The blindfold has been ripped off
Tragically, the silence from the so-called moderate Palestinians following the massacre was and has remained deafening.
It’s not that complicated. We want peace. We always have and always will. We are not people of the sword. We are people of the book. There are no Jewish murderers in Australian prisons, not because we are corrupt and control the police or the justice system, but because it simply is not our “thing”. It never was “our thing”.
We don’t forcibly convert non-believers, nor do we blow up buses of civilians when we don’t get our own way. People aren’t scared of us. They don’t think: “We’d better hide, here come the Jews”. Non-Jews don’t spend millions of dollars protecting their churches, mosques or schools from us. They know that we are law abiding and that the last thing we want to do is to kill and maim others.
Following the October 7 massacre, an abomination incomprehensible in both scale and sadistic brutality, we know that the dreams we had for peace are gone. It is like a blindfold has been ripped off our eyes and the sharp pain of reality is blinding us. We now see that the vast majority of Palestinians do not want peace, do not want a two-state solution where two people would live side by side in harmony. It would make no difference if the settlement were dismantled, if Jerusalem was their capital or if Israel’s borders returned to the Green Line.
What they want is simple: the total annihilation of the Jewish State. Let’s be clear: the total genocide of the population of Israel. A Holocaust 2.0. How do we know this? Because THEY say so.
As Khaled Meshaal, former leader of Hamas, said in January this year (not last year, not 10 years ago, TWO MONTHS AGO): “We reject the two-state solution. October 7 proved that liberating Palestine from the river to the sea is realistic and has already begun”.
He goes on to say: “The Palestinian consensus … is that we will not give up on our right to Palestine in its entirety, from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, and from Rosh HaNikra to Eilat or the Gulf of Aqaba.” In other words, the goal is the replacement of Israel in its entirety.
Tragically, the silence from the so-called moderate Palestinians following the massacre was and has remained deafening. The lack of condemnation both in the Palestinian territories and around the globe has confirmed Meshaal’s statement that there is a consensus that the annihilation of Israel is the aim, not a two-state solution.
Furthermore, the Jihadist ideology has been emboldened by mass global support not just in Muslim countries, but more shockingly in major Western capitals around the globe. As Meshaal stated with smug satisfaction, support for the annihilation of Israel has become “a slogan chanted in the US, and in western capital cities, by the American and Western public.”
What 7 October demonstrated is that this genocidal ambition is not some crazy, fantastical concept, lurking in the sick minds of a few extremists, but is in fact underway. Its spectacular launch, on October 7, was the first step in a dastardly plan of annihilation of the only Jewish State in the world. As Menachem Begin said, “… if an enemy of our people says he seeks to destroy us, believe him. Don’t doubt him for a moment.”
Many of us naively doubted our enemy’s true intent before October 7. We thought that some form of appeasement would work. That most Palestinians, like most Israelis, have the same ambition: to live in peace. Now we know without doubt this is not the case. Our naivete has been painfully exposed and our shock and horror at the betrayal will remain for generations to come.
Anna Pasternak is the director of The AJN.
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