good journalism. She absolutely has a right-leaning bias. But regardless, she's one of the few credible news sources in the world today.
If you missed this video, On November 12, 2023, Bari gave an incredibly important and poignant speech at the Federalist Society. It's worth the time to listen. Her impassioned plea is worth the listen! As she rightly points out, Israel is on the front lines fighting a war for civilization.
If you're not going to invest the 38 mins to listen ... I can tell you I hung on her every word.... Here is the heart of her presentation:
When antisemitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square, it is not about Jews. It is never about Jews. It is about everyone else. It is about the surrounding society or the culture or the country. It is an early warning system—a sign that the society itself is breaking down. That it is dying. It is a symptom of a much deeper crisis—one that explains how, in the span of a little over 20 years since Sept 11, educated people now respond to an act of savagery not with a defense of civilization, but with a defense of barbarism. It was twenty years ago when I began to encounter the ideology that drives the people who tear down the posters. It was twenty years ago, when I was a college student, that I started writing about a nameless, then-niche worldview that seemed to contradict everything I had been taught since I was a child. At first, things like postmodernism and postcolonialism and post nationalism seemed like wordplay and intellectual games—little puzzles to see how you could “deconstruct” just about anything. What I came to see over time was that it wasn’t going to remain an academic sideshow. And that it sought nothing less than the deconstruction of our civilization from within. It seeks to upend the very ideas of right and wrong.
When we speak of morality, we need to pay close attention to what our enemies are telling us. And I don't mean the propoganda we read or see online. I have shared a few videos from Oren who runs Traveling Israel. He is a professional Israeli tour guide who has been publishing you tube videos. I find his insights to be valuable and hope you've derived value from his videos so far. I'm sharing this recent video because it is enlightening and chilling.
The progressive left in America has fallen victim to the propaganda machine of the anti-zionist movement. Some claim that when they chant "from the river to the sea" they are trying to communicate a desire for peace but we know they are simply naive and ignorant to make that assertion. Of course, given how violent the pro-palestinian protests have been, it's clear the majority of them know exactly what it means and they are so emboldened by the support they are getting in America that they don't even hide their true intentions when they chant "globalize the intifada". Wake up!
Instead of listening to Western Media, listen to Palestinian TV and hear the voices of Arab "Palestinian" women, religious leaders, children and political leaders and hear for yourselves what "we" are up against.
When I say "we" I don't just mean jews. I mean every freedom loving person. Sadly, this war has been waging for 8 decades since the end of WWII and it's now starting to boil... and god help the world if Israel loses! And god help the world if the "free world" abandons Israel and allows Hamas, Hezbollah, The Muslim Brotherhood, Iran and these other terrorist regimes to win! Oren asks many poignant questions! PLEASE LISTEN
FYI - I was curious if the translations were accurate so I used google translate and can verify that the translations are accurate. They are!
And finally, while we are discussing morality, I'd be remiss if I didn't discuss the immorality of the DEI "establishment" that has run amok on our college campuses.
I've written extensively about it in my "white paper" on democracy Wars in a chapter entitled "The Culture Wars".
It's fueled by billions of dollars in foreign money.
But that's only half the story.
Once the violent antisemitic demonstrations broke out on campus, why didn't the Universities invoke Federal law to deport foreign nationals inciting violence in support of a terrorist organization? Tablet Magazine has an answer. In "Why America’s Richest Universities Are Protecting Hate-Filled Foreign Students, Accommodating overseas elites by tolerating antisemitism on U.S. campuses is part of a scheme to turn loss-leader DEI categories into profit centers," they observe how a profit motive is driving the immorality we are seeing on college campuses:
The average share of international students in Ivy League schools who enrolled in the fall of 2023 is about 15%. The overall international share is higher. A quarter of Harvard’s student body is now international. At MIT, it’s nearly a third.
