The War For Palestine Is Over In My Opinion
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/20/world/middleeast/west-bank-settlements.html
I found this article on the web site of The New York Times. I did not yet find it in the print edition, but I could have missed it. It is a long, very biased piece of reporting that grieves for the Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank whose land is gradually being taken, in one way or another, by the Israeli settlers and their allies in the Knesset according to the article. The article comes with graphs depicting the accelerating pace of Israel’s incursion into Arab territory as more settlements are formed, the current ones expanded, and violence rains down on the remaining Arab sheep herders and farmers.
Yes, settlers with guns are threatening Arabs in the West Bank. The settlers are putting up barriers to keep the Arabs from their olive orchards. The settlers are burning down Arab homes and buildings. And, for the most part, the members of the Israeli authorities in the form of the military and the police look the other way according to reports in the American press. All of this is backed by the far-right coalition in the Knesset that keeps Bibi Netanyahu in power. According to this article there have been ”more than 1200 Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank, nearly double the number for the decade before that, the United Nations reports.”
I am not denying any of the facts in the article. It all seems right to me from my time in Israel and in the West Bank and from what I read in a variety of sources. What the article misses is the reasons why this is all happening.
This war for the West Bank began a long time ago, perhaps about the time Joshua entered Jericho after bringing its walls down. Both Arabs and Jews want this land, think it belongs to them, and certainly the Jews believe that God gave it to them.
But, surely since there has been an Israel in 1948; and surely since Jews finally got to the holy sites in Jerusalem after The Six Day War in 1967; and surely since Yassir Arafat turned down the chance for a Palestinian state offered to him by Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton; and surely since the two Intifadas; and most definitely since October 7, 2023; there is going to be no peace in the West Bank. The Jews will never trust the Arabs to live peacefully next to them ever again. I think the Israeli position is that Hamas ran Gaza next door to Israel and the attack that killed 1200 Israeli citizens and captured hundreds as hostages has made trusting any Palestinian Arabs with Israeli sovereignty and security in the future impossible.
Now, nature is taking its course and the wolves are devouring the sheep.
I have been to the West Bank several times. I found the people I met human, friendly, and open to peace. However, the Palestinians never had good leaders when they had a chance to make a deal, and now there is no deal on the table, nor will there be. And still the Palestinians have no credible leadership. Hamas will never be it.
Even in the summer of 2023 when we visited Ramallah, we could see the results of the Israeli dissection of the roads in the West Bank keeping the Arabs from their shops. This Israeli government is giving no quarter. It will take the West Bank in any way it can.
I have no answer for the Arabs in the area and there are millions. This article focuses on those in remote areas of the West Bank, but there are many in big cities like Ramallah, Nablus, Bethlehem and Hebron. I have no idea what will become of these cities, but I suspect they will be islands in a sea of settler communities that will surround them.
My point is only that the world thinks this question of a Palestinian state is still up for grabs. It isn’t. This is over. The Arabs have squandered whatever chance they once had at having a state—many times. Israel will annex the West Bank in the near future and Israel will be no more likely to give it back than the United States is to give back South Dakota to the Oglala Sioux.
The United Nations and the rest of the world can make all the noise it wants. It can even throw Israel out of the U.N. As the latest attacks on Jews in Australia and elsewhere emphasize, we Jews are going to have a place to go when the rest of the world rejects us. And it is going to be as big as the Israelis in charge believe God wanted it to be. Right or wrong. These, I believe, are the facts on the ground.
The piece in The NY Times is misleading. These Jewish settlers believe that God has given them this land and, thus, they are not stealing it. They are taking what they believe to be theirs. Is this right? I have no idea, but it has happened many times in human history, why not in Israel?
The United States believed in manifest destiny as it moved west. Israel believes the same. What the United States did to the native Indians the Israeli settlers are doing to the Palestinian Arabs. It’s not about right or wrong. There is no right or wrong. There is only the land and who is strong enough to take it.
Unless and until the Palestinians get viable leadership and agree that Israel has a right to exist, why should Israel do otherwise than take the land they believe was promised to them by God?
You see the quandary? Very few Palestinians get it and no one in the West does.
