UN Again Blames Israel for Fighting Palestinian Terrorists And No Two-State Solution

Earlier this month, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres criticized Israel’s drone airstrikes and ground operations to root out Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank city of Jenin as “an excessive force used by Israeli forces.” Describing it as “the worst violence in the West Bank in many years, with a significant impact on civilians, including more than one hundred injured and thousands forced to flee,” Secretary General Guterres laid all the blame on Israel.

“I once again call on Israel to abide by its obligations under international law, including the duty to exercise restraint and use only proportional force, and the duty to minimize damage and injury and respect and preserve human life,” the Secretary General said. “The use of airstrikes is inconsistent with the conduct of law enforcement operations.”

Secretary General Guterres conveniently omitted the context for Israel’s stepped-up operations. Israel has been trying to deal with the Palestinian militants’ persistent use of Jenin as their base for conducting terrorist attacks against Israelis with limited success. Mr. Guterres ignored all the previous occasions when Israeli forces tried to enter Jenin to capture and detain Palestinian militants who were suspected of terrorist activities, including the killing of Israeli civilians. Instead of turning over the suspects to Israeli forces peacefully, Palestinian militants, who appear to control Jenin, responded with intense gunfire. Israel had no choice but to use more force to effectively neutralize the armed militants’ attacks and try to end Jenin’s role as “a ‘city of refuge’ for terror,” as one senior Israeli government official put it.

As reported by the Times of Israel, “The military said it carried out an airstrike against a joint war room shared by various armed groups in the city including the so-called Jenin Battalion, which ‘served as an observation post, a gathering place for armed terrorists before and after terror acts, a cache for munitions and bombs and a communications center.’”

Reuters reported, “Israeli forces detained 150 suspected militants, seized large caches of money, guns and roadside mines - including an arsenal under a mosque - and destroyed a command centre, the army said." Among the Palestinians killed who were armed fighters, "Islamic Jihad claimed eight as members, with Hamas claiming another.”

If the terrorists choose to embed their command, planning, and arms storage facilities inside homes, mosques, and civilian infrastructure, then they are the ones putting innocent civilians’ lives at risk and committing violations of international law.

Secretary General Guterres and other senior UN officials also blame Israel for the failure of the Palestinians and Israelis to negotiate a viable two-state solution. They focus especially on Israel’s settlements, which a statement attributable to the Spokesperson for the Secretary General called “a flagrant violation of international law and relevant United Nations resolutions.” The statement went on to say that the “ongoing settlements are eroding the possibility of establishing a contiguous and viable sovereign Palestinian State, based on the pre-1967 lines, thereby impeding the ability to achieve a viable two-State solution, and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.”

This statement is another example of the UN’s flagrant anti-Israel bias. The fundamental reason that “a contiguous and viable sovereign Palestinian State” has not been established for more than seven decades is the intransigence of Palestinian leaders and their enablers.

The Palestinians’ responsibility for their own fate began with the Palestinians’ and their Arab neighbors’ rejection of the original two-state solution – the United Nations 1947 partition plan. And the Palestinians’ rejectionism has continued ever since.

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After Israel’s victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and its capture of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the United States made repeated efforts to mediate a negotiated two-state solution between Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Successive U.S. administrations have offered reasonable proposals for resolution of the conflict to no avail.

First Yasser Arafat and then Mahmoud Abbas walked away from proposed deals that would have given the Palestinians virtually all of the West Bank, East Jerusalem as their new state’s capital, and even sovereignty over the Temple Mount.

Arafat and Abbas both dug in their heels on the Palestinians’ demand for an unlimited “right of return” to pre-June 1967 Israel for potentially millions of so-called Palestinian “refugees.” An independent Palestinian state where Palestinians of whatever status could live with full citizenship rights was not enough for them. The Palestinian leaders’ unwavering objective has been to flood Israel itself with enough Palestinians claiming the “right of return” to destroy Israel’s unique character as a Jewish state.

Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, uprooting Israelis living there, only to be attacked by many thousands of deadly rockets that Hamas terrorists launched from Gaza after Hamas assumed control of Gaza in 2007. To expect Israel to revert to pre-1967 lines in establishing its border with a new Palestinian state, after what Israel experienced when it gave up Gaza in a gesture of peace, is to expect Israel to commit suicide as a Jewish state. That would suit the Palestinian militants, their leaders, and their enablers at the United Nations just fine.

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