Two years on from Hamas’s massacre and with Gaza lying in ruins, the West still refuses to look the real problem in the eye. The obstacle to lasting peace between Israel and Gaza is not a few masked gunmen, but a widespread conviction in the West Bank and Gaza (and on uni campuses and on London’s streets) that Israel itself is a mistake to be undone.
Until that idea dies, no ceasefire, no summit and no “two-state solution” will hold.
The region now again sits at what António Guterres, the UN secretary general, grandly calls “a unique opportunity” for peace. The first phase of a new American-brokered deal promises the release of hostages and a partial Israeli withdrawal. Donald Trump is already hailing it as a diplomatic triumph. For once, there is even talk of a two-state solution that might endure.
Yet this is hardly the first time such optimism has arisen. Successive US administrations have put forward peace plans that would have granted Palestinians statehood, only for those offers to be rejected by Arab leaders themselves. That, more than anything else, has led us to where we are today.
Amid all the self-congratulation, this truth remains barely spoken. The belief that Israel should someday cease to exist, still widespread among Palestinians and their sympathisers abroad, is at the heart of the conflict. Hamas did not invent this idea, it is merely the current most violent manifestation of it.
As long as the fantasy endures – in classrooms, refugee camps and UN speeches – every truce is an intermission, not a peace. Believing that Gaza can be “rehabilitated” while its people are taught that their neighbour must disappear is for the birds.
Western diplomats will not admit this. They prefer the illusion that both sides are mirror images; each nursing historic grievances, each capable of compromise if only nudged by enlightened foreigners.
But Israel’s demand is brutally simple: to live without annihilation as a daily threat. The corresponding Palestinian demand, voiced from Ramallah to the London marches, is the reverse – to erase the Jewish state “from the river to the sea”. The tragedy is that millions of ordinary Palestinians, whose lives have been ruined by this obsession, are told that justice requires their endless misery.
The international institutions that claim to champion their cause are complicit. The UN Relief and Works Agency, created as a temporary measure in 1949, has become the keeper of permanent grievance. By treating refugee status as hereditary and teaching generations that return not resettlement is their birthright, UNRWA sustains the bloody status quo. It offers not compassion but cruelty: a promise that one day history will run backwards. Real compassion would be to tell Palestinians the truth – that the state of Israel is here to stay, and that their dignity depends on building a future within that reality, not against it.
Lebanon, too, bears responsibility. The Palestinian camps in Beirut and Tyre are not symbols of solidarity but of cynical neglect. It denies the Palestinians living in them, most of them born there, citizenship. They are in effect political hostages, a frozen army of resentment against Israel. This cruelty has no moral justification. If peace is ever to come, those camps must be closed, their residents made citizens and their children freed from the mythology of return. To do otherwise is to condemn yet another generation to bitterness and manipulation.
Europe once faced a similar reckoning. After 1945, millions of ethnic Germans were violently expelled from lands they had lived in for centuries: East Prussia, the Sudetenland, Silesia. What was done to them was wrong, and in a perfectly just world they might have returned. Yet peace in Europe required compromise. The expellees built new lives in new homes, and the continent moved on. No international agency taught their grandchildren to dream of Breslau or Königsberg. No politicians promised that someday the borders would be reversed. Out of that acceptance grew the stability on which modern Europe rests. The Middle East will find no peace until it learns the same lesson.
This is not a call for Palestinians to surrender their identity, only their illusion. Nations can be built from loss – Germany itself is proof of that – but they cannot be built upon perpetual rage. The moral task now facing the pro-Palestine movement is to choose between grievance and acceptance. If it continues to nourish the fantasy of Israel’s erasure, it will guarantee only further tragedy. For Jews and Arabs alike.
So yes, let the world welcome a ceasefire, let the hostages come home, let Gaza rebuild. But let us stop lying to ourselves about the cause of this war and the conditions for ending it. Peace will not come through conferences, aid packages or yet another “roadmap”. It will come when Palestinian leaders, educators and activists have the courage to tell their own people what European leaders once told millions of their displaced: that history does not run in reverse, that home must be made where you are, and that compromise – not conquest – is the price of peace.
Until then, every slogan about “resistance” is a declaration of permanent war. And those who chant it in Western capitals are not standing for liberation, but for the endless imprisonment of the very people they claim to defend.
