Elliot Kaufman
WSJ, Feb. 5, 2025
“The scandal isn’t that displaced Palestinians now could be “transferred” voluntarily out of Gaza; it’s that they have been forced to stay there—as Hamas’s shields during the war and among the ruins in its aftermath.”
President Trump shocked the world with his proposal to resettle Gazans in nearby countries, but not because the idea is cruel. Few critics dispute his point that it would benefit the displaced to escape the “demolition site” of Gaza and live in peace rather than as cannon fodder. The real disturbance, after decades to the contrary, is to think seriously about what it would mean to put Palestinian lives first rather than sacrificing them to the lost cause of Palestine as their leaders always do.
On Oct. 19, 2023, Hamas leader Khaled Mashal suggested that to achieve the dream of Israel’s destruction, and with it an Arab Palestine from the river to the sea, millions of Palestinians might have to die. The prospect doesn’t trouble him. Years earlier the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas turned down Israeli offers of statehood—unprecedented for a national liberation movement—and the Palestinian leader from the 1920s through the ’40s, Hitler ally Amin al Husseini, did much the same before and at Israel’s founding.
Reimagining the failed Arab drive to wipe out the Jews, only a few years after the Holocaust, as a story of Palestinian victimization and valiant resistance to Zionist aggression is the essence of the lost cause. Each major Palestinian leader has preferred his own generation to suffer rather than consent to live alongside a Jewish state on any part of the Jewish homeland. …SOURCE