The scheme by which U.S. taxpayers pay to give 25% or more of the places at America’s most prestigious universities to foreign students is a recent innovation—one that took shape between 2004 and 2014, and has helped make the universities’ DEI rhetoric cost-free. The international share of freshmen at Georgetown nearly quadrupled from 3% in 2004 to 11% a decade later, with similar numbers at Berkeley and Yale. The growth in undergraduate enrollment at Yale during that decade was fueled almost entirely by foreigners. In that same period, the number of incoming foreign students at Ivy League schools rose by 46%.
Behind this increase lies the simple reality that only a comparatively small number of Americans can afford the mind-numbingly high fees that American universities extort from their captive domestic market. Foreign students, the overwhelming majority of whom are either the children of wealthy foreign elites or directly sponsored by their governments, represent a serious source of funding for American colleges, public and private alike. These students often pay full or near-full tuition and board, and help public universities balance the books in the face of budget cuts. More broadly, they augment revenue by helping to fill federally funded programs that are based on racial and ethnic quotas.
Here is a transcript from a relevant portion of an interview between Haviv Rettig Gur and Eli Lake discussing the Israeli response to Iran’s genocidal war against Israel. I’d encourage you to listen. It’s incredibly insightful on many levels.
Here is the Transcript:
“I have this deep frustration with the Western press—a frustration that makes me… you know, I don’t always agree with everything I read in the free press, but I love the theory of the free press, which is: there is actually a monoculture that is preventing much of elite mainstream media from actually seriously analyzing and thinking through the world.
And one of those things that I have been just railing at the Western press reporters here for not doing is seriously looking at Iran. Seriously looking at Iran.
Iran is a regime that has no border with Israel, no interest in Israel, and has spent a double-digit percentage of its GDP on destroying a country it has absolutely no interest in. Why? What drives it? What motivates it?
Now, the country that—the regime that helped engineer the death of 600,000 Syrians—Palestinian rights are not what motivates it to do that. And Gaza is not what motivates the Iranian Ayatollahs—these people who helped drive the Yemen civil war—to do that.
So what actually does? Let’s assume they’re three-dimensional serious human beings—what motivates them?
You will not be able to find in the pages of the Washington Post, the New York Times, the LA Times—if you go back in all of them—excuse me for singling those out, not really apologizing—you will not be able to find a serious deep dive into the basic motivations and historical experiences that built—and ideas that built—these regimes and these policies.
And so it’s something profoundly frustrating to watch, you know, from the Middle East—how this stuff really isn’t talked about in a serious way in the United States.
Well, I want to now move on to when—let’s talk about the sort of roots of what might be the sort of strategic revolution in Israel. We could look at October 7th obviously as a start date, but I’m thinking almost maybe the start date is before even Netanyahu. It’s Meir Dagan. It’s the decision to go into the Mossad in, I think, 2002 and say: we need to make this agency—the number one priority is Iran.
And I remember at the time—I’m trying to humble brag—he’s no longer with us—I got a chance to meet with Dagan a couple times in my trips to Israel. Very impressive, interesting guy. But at the time he would say the kind of things that Netanyahu says today—talking about how the Iranian people hate the regime. But this focus—how would you—where would you—where does this go back to? How would you—where would you—where do you start the timeline?
I would—I mean, I start the timeline 150 years ago.
There you go. Let’s do that. I love it.
At the beginning of a process happening—not even in Shia Islam, but in Sunni Islam. Something I try to talk about a lot because I really try and help people open up a window, right? That they can then fact-check me on ChatGPT or whatever it is people do nowadays—but open up a window into the deep prehistory, so to speak, of Hamas, of these ideas, of this obsession of the Middle East with the destruction of Israel.
The obsession in the Middle East of so many different ideological factions and groups—Muslim Brotherhood groups on the Sunni side and the Shia revolutionary groups and Iran and the proxies that it funds and supports—the idea of the destruction of Israel runs very, very deep. And to them is a stepping stone on the road to a much larger vision of grand redemption. And not just the redemption—not just some kind of simple messianic thing—but really the redemption of Islam from centuries of weakness.
