Why Most Arab Countries Do Not Want Palestinians

 by Khaled Abu Toameh  •  

• [C]ountries such as Jordan and Lebanon had extremely negative experiences with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and other Palestinian armed groups who were trying to overthrow or destabilize their governments (Black September in Jordan in 1970 and the Lebanese Civil War 1975-1990).
• Arab leaders often make strong statements, issue condemnations of Israeli actions, and attend high-profile summits that express solidarity with the Palestinians. Their gestures, however -- apart from Iran and Qatar -- are often not matched by decisive steps...
• The refusal of the Arab countries to absorb Palestinians (including the ex-prisoners) is... proof why it would be a mistake to rely on the Arab countries to help rebuild and demilitarize the Gaza Strip.
• US President Donald J. Trump, who seems to be pinning his hopes on the Arabs to assist in funding and establishing a new government as well as deploying an international force in the Gaza Strip, needs to bear in mind that most of the Arab heads of state and regimes actually do not care about the Palestinians.
• By now, most Arab heads of state see Palestinians as having caused immeasurable harm wherever they went and as having rewarded with treachery whoever stretched out a hand to them.
• For the Arab leaders, the Palestinian issue is just another tool to advance their own political objectives, shore up their own popular support at home, or unite various factions against a common enemy.
• Most Arab leaders, in short, will continue to pretend that they are eager to help the US administration with its efforts to implement Trump's 20-point plan for peace in the Gaza Strip. In reality, the Arabs will continue to do their utmost to stay away from the Palestinians -- apart from helping them to regroup in the Gaza Strip.
• For the full article go to: https://tinyurl.com/3687yfyf

The Illusion of Palestinian Peace

written by Fiamma Nirenstein November 4, 2025 

The orgy of blood on Oct. 7, 2023, and everything that followed should have inspired a dream of peace. For anyone with a conscience, the horror would be enough to say: “Never again.”

Yet that isn’t what happened. When you ask Israelis how they are, their automatic “Fine, thank you” is no longer true; it’s merely a social convention. Their souls remain shaken.

But across the divide, in the Palestinian territories, the picture is far more disturbing. According to a recent survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 59% of Palestinians living under the Palestinian Authority—that is, in Judea and Samaria—believe that the decision to carry out the Oct. 7 massacre was “correct.” In Gaza, 44% agreed.

Even more shocking, 54% blame Israel for Palestinian suffering, while only 14% blame Hamas. And so, we must ask: what peace are we talking about? The one preached endlessly by the U.N., by Europe, and by French President Emmanuel Macron — “two states for two peoples”? Not only does it lack realism; a majority of Palestinians reject it outright.

The same survey shows that 40% of Palestinians believe an independent state must come through armed struggle, not negotiation; in Gaza, 35% say the same. These are not marginal numbers—they represent a society still enthralled by the myth of “resistance,” not the idea of coexistence.

As Israeli journalist Amit Segal has noted, Shany Mor’s essay “Ecstasy and Amnesia” explains this phenomenon well: the intoxication of violence, the inability of parts of the Islamic world—and the Palestinian one in particular—to separate history from religious emotion.

The “ecstasy” of jihad was visible on Oct. 7, in videos of young men calling their parents to boast about killing Jews with their own hands, and in the mobs cheering as kidnapped Israeli girls were paraded through Gaza’s streets.

Even academics in the West, such as Cornell’s Russell Rickford, revealed the same moral sickness when he called the massacre “exhilarating.”

Arab–Palestinian wars have always followed this script: an initial eruption of homicidal and suicidal ecstasy, followed by crushing defeat—the War of Independence (1948), the Six Day War (1967), the Intifadas, and now the war of Oct. 7. Yet from each failure, what remains in memory is the thrill of violence, not the price of it.

 

 

Westerners Help Hamas Win the Propaganda War

 By Tom Gross  25 October 2025

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-westerners-helping-hamas-win-the-propaganda-war/

After two years of war, and despite Israel’s many successes on the battlefield, Hamas can also claim a kind of victory – at least for now. The terror group has survived and is once again exerting control in the areas of Gaza under its authority. Public executions, whippings, stonings and kneecappings have returned. In the first five days of the ceasefire, Hamas executed at least 100 Gazans.

Hamas’s survival was achieved not only through its remaining fighters and its holding of hostages, but also thanks to a chorus of western apologists. A coalition of so-called progressives and professional activists has excused, rationalised and defended the group’s actions across universities and in newspaper editorials. The BBC, Sky, the Guardian, the FT and the New York Times have all parroted Hamas talking points.

