GOLDSTEIN: A Palestinian state won’t lead to peace in the Mideast

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The latest call for the creation of a Palestinian state by Prime Minister Mark Carney and the leaders of many other countries is a classic example of politicians believing they have to say something and this is something.

The political fraud inherent in this call, however, is the implication that creating a Palestinian state will end the suffering of the Palestinians and ensure Israel’s security.

A peace deal requires credible leaders on all sides of the conflict who genuinely want peace, which doesn’t exist in Israel today.

Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza — one half of the proposed Palestinian state, along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem — in 2005, using its army to forcibly remove 9,000 Jewish settlers in 21 settlements, plus four Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

None of this led to peace. Far from it.

Ever since then, Hamas has controlled Gaza and used it as its base for terrorist operations and missile attacks on Israel.

Simply put, Hamas doesn’t want a viable Palestinian state living in peace beside a secure Israel. It wants Israel cleansed of Jews — Judenfrei — as the Nazis called it — which is in its founding charter.

Carney’s choice to preside over the creation of a Palestinian state — Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas — is a discredited, 89-year-old antisemite and periodic Holocaust denier whose authority is limited to the West Bank and not Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Polls show Abbas is deeply unpopular among Palestinians, who regard his Fatah party, which has received billions of dollars in foreign aid, as corrupt. They want him to resign.

On the other side, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposes the creation of a Palestinian state, intends to expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank and may be about to re-occupy Gaza, escalating the war yet again, which some military commanders oppose

The Israeli parliament recently passed a symbolic motion to annex the West Bank — where 700,000 Jewish settlers live illegally, according to international law, among an estimated 3.3 million Palestinians.

Netanyahu’s supporters view him as the only Israeli leader tough enough to counter the threat posed to Israel not only by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, but by terrorist-sponsoring Iran, whose nuclear facilities were recently bombed by Israel and the U.S.

Netanyahu’s opponents say he is corrupt. He’s on trial for 2019 charges of breach of trust, taking bribes and fraud. Despite his claim of being Israel’s “Mr. Security,” the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust — by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023 — occurred on his watch.

Netanyahu has been accused of propping up Hamas as a bulwark against the creation of a Palestinian state by Abbas.

In fact, Israel promoted Hamas in the 1980s — disastrously — as a bulwark against the Palestine Liberation Organization, headed by the late Yasser Arafat, forerunner of the Palestinian Authority.

To be sure, the myth promoted by Israel’s enemies that one cannot criticize Israel without being accused of antisemitism is absurd and ignores that some of the harshest critics of the occupation are Israelis.

Many are in Israel’s security forces.

One example was the late Avraham Shalom, director of Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, in the 1980s.

He described Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank as “brutal … similar to the Germans in World War II. Similar, not identical … We’ve become cruel to ourselves as well, but mainly to the occupied population, using the excuse of the war against terror.”

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