An Egyptian Highlights What Most Palestinians, and Other Arabs, Refuse to Recognize

While there are Lebanese who resent Hezbollah’s takeover of the state, which it now controls “politically, economically, and [in] everything else,” they are helpless to oppose Hassan Nasrallah and his goose-stepping bezonians who far outnumber the soldiers of the Lebanese army, and have 150,000 missiles and rockets, received from Iran, stockpiled for future use against not just Israel, but also against any Lebanese factions determined to oppose it. More on this can be found here: “Egyptian analyst sanity on Lebanese TV: ‘Hamas is the problem, Arabs have to stop thinking Israel will disappear, Hezbollah hijacked Lebanon,'” Elder of Ziyon, January 11, 2024:

He [Magdi Khalil] added, “Force, weapons, and imposing a fait accompli is not legitimate. If the party gives up its weapons, its actual political size will appear. Israel assaulted Lebanon after it turned into a theater for the Palestine Liberation Organization. If the Lebanese state adheres to neutrality, it will not have a problem with Israel.”

Having a powerful military force, outfitted by Iran, does not confer on Hezbollah either the right, or the legitimacy, to rule over Lebanon. Take away those weapons, and those Iranian funds, Khalil is saying, and one would see how little real support Hezbollah has in Lebanon, where its high-handed ways, its responsibility for the disastrous “Beirut blast” at the Port of Beirut, which on August 4, 2020, killed 230, wounded 7,500, and caused $15 billion in damage, its murder of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005, are among the deeds that have made the terror group so hated by all the other Lebanese.

He explained, “Israel is a state recognized globally and by the United Nations and cannot be removed. I call for liberation from two illusions in the Arab imagination. The first is the illusion that God promised to eliminate Israel, and the second is to completely expel the Jews from this region.”

Khalil highlights what most Palestinians, and many other Arabs, refuse to recognize: Israel is a thriving, strong state, and constantly getting stronger. It has the fourth most powerful military in the world, after the US, China, and Russia. It is the world’s sixth most politically influential country, and it is the tenth strongest power overall. Its citizens rank fourth in the World Happiness Index. The Arabs can keep telling themselves that Israel is about to collapse, but Khalil says this is nonsense. Accept reality, my fellow Arabs, he insists, Israel is here to stay. He’s a brave man to say this on Lebanese television, while sitting in Cairo.

He continued, “The Palestinian issue, as defined by the United Nations in 1947, is a land dispute between Jews and Arabs. Therefore, the decision came with a state for the Jews and a state for the Arabs. The Arabs rejected the partition decision and then refused to join Camp David and everything after that. Those who did not adhere to the Oslo Accords were the Palestinians. They are themselves at the hands of Hamas and evil forces that do not want a solution to the Palestinian issue. They have destroyed all chances for peace and caused the Israeli right to come to power in Israel. There is no solution to this issue except through peaceful negotiations.”

Magdi Khalil reminds the Arabs that it was they, and not the Zionists, who rejected the UN’s Partition Plan in 1947 — something Arab spokesmen always overlook. It was the Palestinians who, having accepted the Oslo Accords, then violated those same accords. The people of Gaza allowed the takeover by Hamas in the Strip. Hamas, for those who may need reminding, is a terror group founded in 1987 that takes as its inviolable goal the “obliteration” of the Jewish state and the expulsion, or murder, of all the Jews in Israel. It was the Palestinians who rejected the generous peace offers made to Yasser Arafat by Ehud Barak in 2000, and to Mahmoud Abbas by Ehud Olmert in 2008. It is the Palestinians, especially the terror group Hamas, who have repeatedly started conflicts with Israel that always lead to their crushing defeat. It is those terror groups, such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and not Israel, that have “destroyed all chances for peace.” Nothing will come of these constant conflicts that always end in humiliating losses for the Palestinians. According to Khalil, the only way to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians is through “negotiation.” Nowhere does he mention a “two-state solution,” or say that Israel will have to agree to be squeezed back within the 1949 armistice lines (often described as the “pre-1967 lines” to soften the impact) with a nine-mile-wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea; nor does he state that a Palestinian state should be created at all.