Tales of impending famine in Gaza, for instance, were broadcast as fact, sourced from UN bureaucrats and ‘aid agencies’ with long records of anti-Israel bias and, in some cases, open sympathy for Hamas. This isn’t journalism: it’s agenda-driven activism disguised as news. What the BBC and others failed to grasp is that, for Hamas, the western media is the battlefields.

From the outset, even before Israeli troops had entered Gaza, Hamas’s operatives and sympathisers in the West were shouting about ‘genocide’ and ‘famine’. It was a propaganda trap – and the western media walked right into it.

Consider, for example, these headlines from the early weeks of the conflict in 2023:

11,15,30 October, 6 November: “Fuel in Gaza will run out in 48 hours”

The pattern speaks for itself. It’s been the same story with Gaza being ‘on the brink of famine’ for the past two years. This is how it works:

Step one: The Hamas ‘health ministry’ makes up a casualty number which could be debunked by the most cursory statistical analysis.

Step two: Aid organisations repeat the number without independent confirmation.

Step three: UN agencies in Gaza (some staffed by Hamas members) cite the aid organisations.

Step four: Media outlets quote the UN agencies.

Step five: Hamas’s supporters in the West claim the numbers are ‘UN verified’.

UN officials have also contributed to the fiction directly. In May, Tom Fletcher, a humanitarian coordinator for the organisation, told BBC Radio 4: ‘There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them.’ Almost no babies died as a result of the war in the following days. But that didn’t stop the BBC running the claim in bulletins and news outlets around the world repeating it, citing the BBC as a reliable source.

The Hamas narrative has been amplified, too, by disinformation campaigns driven by Iranian, Russian and Chinese state-linked bots on social media, which have exploited Gaza as a means of destabilising western societies. These regimes understood how easily such narratives could tap into a pre-existing willingness among many in the West to believe anti-Semitic libels.

Today, falsehoods are disseminated by journalists, academics and UN officials – cloaked in the language of human rights but echoing ancient prejudices.

Why were Hamas’s inflated casualty figures reported as facts? Why were incorrect claims of Israel bombing hospitals repeated without scrutiny – while confirmed cases of Hamas rockets hitting Israeli hospitals in Ashkelon and Beersheba were ignored? In part, this was down to journalistic complacency. The facts were accessible.

Independent researchers discovered that some of the most widely shared images of ‘starvation in Gaza’ were from Yemen. One prominent photo showing a skeletal child was highlighted by the media as evidence of famine. In reality, the child wasn’t malnourished due to famine. He had cerebral palsy, hypoxemia and other genetic conditions. That didn’t prevent the Guardian, Times and New York Times running it on their front pages, inflaming the emotions of millions of readers. Despite its resources, the much-touted BBC Verify unit missed these falsehoods.

The good news? Large swaths of the British public aren’t buying it. Scroll through the reader comments under articles about Israel, and you’ll find thousands of ordinary people who haven’t lost their critical faculties. They know casualty figures from terrorist regimes aren’t a sacred truth. They can spot propaganda when they see it.

Unlike some intellectuals, they don’t lose all logic the moment the word ‘Israel’ is uttered. As George Orwell once quipped: ‘You must be an intellectual. Only an intellectual could believe something quite so stupid.’ Today, he might have aimed that line at Guardian readers or BBC news staff.

In this war, it is not Israel or even Hamas that has lost its purpose, but the media.

 

Europe Has Apparently Learned Nothing

        by Majid Rafizadeh, Europe Has Apparently Learned Nothing :: Gatestone Institute

• Once again, Europe seems to have slipped into a dangerous fantasy: that engaging in polite diplomatic parleys with promises of sugar plums will tame Iran's rapacious ambitions.
• France, Germany, and the United Kingdom (E3), acting as the European Troika, declared their intention to revive the long-stalled nuclear negotiations with Iran.
• At the core of the E3's plan lies the deeply flawed assumption that Iran can be wooed into restraint through incremental "incentives." These generally consist of easing financial pressure, lifting trade restrictions, or delaying multilateral sanctions in exchange for ephemeral commitments.
• Sadly, Europe appears to be pursuing the worst lessons of appeasement: the dangerous illusion is that you can temper a ravenous aggressor by conciliation, weakness and generosity. The aggressor immediately sees that the best route for him is to demand more. The cycle becomes self-reinforcing.
• By treating the Iranian regime as a legitimate negotiating partner — and by discounting the moral and strategic gulf that separates it from liberal democracies — Europe is bankrolling the terrorism industry.
• President Donald J. Trump's current posture — doubling down on sanctions, refusing immediate diplomacy until leverage is secured — should jolt Europe out of its passivity.
• The European Troika's charade must stop. Anything less just prolongs the threat.

 

Can Trump’s Gaza Peace Deal Last?

