Conrad Black: Only after Hamas is destroyed can there be a Palestinian state

 Conrad Black: Only after Hamas is destroyed can there be a Palestinian state (msn.com)

Given the Gazan war and the tensions that are always present in the Middle East but are particularly high now, a little original thinking would be particularly useful. As I have had occasion to write in this space before, there can be no resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian issue until the terrorist apparatus of Hamas is completely destroyed. This is not just another episode, the latest skirmish, in the endless series of such incidents until on some far-off day by sheer attrition the parties turn their swords into plowshares.

Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 was an act of war in violation of an agreed ceasefire and was conducted with the maximum possible barbarity, with the support of the Iranians, to sabotage an impending agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and specifically targeted against the most vulnerable people — children, women and the elderly, and those who had shown their commitment to reconciliation with the Arabs by choosing to live so close to the border of Gaza. It combined the sneak attack aspect of the Japanese descent on Pearl Harbor with the repulsive notion of a massacre of the innocents as on 9/11 at the World Trade Center in New York. The loss of life was somewhat smaller in Israel, but proportionately much greater.

There could be no clearer statement of the absolute refusal of Hamas, the governing authority in Gaza, to accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Since they will never agree to it, they’ve made it clear that they will never cease to persevere against Israel in the most barbarous manner possible. Since no peace, beyond a tactical ceasefire certain of eventual violation, is available with such a recalcitrant and genocidally motivated organization as Hamas, the road to peace is through the extermination of its terrorist capacity.

Israel is approximately halfway towards that goal and has substantially worked out a plan for its completion. It is clear that hundreds of millions of dollars of assistance given supposedly as humanitarian aid, including from the government of Israel, to the Hamas regime in Gaza has gone to strengthen Hamas’s military capabilities and to build the most elaborate subterranean network of bunkers and tunnels in history. It is here that the remaining Hamas fighters are lurking, counting on misplaced western hysteria about civilians and hostages to save them from the justified vindictive wrath of the Israel Defence Forces.

How Israel's war against Hamas has impacted the Middle East | Watch (msn.com)

When then-prime minister Stephen Harper gave one of the most cogent and important speeches of any Canadian prime minister since Pierre Trudeau’s imposition of the War Measures Act in 1970, to the Knesset in Jerusalem in 2014, he concluded his remarks: “Through fire and water Canada will stand with you.” This is the appropriate policy for a western democracy to espouse. The Jews and Syrians are the senior sovereign peoples in the region between Persia (Iran) and the Mediterranean, and the idea that all of Israel constitutes an occupation of other people’s land is false. The Palestinians are Arabs that are supposedly, according to some theories, descended from the Philistines and can be distinguished from the Jews, Bedouins (Jordan), Syrians, Egyptians and the Lebanese Christians who may broadly claim descent from the Phoenicians.

In the same address in 1917 when the British foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine, then governed by Turkey, he promised not to compromise the rights of the Palestinian Arabs, and the obligation to grant a state to Israel as a homeland for the Jews comported a parallel obligation to find a suitable jurisdiction for the Palestinian Arabs. Obviously, that second obligation has not been fulfilled but the way to address it is not to attempt to destroy the obligation to the Jews, which has been fulfilled and which they have transformed miraculously into a wealthy and flourishing democracy: the Jews have made the desert bloom.

The five countries created in the aftermath of the First World War by the senior Allied leaders, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, meeting in Paris, were Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. They have all disintegrated, all of them except Czechoslovakia violently. (Jordan was established separately two years later by British colonial secretary Winston Churchill, as he said, “on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem.“) Most of the European states that were the components of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia are doing well, some of them very well.

If the West had leaders of the stature of the chief authors of the treaty of Versailles in 1919, it would be time to meet again with suitable leaders from the Mideast, and reconsider demarcations between the failed states of the region. The West Bank, as has been foreseen for the last 25 years in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, should go to a new Palestinian state after being narrowed somewhat: Israel cannot be asked to return to a width of only nine miles from the Mediterranean to its eastern border 30 miles northwest of Jerusalem. Gaza should be deepened very substantially, and an assured and secure permanent road placed between the West Bank and Gaza.

The Palestinian state would be welcome to east Jerusalem as a capital, and a special regime would have to govern sacred sites shared by different faiths, most conspicuously the Dome of the Rock, built upon Solomon’s Temple and the second Temple of Jerusalem. As the majority of the population of Jordan are Palestinians, Jordan could concede a modest amount of territory adjacent to the West Bank to give the Palestinian homeland a larger population and greater geographic depth (and give greater stability to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan by relieving it of some of its Palestinians).

Iraq has been an almost complete failure and the Kurds have earned a sovereign state of the Kurdish territory of Iraq and with the right to receive Kurds from neighbouring countries who wish to settle there. It is an oil-rich region around Mosul and the Kurds are resourceful people who would land on their feet quickly. The Shiite majority of Iraq in its south and east, culminating at Basra, have a religious affinity with Iran but not a cultural one and they could remain connected to Sunni Iraq around the city of Baghdad if some kind of confederation could be agreed.

Some percentage of Kurdish oil revenues could be paid to the emergent Iraqi confederation in exchange for Kurdish independence. Syria and Lebanon should probably be divided along local ethnic lines, giving the principal groups a relatively high degree of autonomy and it would be necessary, for there to be any security, for the surrounding powers — Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and ultimately Iran when it learns to behave responsibly again — to guarantee these arrangements, with the support of NATO and Russia, which would sponsor them.

If Canada had shown any recent aptitude for constructive international arrangements and had maintained a level of economic growth and military strength and diplomatic innovation adequate to make it relevant in the councils of the world, as it was during the Second World War and through most of the Cold War and during the Harper government, it would be well positioned to propose the opening of discussions towards a comprehensive regional agreement, as soon as Hamas had been destroyed as a terrorist operation.

As it is, we bring nothing to the theatre, and have no diplomats of the stature to make a difference, as Lester Pearson was during the Suez crisis of 1956. In international relations as in other spheres, vacuums are unnatural, and all of this will be different with the regime changes that now appear to be likely and desirable in Ottawa and Washington.

National Post