Making peace with unsavoury enemies

In the near 11 months of conflict between Israel and terrorist group Hamas in Gaza, world leaders have urged Israel and the PA to work towards a two-state solution to end the Israel-Palestinian conflict once and for all. What happens to Hamas in this is anyone’s guess.

The aim, however, is widely supported by much of Britain’s Jewish community.

But the international community shouldn’t expect Israelis to ignore the reality of who they are dealing with and nor should they turn a blind eye to the PA’s many wrongs.
While it is right that British ministers publicly criticise extremist Israeli ministers like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir for their distasteful headline-chasing comments and actions, they should condemn extremist comments from supposed Palestinian moderates with the same vigour.

While the PA is cast as moderate compared to Hamas, it isn’t by western democratic standards.

President Mahmood Abbas is 19 years into a four-year presidential term. Former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s efforts to root out corruption saw him removed from office in 2013. Moreover, two years ago, the JC revealed that members of Abbas’s security forces, trained at the British taxpayer’s expense, beat one of the president’s critics, Nizar Banat, to death in June 2021.

Israel’s Nobel Prize-winning former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who brought peace with Jordan and the Oslo Accords that created the PA, said that “you don't make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavoury enemies.”

It is worth remembering quite how unsavoury they are.