By Jonathan Sacerdoti   https://jonsac.substack.com/p/can-trumps-gaza-peace-deal-last?triedRedirect=true

Together, Trump and Netanyahu have achieved what few thought possible: an agreement for the release of all hostages held in Gaza and a broad cessation of hostilities, at least for now. The is a big moment, but also an unclear and perilously risky one.

The deal, announced publicly but still potentially in flux, contains both substance and shadow. According to Israeli sources, 20 live hostages are to be released in the initial phase, with expectations that this will occur by Sunday night. Hamas, for its part, has confirmed a framework involving the end of fighting, Israeli withdrawal from Gaza (possibly 70 per cent of the strip), the entry of humanitarian aid, and a prisoner exchange. The guarantor states – Qatar, Egypt, Turkey, and the United States – have reportedly secured assurances against the resumption of war so long as both parties honour the terms.

Yet many details remain ambiguous, and deliberately so. Maps of Israeli withdrawal have been amended, and five crossings are set to open for aid. It’s reported that for every living hostage, as many as 100 convicted terrorists will be freed, among them senior figures sentenced to life for murder. This is a brutal price for Israel. But for many families awaiting a son, a daughter, a child, it is one they have long been willing to pay.

President Isaac Herzog said what millions feel: ‘All the people of Israel stand with the hostages. All the people of Israel stand with the families.’

But not all images comfort. From Gaza, videos immediately emerged of men who appear well-fed and strong, celebrating in the streets. Terror-affiliated media chant genocidal slogans – ‘Khaybar, Khaybar ya Yahud’ – whose message is one of eternal battle and endless death of Jews. Senior Hamas operatives, including Zaher Jabarin, photographed smiling in the Sharm El-Sheikh negotiation rooms, do not smile for peace. Their smile indicates that for them at least survival, and perhaps advantage, has been secured.

This agreement will bring a kind of calm. But calm is not peace. It is not justice. It is not safety. Even yesterday, Hamas-aligned media were promoting videos of their military wing training to abduct IDF soldiers, declaring such operations ‘inevitable.’ Meanwhile, those in Gaza who worked with Israel to protect non-Hamas aligned Gaza residents, such as Yasser Abu Shabab, have become targets of death threats and face possible annihilation in the vacuum of Israeli withdrawal. And what of the ‘innocent civilians’? If Hamas clings on to power it will reinforce it brutally and ruthlessly as it always does. If not, it can be easily replaced by other equally brutal Islamic terrorist factions keen to fill its place.

The Palestinian movement has not earned peace. It must show that it wants more than survival, more than revenge, more than martyrdom. That it wants a future. Until then, no agreement, no photo-op, no negotiated phrase can promise stability, even if the hostages come home for now.

In the days ahead, we will see weeping and celebration, heartbreak and healing. The hostages will come home, and with them, untold stories of horror and survival. We will also see funerals. Some will return dead. Some, not at all, for the Palestinian terrorists are likely to stall and lie at every possible opportunity and ensure the pain is dragged out. It is unlikely they will truly give up every last hostage.

No single agreement can reverse decades of indoctrination and incitement. No single gesture can dismantle the machinery of hatred that has ruled Palestinian political life and ideology for generations. In the days ahead, Israel will witness scenes that test the limits of the human heart. There will be reunions so overwhelming they will shake the nation to its core, and losses so final that no agreement on earth can soften them.

But even as we embrace the living, we must not ignore what else this deal unleashes. Celebrations erupt in Gaza not just for the return of prisoners, but for the return of convicted murderers, some of them architects of massacres, now welcomed home as heroes. It is a decision made under unbearable moral pressure, and one that may come to stain the future with fresh blood.

The Media are not allowed into Gaza.

  The media are merely conglomerates that sell column inches and air time. Others are state-funded bureaucracies with fixed ideological agendas.

 Journalists exhibit almost conceit when they insist that they have some natural right to stroll onto any battlefield. In truth, there are many places and proceedings to which journalists are denied access: cabinet meetings, intelligence briefings, jury deliberations, corporate boardrooms, trade negotiations, Papal conclaves, nuclear command bunkers, sports team strategy sessions, and Hollywood movie sets. The list is endless.

 No serious person imagines democracy has collapsed because reporters cannot barge into NATO’s war rooms. However, when it comes to Israel, the rules are magically rewritten. The expectation is that the Jewish state must fling wide its gates and allow hostile scribblers to tramp about a war zone as though it were an open-air museum.

 Consider, too, the international press’ record. Since day one of the war, they have parroted Hamas falsehoods, recycled invented casualty figures, and published photographs that even a  child could see are staged or fake. They have splashed headlines across the globe that would disgrace a provincial gossip paper.

