“I don’t think this position is realistic today and we must be realistic,” the newly appointed minister said in response to a question about the creation of a Palestinian state in exchange for a normalisation of ties between Israel and Arab countries. The normalisation drive was a part of the 2020 Abraham Accords overseen by Donald Trump, and the process could resume after the president-elect returns to the White House in January.
A Palestinian state would be “a Hamas state”, Saar added
Abbas, in comments carried by the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, said Sunday that “security and stability” could only be achieved with the establishment of “sovereignty and independence on the land of the Palestinian state”.
As Saar spoke in Jerusalem, Arab and Muslim leaders gathered in Saudi Arabia for a summit addressing the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, where Israel is also fighting Hamas ally Hezbollah.
I think the clearest indicator of the philosophical and moral bankruptcy of the entire matter is the fact that anyone believes for even a second that Israel has a meaningful opinion on whether or not a Palestinian state can or should exist.
In any sane and rarional world, Israel would not be seen to have the right to make that decision, or even to hold a meaningful opinion on the matter. It should be ENTIRELY a matter to be decided by the Palestinian people.
But this is not a sane or rational world.
Israel was never interested in a Palestinian state.
You can’t ethnically cleanse people and build Jewish settlements while proclaiming you want peace.
The most maddening, astonishing and discouraging part of the whole thing, for me, is that that isn’t even really debatable. From any reasonable, purely fact-based and unbiased viewpoint, Israel has been clearly maneuvering for decades now to conquer everything from the river to the sea, and to oppress, displace or kill as many Palestinians as it takes to do it.
The Gaza genocide isn’t an aberration - it’s the direct culmination of decades of very deliberate Israeli policy and strategy. It’s not a coincidence that they had exactly one Prime Minister who advocated for Palestinian statehood and they assassinated him - it’s because Palestinian statehood has never really been an option.
The plain fact is simply that the only reason there’s even any difference of opinion about the matter is that some number of assholes - power-hungry assholes and greedy assholes and hateful assholes and ignorant assholes - have a vested interest in lying about it or at the least promoting the lies that their fellow assholes tell.