Among the oldest genres of civilization’s stories, the most enduring works of fiction are the fables, the fairy tales of old.
From Aesop to the Brothers Grimm, we all once read them as children – often scary stories, centuries old, decorated with the local color of medieval Germany or Britain, or even of ancient Greece or Rome, but with universal messages as valid today as when they were first recounted.
They have been updated for television, film, even Broadway musicals, and their morals are clear as a bell.
Don’t stray from the path, don’t tell fibs. Don’t take up with strangers, don’t neglect your duties. And don’t forsake your good judgment, just to go along with the crowd.
As we read the stories, we readers see the lesson as it’s developing. We understand long before the protagonist does. All full of himself, unwilling to heed the advice of history, the protagonist has to learn it for himself. Too late he realizes what we readers, or storytellers, or audiences, knew all along.
In recent weeks, the nations of the world have been falling all over each other to recognize a non-existent new “Palestinian” state. Within their bubble of antisemitism, their fashionable clubs of NGOs and exclusive colleges, their secular worlds of bureaucrats and oligarchs, this all makes perfect sense.
We have been talking about a palestinian state for a century, really, ever since the end of World War One. It’s about time, they figure, isn’t it?
They conveniently forget that the two-state solution has actually already been done: In the 1940s, the great powers of the world agreed to draw dividing lines in the middle east and create new countries out of whole cloth. Amidst this process, they took the area then known as the British Mandate for Palestine and carved it into two countries, a little one to be majority-Jewish named Israel, and a larger one to be majority-Arab called Jordan.
That’s two countries, no matter how you count. And they’ve both been there a very long time now.
But there were some Arabs there who objected – frankly, a lot of them. They opposed any land for Israel at all, and started clamoring for yet another split, a three-state solution, now, and they shouted their cause so loudly, in the U.N. and in the newspapers, on the streets and in the airports, that the people inside this bubble conveniently managed to forget their history.
They forgot that the nation of the Palestinian Arabs, the Kingdom of Jordan, already exists, and is doing just fine. Through some willful mass psychosis, they managed to forget the history that they had themselves already lived through, and accepted the fiction spun by these so-called Palestinian activists: that the Palestinians didn’t have a country at all, and deserved to take Israel away from the Jews to get one.
In order to stick with this new fiction – this so-called two-state solution that’s really a three-state solution – participants have to lie to themselves. Constantly.
They have to close their eyes to the endless robbery going on in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. They have to pretend that the PLO, then Fatah and Hamas, don’t constantly steal aid money to fund war materiel.
They have to pretend that the so-called Palestinian activists haven’t spent over half a century sending suicide bombers and rockets into Israel, and hijacking airplanes, and murdering innocent civilians.
They have to pretend that their neighbor Jordan, a nation of 35 thousand square miles and 11 million Palestinian Arabs, doesn’t already exist.
And they have to pretend that Hamas, a demonic organization that – just two years ago – murdered the most Jews in a single day than had occurred since the Holocaust – is somehow deserving of the right to rule this new nation.
That’s a lot of willful self-blinding.
Looking on from the outside, we see everything that the advocates of this Palestinian psychosis don’t see. We see the half century of murder, the half century of corruption. We see how undeserving Hamas and Fatah really are.
And we see that Israel – far from being the oppressive colonial master it’s painted to be – is a functioning republic, the only place in the Middle East in which Jews, Christians and Muslims are all able to vote in elections, and peacefully, happily hold public office together, with a stellar record - for three-quarters of a century now - of building economic prosperity and a commitment to human rights for all. Israel is a role model among countries, especially for the Middle East.
But still the psychosis persists. Just last week, Keir Starmer’s seppuku regime in the United Kingdom announced its support for this three-state solution, insisting on creating another nation for Palestinian Arabs, not offering land of their own but insisting on taking land from tiny Israel to do it.
And as soon as the ink was dry on the U.K.’s fresh commitment, we were reminded of Fatah’s demand of billions of pounds from them in reparations.
How would Fatah and Hamas equip their imagined country if they were to get one, after all?
By shaking down the soft touches of the world, the many socialist governments that don’t respect their own citizens’ property any more than they respect Israel’s.
As soon as one leftist president or prime minister tries to make the case for another Palestinian state, in flowery language that makes terrorists look like freedom fighters and makes embezzlers look like philanthropists, yet another head of state from another such morally bankrupt nation rises to top him.
They proudly spin a web that obscures the decades of intifada; they weave beautiful cloth that makes their own crimes look valiant. Money given for food and medicine was instead spent on a network of tunnels for their terrorist cells. Piping given to them for agricultural irrigation was repurposed as rockets to fire at their benefactors. But you’d never know it to hear these advocates speak; they weave a fabric so colorful that you’d never know they spent the past half century attacking their neighbor and starving their own people.
Sometimes, however, the veil is dropped, and we see the truth.
Sometimes we see Hamas’ rockets rain down on a civilian neighborhood, unprovoked. Sometimes, we can’t help but watch Fatah jump up and demand sacks of other people’s money to loot.
And sometimes, the haunting images of Oct. 7, 2023 return to our minds’ eye, and we remember who Hamas really is: the monsters who mow down innocent revelers at a dance, incinerate babies alive in a kitchen oven, rape innocent young women and parade their corpses before a riotous, drooling crowd back home.
That’s reality. That is the cause of “Palestinian statehood,” allegedly a two-state solution but really a three-state one, but only for a little while. Because if they ever got away with it, they would wipe out Israel as fast as possible, “driving the Jews into the sea” as they have chanted incessantly for generations. In the end, their real goal is not a three or two state solution at all, but a one-state solution, a single Jihadist base from the river to the sea.
When that veil is dropped, and we see the world as it really is, then we know the lie of the Palestinian argument, the ultimate vice of the caliphate dream.
And then we know what fairy tale we are living in.
The fabric they spin is fraudulent; the window-dressing they make for a palestinian nation holds no water. In fact, as more and more people around the world are realizing, this emperor has no clothes.
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, and speaker. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous
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