That refusal to accept Israel’s existence is why there is no peace
For that reason, I wish every Jew in the world would read Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf’s The War of Return; How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (2020). Written prior to the Gaza War, it seeks to answer why there is still no peace between Jews and Palestinians nearly 80 years after the creation of Israel.
Dr. Wilf and Schwartz are members of the Israeli “peace camp.” She was a left-wing MK and he a long-term writer for Ha’aretz, Israel’s progressive daily. Both were committed to a “two-state solution” based on territorial compromise. And both were puzzled when the Palestinians walked away from proposals in 2000 and 2008 that would have given them a state in the West Bank and Gaza, free of Jewish settlements, with a capital in East Jerusalem.
Their solution to the quandary: The Palestinians, and indeed much of the Arab world, never have reconciled themselves to Jewish sovereignty in any part of the Land. And the demand for a return of refugees to their pre-1948 homes is the concrete expression of that refusal.
Prior to 1948, Azzam Pasha, then secretary-general of the Arab League, told Abba Eban that there could be no agreement to a Jewish state: “It is a question of historic pride…. What would be shameful would be to accept [an unjust and unwanted situation] without attempting to prevent it.” The decision, he said, “will have to be by force.”
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