Israel/Palestine
In reply to the discussion: Will there be peace if Palestinians lay down their arms? [View all]aranthus
(3,385 posts)Here's what Gopin writes:
"This argument is based on two false assumptions about Palestinians. The first statement is based on the false assumption that the only impediment to peace is Palestinian violence, and the second is based on the assumption that the Palestinians main goal is to eradicate the Jews."
Let's take the two parts of this one at a time.
"The first statement is based on the false assumption that the only impediment to peace is Palestinian violence"
This is a gross simplification of what the phrase means. While it is certainly true that there would not be an immediate peace agreement if the Palestinians were to lay down their arms, that isn't what the statement is or means. It says that there wouldn't be war. More than that, the two phrases taken together are a description of what the war is about. From the Israeli perspective, the war is about Palestinian and Arab denial of the legitimacy of Jewish national existence. It is the war to destroy the Jewish state. So if the Palestinians stop making war against the Jewish state, it won't bring peace immediately, but it is the one thing that will make peace possible.
Okay, now the second part of Gopin's "assumptions"
"the second is based on the assumption that the Palestinians main goal is to eradicate the Jews."
Except that isn't the assumption at all. It's just not true that the argument assumes that all Palestinians want to eradicate, slaughter, do away with or, murder the Jews. It's based on the assumption that they want to do away with the Jewish state; that they don't recognize the legitimacy of Jewish national existence. It's really more of an observation than an assumption, since so many Palestinians and Palestinian organizations either say that, or say things that can only be meaningful if you don't recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state. BDS, right of Return, the refusal of Abbas and the PA to recognize Israel as a Jewish state; almost the whole of the pro-Palestinian argument only makes sense if you assume that the Jews don't have a right to a state in Israel. And of course, Hamas really does want to kill Jews; the Hamas Charter is quite explicit about it. So the real question is whether Gopin is just clueless, or disingenuous.