In this season of political polarization, denouncing Israel could be becoming one of the few preferences shared by both of America’s political parties.
Since Hamas’s horrific Oct. 7 rapes and slaughter, the American left has become ever more vocal in its denunciations of Israel, and candidates opposed to the U.S.-Israel alliance have gained far greater influence in the Democratic Party.
And less than 24 hours after the Republicans’ catastrophic midterm election defeats, Vice President JD Vance blamed that same alliance as one of the chief drivers of the party’s losses.
This sentiment emerges against the background of a world that lays all blame on Israel for the century-long failure of Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.
Just a month ago, the foreign ministers of Canada, the United Kingdom and 10 European countries publicly declared their commitment to a Palestinian state while blaming Israel—and only Israel—for “undermining the possibility of a two-state solution.” A year before that, in September 2025, the United Nations called for implementing (imposing?) a two-state solution by a vote of 142 to 10.
Nowhere in those declarations was there the slightest suggestion that the Palestinians may have played some role in the decades-long record of failed “two-state” efforts.
In fact, since 2015, the UN has passed more resolutions condemning Israel (187) than all other condemnatory resolutions combined (90), while issuing exactly zero condemnations of the Palestinian Authority—despite “Palestine” having sat as a General Assembly “observer state” since 2012.
The media often take a similar approach, as in former President Bill Clinton’s peace negotiator Robert Malley’s account of the 2000 Camp David peace effort in which the villain is deemed Israeli expansionism, not Palestinian rejectionism.
This is a remarkable inversion of the actual historical record. In reality, the decisive factor for the entire past century has been Palestinian rejectionism. That is, the wholesale rejection of a Jewish state, manifested in the Palestinians’ century-long war of propaganda and terror, which seeks the permanent elimination of Jewish sovereignty in the region.
This invites the question: Why the misunderstanding? Among the possible explanations, two factors are especially important: The failure of our universities to teach the actual history, and the failure of the media to report it. These oft-neglected realities include:
In the early twentieth century, tens of thousands of Jews emigrated to Palestine fleeing profoundly oppressive conditions in Russia and Eastern Europe. There, they lawfully purchased land from Ottoman landowners, often at inflated prices. There was no mass “land theft.”
The Jews regularly sought peaceful coexistence with local Arabs. But from 1921, when the ruling British authorities appointed Hajj Amin al-Husseini to lead the Palestinian Arabs, Husseini launched a propaganda war against the region’s Jews, falsely accusing them of seeking to destroy Muslim mosques built upon the ruins of the ancient Jewish Temple. In 1929, this led to mass slaughter of innocent Jews across Palestine.
In 1936, Husseini launched a three-front war against the British, the Jews and his fellow Arabs who sought coexistence with the Jews. The latter were brutally tortured by Husseini’s enforcers, with their shattered bodies left out in public to terrorize the many Arabs who had favored coexistence.
Despite a century-old record of murderous Palestinian rejectionism, many continue to denounce Israel as the “obstacle to peace.”
In 1937, a British Commission concluded that peace required two separate states, proposing a tiny state for the Jews, and offering most of the land west of the Jordan River to the Arabs. The Jews reluctantly said “yes”; the Palestinian Arabs said “no” and resumed their terror war against the Jews.
In 1941, Husseini flew to Berlin and formalized an alliance with Adolf Hitler, in which Hitler promised: (a) to install Husseini as leader of the Arab branch of a future Nazi Empire; and (b) to build death camps in Palestine for killing all the region’s Jews. Only the Allies’ defeat of Hitler’s North African army prevented that second Holocaust.
In 1947, the new United Nations voted for a revised two-state solution in Palestine, which (again) the Jews accepted and Palestinian leaders rejected. Reprising his 1936 revolt, Husseini launched a civil war to exterminate the Jews in coordination with five neighboring Arab countries that invaded Israel. One percent of the Jewish population of the new State of Israel died defending themselves against this further attempted Holocaust.
At least five more times, the Palestinians were offered pathways to statehood: in 1993, 2000, 2001, 2008 and 2020—all endorsed by Israel, and all rejected and sabotaged by Palestinian leaders.
The Palestinians still prioritize preventing peace, with much of their school curricula devoted to demonizing Israel and Jews and lionizing suicide bombers as role models. The Palestinian Authority awards lifetime pensions to every Palestinian Arab who kills an Israeli.
After Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion, rapes and slaughters, the P.A. enrolled thousands of those Gazan terrorists in its life-pensions-for-killers program; and P.A. schools now celebrate Hamas’s attempted genocide.
Despite this century-old record of Palestinian leaders’ murderous rejectionism, Europe and Canada continue to denounce Israel as the “obstacle to peace,” while showering hundreds of millions in aid each year upon the P.A.—effectively financing its enormous terrorism-industrial complex.
With the sole exception of the United States under President Donald Trump, no Western country has ever acted to withhold the millions given the P.A. in aid on condition of it finally ending its terrorist-grooming school curricula and closing down its massive life-pensions-for-killers program.
In fact, Europe, the United Nations and much of the Western media coddle and protect the P.A. from any serious consequences for its expansive terrorism industry, choosing silence and appeasement rather than facing the obvious truth.
That silence not only guarantees the continued failure of Israel-Palestinian peace efforts, but also feeds the global tsunami of disinformation that falsely demonizes Israel in political discourse. It therefore reinforces the dangerous rise of antisemitism across America and its Western allies.
And by failing to confront the true obstacles to Israeli-Palestinian peace, that silence consigns Palestinian Arabs to continued subjugation under the corrupt and dictatorial regimes of both the P.A. in Judea and Samaria and the remnants of Hamas in Gaza.
It is now nearly a century since the Palestinian leadership in 1929 first publicly demonstrated the gruesome operation of its terrorism industry, spreading incendiary lies that incited the slaughter of hundreds of innocent Jews.
Since then, that macabre industry of death has only expanded, with ever greater sophistication, intensity, and budgetary commitment from Palestinian leaders. This and only this is what killed the “two-state solution.”
Only when this reality is acknowledged, confronted and finally changed will a sustainable Israeli-Palestinian peace become possible. Until then, as the sage philosopher Confucius warned us over 2,500 years ago: “If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”
