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The U.S. President's Gaza Vision Is the Best Chance of Ensuring that Hamas's Genocidal Hatred Is Defeated
(Telegraph-UK) Allister Heath - After 11 p.m. on Oct. 7, 2023, I was heading home after a day at Telegraph HQ chronicling the deadliest anti-Jewish pogrom since the Shoah. As I arrived near Marble Arch, I spotted fireworks shooting into the sky. A large group had gathered at the top of Edgware Road, partying and waving Palestinian flags. It was unfathomable. Jihadi Einsatzgruppen, genocidal rapists, sadistic child-killers and paragliding kidnappers had broadcast their barbaric crimes live on social media throughout the day, and yet these people in England, in our supposedly enlightened age, were celebrating, rather than protesting, the atrocities. The 7/10 massacre clarified almost everything. It sorted the good from the evil. It exposed the moral depravity of many of the West's leaders, and of swathes of its over-credentialed but under-educated elite. It revealed the emptiness of the post-war human rights edifice. It shattered the delusion that history had ended, that anti-Semitism was a relic of the past, that humanity had moved beyond its basest instincts. Whether or not Trump's plan materializes, taboos have been shattered, and the Foreign Office approach to the Middle East is about to be consigned to the dustbin of history. The central problem at least since the Balfour Declaration has been the refusal by Palestinian elites to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state. Time and again, beginning in 1937 with the Peel Commission's Partition Plan, the Palestinian leadership has been offered a state and has rejected it, while the Israelis have made massive compromises; time and again, armies or terrorists have attacked Israel to try and destroy it. The Palestinian elite's ideology is rejectionist: they define themselves as against Israel's existence. Eliminating the Jewish state is their sole raison d'etre. Trump is the first Western leader who grasps that the irredentism of extremist Palestinian leaders is the real block to peace. The writer is editor of the Sunday Telegraph-UK.