 Coverage of the Israel-Hamas war has been the most contemptible display of reporting ever.

 When the press has consistently demonstrated hostility to Israel and indifference to truth, why would Jerusalem confer privileges upon it? The news media has shown itself to be neither neutral nor trustworthy. It has not yet grasped the contempt with which they are now held.

 Why should a country at war with a genocidal enemy invite in hostile agitators who will lie about its every move?

Starmer in UK has declared war on Western values

 

What is happening to our country? When did we give up on truth, democracy and Western values? When did we choose to reward terrorists, butchers, kidnappers and barbarians? Why is Britain turning its back not just on Israel, a democracy on the front line against Islamism, but also, increasingly, against its Jewish citizens?

The explosion in anti-Semitic sentiment and crimes in the UK is a national emergency, an existential threat to the liberal society painstakingly constructed since the 1850s, yet, unlike other kinds of racism, it is dismissed or ignored. Why? Is it elite prejudice of the sort Emile Zola exposed in France all those years ago? Is it electoral politics? Can’t Labour see that it is making everything worse with its unfair, mendacious attacks on Israel?

The double-standards are sickening. There was anger that Isaac Herzog, Israel’s Left-wing president, is in Britain meeting Sir Keir Starmer; yet the PM’s tête-à-tête with the Palestinian Authority dictator Mahmoud Abbas, holder of an anti-Semitic PhD from a Soviet university and proponent of pay-per slay support for the families of Palestinian terrorists, was uncontroversial. How can this be right?

And why doesn’t Starmer put maximum pressure on Hamas to release its hostages and quit Gaza, and make the case for a multinational, Arab-backed temporary government to rebuild it, rather than promising to unconditionally recognise a virtual Palestinian state that would still be committed to Israel’s obliteration? Does Labour only pretend to care about Gazan civilians?

Britain, courtesy of a ruling class that has lost its moral bearings, home of Left-wing broadcasters that no longer pretend to be objective, is now among the global centres of Israelophobia. The Jewish state is always on trial, guilty until proven innocent.

The savage Hamas blackmailers who were targeted in Qatar rebranded themselves as “the negotiation team”, even though they were the terror group’s most hardline leaders. Each one of their blood libels, of their incendiary calumnies, goes around the world, lapped up by a gullible audience that never learns. A little more mud sticks every time. Israel isn’t committing a genocide, as the Foreign Office has quietly admitted, and yet 45 per cent of voters believe, absurdly, that Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews.

Israel needs to fight anew for its legitimacy every day. It is never given the benefit of the doubt. Britain, America, France: all made terrible errors in wartime, all are plagued by their fair share of rogues, and yet few believe that these nations have forfeited the right to exist as a result.

There is no empathy, no contextualisation, no historical knowledge, no interest in all the times Israel sought to agree a land-for-peace swap but was rejected. Israel must be perfect, more moral than anybody else, or else it will be demonised, vilified and sanctioned. Our Western-centric, secular intelligentsia refuses to accept that Palestinian elites are rejectionists. They don’t want a two-state solution: they want control, from the river to the sea, with the Jews ethnically cleansed.

Hamas pioneered a new form of warfare, squandering billions in aid to build a network of tunnels under homes, hospitals and mosques. This will be studied by military historians for centuries; Israel has so far only destroyed 35-40 per cent of all these tunnels. Gaza’s population is used as human shields, in the hope that as many as possible are killed to score propaganda points, while the terrorists hide in tunnels. It’s an obscenity, and the West falls for it.

Anti-Semitism is a virulent, ever-evolving pathogen. As a form of social contagion, it is ideal for social media, with its fake or misleading viral images, incendiary accusations and propaganda campaigns. A world where critical reasoning has been superseded by short-form videos is an ideal ecosystem for the resurgence of a medieval hatred based on rumour, gossip and hearsay.

In today’s post-Protestant woke world, which worships a certain form of weakness and glamourises the oppressed, Israeli Jews are too strong. Their country represents everything the woke detest: a patriotic, demographically healthy nation-state that believes in strong borders and military virtues, all with a biblical backdrop.

The Left, which used to see Israel as a case study in decolonisation and anti-imperialism, a beautiful story of the return of a dispossessed people to its indigenous homeland, has switched sides. It now falsely categorises Israel as a “settler-state”, like the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, countries that it deems to be axiomatically racist and guilty of “white supremacy” and “genocide”.

To the woke, the Balfour declaration, a great moment, was Britain’s original sin. The Labour Government should be fighting this tidal wave of madness; instead, it is trying to ride it. The scale of its betrayal is off the charts.

            Allister Heath. Full article at

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/10/labour-betrayal-british-jews-historic-disgrace/