Two years on from Hamas’s massacre and with Gaza lying in ruins, the West still refuses to look the real problem in the eye. The obstacle to lasting peace between Israel and Gaza is not a few masked gunmen, but a widespread conviction in the West Bank and Gaza (and on uni campuses and on London’s streets) that Israel itself is a mistake to be undone.
Until that idea dies, no ceasefire, no summit and no “two-state solution” will hold.
The region now again sits at what António Guterres, the UN secretary general, grandly calls “a unique opportunity” for peace. The first phase of a new American-brokered deal promises the release of hostages and a partial Israeli withdrawal. Donald Trump is already hailing it as a diplomatic triumph. For once, there is even talk of a two-state solution that might endure.
Yet this is hardly the first time such optimism has arisen. Successive US administrations have put forward peace plans that would have granted Palestinians statehood, only for those offers to be rejected by Arab leaders themselves. That, more than anything else, has led us to where we are today.
Amid all the self-congratulation, this truth remains barely spoken. The belief that Israel should someday cease to exist, still widespread among Palestinians and their sympathisers abroad, is at the heart of the conflict. Hamas did not invent this idea, it is merely the current most violent manifestation of it.
As long as the fantasy endures – in classrooms, refugee camps and UN speeches – every truce is an intermission, not a peace. Believing that Gaza can be “rehabilitated” while its people are taught that their neighbour must disappear is for the birds.
Western diplomats will not admit this. They prefer the illusion that both sides are mirror images; each nursing historic grievances, each capable of compromise if only nudged by enlightened foreigners.
But Israel’s demand is brutally simple: to live without annihilation as a daily threat. The corresponding Palestinian demand, voiced from Ramallah to the London marches, is the reverse – to erase the Jewish state “from the river to the sea”. The tragedy is that millions of ordinary Palestinians, whose lives have been ruined by this obsession, are told that justice requires their endless misery.
The international institutions that claim to champion their cause are complicit. The UN Relief and Works Agency, created as a temporary measure in 1949, has become the keeper of permanent grievance. By treating refugee status as hereditary and teaching generations that return not resettlement is their birthright, UNRWA sustains the bloody status quo. It offers not compassion but cruelty: a promise that one day history will run backwards. Real compassion would be to tell Palestinians the truth – that the state of Israel is here to stay, and that their dignity depends on building a future within that reality, not against it.
Lebanon, too, bears responsibility. The Palestinian camps in Beirut and Tyre are not symbols of solidarity but of cynical neglect. It denies the Palestinians living in them, most of them born there, citizenship. They are in effect political hostages, a frozen army of resentment against Israel. This cruelty has no moral justification. If peace is ever to come, those camps must be closed, their residents made citizens and their children freed from the mythology of return. To do otherwise is to condemn yet another generation to bitterness and manipulation.
Europe once faced a similar reckoning. After 1945, millions of ethnic Germans were violently expelled from lands they had lived in for centuries: East Prussia, the Sudetenland, Silesia. What was done to them was wrong, and in a perfectly just world they might have returned. Yet peace in Europe required compromise. The expellees built new lives in new homes, and the continent moved on. No international agency taught their grandchildren to dream of Breslau or Königsberg. No politicians promised that someday the borders would be reversed. Out of that acceptance grew the stability on which modern Europe rests. The Middle East will find no peace until it learns the same lesson.
This is not a call for Palestinians to surrender their identity, only their illusion. Nations can be built from loss – Germany itself is proof of that – but they cannot be built upon perpetual rage. The moral task now facing the pro-Palestine movement is to choose between grievance and acceptance. If it continues to nourish the fantasy of Israel’s erasure, it will guarantee only further tragedy. For Jews and Arabs alike.
So yes, let the world welcome a ceasefire, let the hostages come home, let Gaza rebuild. But let us stop lying to ourselves about the cause of this war and the conditions for ending it. Peace will not come through conferences, aid packages or yet another “roadmap”. It will come when Palestinian leaders, educators and activists have the courage to tell their own people what European leaders once told millions of their displaced: that history does not run in reverse, that home must be made where you are, and that compromise – not conquest – is the price of peace.
Until then, every slogan about “resistance” is a declaration of permanent war. And those who chant it in Western capitals are not standing for liberation, but for the endless imprisonment of the very people they claim to defend.