150–170 years ago, the Europeans are busily dividing up the Ottoman Empire into zones of control. The British take Egypt, the French take—I believe in 1830 they take Algeria—and they’re starting to just chop up Muslim lands and Muslim populations under Western imperial rule.
And that begins to drive a profound self-critical examination by intellectuals and theologians and religious leaders in the Arab world—in the Muslim Arab world—who ask themselves: what’s happening?
You know, until now under Ottoman rule, yeah, it was decrepit, but it was 400 years of stability basically. What the heck happened that suddenly it turns out we come out of 400 years of not having to think about whether Islam is strong or not, discovering that Islam is catastrophically weak and backward compared to this surging, powerful West?
And that discourse was public, and it was explicit, and it was on the books. It’s a kind of questioning of: what happened to us? That if you tried to, say, do it today in the West—in Western academia—you would be run out of town. And really, there isn’t the courage to ask these kinds of questions today in the West. But in Islam itself, there is absolutely the courage.
And the answers that these people gave were pietistic answers. Often it was people like a guy named al-Afghani, this theologian in Egypt, who said: if we return to our sort of forefathers and the original Islam—his student, a guy named Muhammad Abduh—who said: if we return to original Islam, the Islam of the first successful generations after Muhammad, and we return to piety, then we will find that inner core of Muslim strength. We will come closer to God because of our piety, and God will then help us take our rightful place in history and solve the geopolitical weakness and the, you know, scientific weakness and commercial weakness.
And this is a discourse that produces the Muslim Brotherhood—that says: we all return to—as pietistic and built on this image of old Islam as we can, and that will drive us forward into a successful future.
And Egyptian society slowly transforms from a very open society where women walk around with pants into a much more closed society where they increasingly don’t. And everywhere that these ideas—these pietistic ideas—go, they’re a discourse about Islamic weakness in the modern age. And they drive a kind of religious conservatism all over the place.
The great concern with Islamic weakness focuses very early on—already in the 1910s and 20s—by these theologians, by someone named Rashid Rida, who’s working in Cairo and is this very, very important and the most influential Sunni theologian of his day—focuses in on the Zionist movement and focuses in on what would become Israel.
The reason is that the Jews of the 1910s, the Jews of the 1890s, the Jews of that whole era, are the weakest people in the world. They’re these desperate refugees fleeing Eastern Europe, pathetically weak, with nothing but the shirts on their backs. And they’re building out a national movement that is planting powerful roots in the Muslim land.
And to these theologians, that’s pushing Islam back. But the problem with the Jews is that they’re weak. If the British Empire conquers Egypt—okay, then that’s a problem theologically: Islam should be on top, not on the bottom. But it’s not a terrible problem because the British Empire is at least very, very powerful. But if the Jews can push back—if the Jews of 1905 can push back Islam—then that’s a catastrophic signal of Islamic weakness.
And so everything turns in this profoundly angry and vindictive way on Zionism. And it comes from theologies of Islamic weakness. It doesn’t come from Palestinian nationalism, which at the time doesn’t yet exist as an idea, as a mobilizing force.
So the reason I say all of that is just to say: Iran wants to destroy Israel because Israel is the weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back. And a success in destroying Israel would be a signal that Shiism is capable of redeeming Islam from this weakness in a way that is built right.
And so there’s deep, powerful old ideas about validity and validation and redemption and the future of Islam’s return to its rightful place in history—on which the redemption of the world depends, if you’re a believing Muslim—that drive a politics that is basically genocidal.
And if we understand that, they really can’t have a nuke. And if we don’t understand that, and we think that whatever the, you know, Foreign Ministry of Iran put out in a statement last week is the overriding driving truth of the regime, then we’re not useful to Israelis who actually face a problem of a regime that has spent—again—a double-digit percentage of its GDP on the destruction of a country that, if you don’t see this religious vision, you have no understanding of why it’s in any way investing in the destruction of that country.”