In a recent piece for The Guardian, opinion columnist Owen Jones expresses his ire about a speech given by the UK Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, to the Labour Friends of Israel.
In his op-ed,
“Denied a state, Palestinians are now denied a say in their own future,” Jones manages to sidestep most of the salient facts surrounding the issue of Palestinian statehood, in an effort to hammer home his simplistic central message: Palestinians are victims, and Israel and its supporters are responsible.
Jones’ disregard for the truth is evident in his headline, which misleadingly implies that Israel is somehow responsible for Palestinians being “denied a state.”
Yet, he neglects to mention why such statehood has not yet been actualized — because the Palestinian leadership has repeatedly rejected all comprehensive peace proposals.
For example, at the Camp David Summit in 2000, then-US president Bill Clinton, with the backing of then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak,
offered Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat a deal that would have seen 92 percent of the West Bank and all of the Gaza Strip put under Palestinian control, with a plan to award territorial compensation for the remaining eight percent.
In addition, eastern Jerusalem would have been designated the new state’s capital.
Unfortunately for millions of Palestinians, Arafat rejected the proposal and, instead,
unleashed the Second Intifada, a campaign of suicide attacks that killed more than 1,000 Israelis, and injured thousands more.
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That Jones can blithely ignore the role the Palestinian leadership has in keeping its citizens in a state of chronic poverty is astonishing.
Gaza’s terrorist rulers — Hamas — currently hold interests in dozens of international companies, with an estimated value reportedly
exceeding $500 million (not that any of this money is spent on much-needed infrastructure in the Strip).
Hamas is also well-funded by Iran, which has supplied the group with all kinds of state-of-the-art military equipment, including rockets and drones, that are then used to wage war against the Jewish state.
Jones notes the disparity in the loss of life in the conflict, yet ignores why this is the case: while Israel has an Iron Dome defense missile system that
protects its citizens from indiscriminate rocket fire, Hamas uses its people as human shields by
hiding its weapons arsenals in tunnels beneath schools and hospitals — a fact that even the United Nations, a frequent critic of Israel,
has attested to.
By skirting facts and ignoring inconvenient truths, any point Jones thinks he is making is completely lost in this muddled op-ed.
(full article online)
In a recent piece for The Guardian, opinion columnist Owen Jones expresses his ire about a speech given by the UK Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, to the Labour Friends of Israel. In his op-ed, "Denied a state, Palestinians are now denied a say in their own future," Jones manages to sidestep...
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