Roasted chicken and vegetables with rice.

Cooked by me. 😁

The romantic idealism of Palestinian statehood

Ben Riley-Smith writing in “Hermer dismisses lawyers’ claim that Palestine recognition breaks law” (Telegraph, 1 Aug 2025) says:

The Prime Minister said he would recognise Palestine at the UN General Assembly in September unless Israel meets four conditions. He wants Israel to end the “appalling” situation in Gaza and allow the UN to restart the supply of aid; reach a ceasefire; “make clear” there will be no annexation in the West Bank; and commit to a long-term peace process that delivers a two-state solution.

Sir Keir also repeated calls for Hamas to release all remaining hostages captured in the October 7 attacks, but that demand was not made an explicit condition for recognition to take place.

The letter to Lord Hermer from the 40 peers, including prominent Israel supporters, first reported by The Times, argued that the Government’s approach risked breaking international law. The signatories wrote: “We call on you to advise him [Starmer] that this would be contrary to international law. “You are on record as saying that a commitment to international law goes absolutely to the heart of this Government and its approach to foreign policy. Accordingly, we expect you to demonstrate this commitment by explaining to the public and to the Government that recognition of Palestine would be contrary to the principles governing recognition of states in international law.”

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There are three points to make:

1. As the article says, the British Prime Minister did not call for the return of Israeli hostages as an explicit requirement for statehood. That’s absolutely incredible.

2. The British government is effectively threatening Israel. It says if you don’t agree to a ceasefire then we’ll recognise Palestinian statehood. Sir Keir Starmer is effectively doing Hamas’ work for them. There are ongoing ceasefire negotiations which Hamas recently rejected. And of course they would. Why accept anything when you can sit on your demands - as the world castagates Israel. If I was the Hamas leader, I would make sure to reject every ceasefire deal; and let the democracies of the West come to my aid. Afterall, I don’t need to release any hostage.

3. Mere recognition cannot conjure up a functioning state which would be required for a two-state solution. The Montevideo Convention of 1933 in international law requires 4 conditions for statehood: a permanent population, a government, defined borders, and the capacity to enter into diplomatic relations. The so-called state of Palestine can only meet 2 conditions. E.g. it has two rival governments. After Israeli unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, did the Palestinians seek to establish a fully functioning nation state. No. Billions of dollars in aid spent on building a war machine.

Should Israel end this war? (Apropos the Arab League’s condemnation of Hamas)

Israel has effectively won the war as it relates to the nation’s security. The objectives are:

• Secure Israel’s borders - Israel’s borders are now secure.
• Prevent Oct-7 from happening again - Hamas don’t have strategic capability to exert force beyond the borders of Gaza. Mohammed Deif is dead. Hanniyah is dead. Sinwar is dead. Sinwar’s brother is dead.
• Defeat and/or dismantle Hamas - Leadership wiped-out, Iranian regime deterred, infrastructure & finances seriously hampered.
• Return the hostages - Most of the hostages that can be returned are back. 

After the death of Sinwar, Israel effectively won this war. But it cannot really declare victory with the hostages remaining in terrorist hands.  Thus, the only thorn, it seems to me, is whether you really believe Hamas will be prepared to return the 20 remaining hostages.

Should Israel continue to use force to secure the hostages, or can they be negotiated for? Afterall, what further military objectives can be reasonably yielded at this point by the IDF? 

Since the outset of war, I have thought that military force was the only real means for the security of the hostages. But, there has been a shift among the Arab adjoining nations. Some part of me wonders whether this might make Hamas surrender the hostages?  As the Times of Israel has reported:

Arab and Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan and Turkey, signed a declaration Tuesday condemning for the first time Hamas’s onslaught of October 7, 2023, and calling on the Palestinian terror group to release all the hostages it is holding, disarm and end its rule of Gaza, in a bid to end the devastating war in the Strip ...

The ToI has also uploaded a copy of a UN-document in which the nations are calling for (1) the removal of Hamas from Gaza and (2) revive the two-state process with Israel. 

The whole document is mostly a joke (as I point out below). In fact, I think it was designed to make Israel reject it. 

Should Israel respond stating her needs in clear actionable language? I think perhaps - thought only barely. We are approaching the end and Israel needs US and Arab support. (I don’t think UN is any use to Israel).

From what’s worth, I think the two-state solution is a long way off though. We’ve all seen the videos of Oct-7 when the hostages were kidnapped and dragged back into Gaza. There were cheering hordes of civilians who took turns desecrating dead bodies and spitting on and harassing (to put it mildly) the living ones. Moreover, we shouldn’t forget that everyday guards and civilians followed up the wave of Hamas fighters on October-7 to commit further atrocities in Israel itself. Then we have institutions, like the UNRWA education system, which has raised Gazan children for decades to loathe the Yahud.

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The declaration’s points about the 2 state-solution

• The false moral equivalence of Hamas and Israel - The declaration (para 4) actually says “we condemn the attacks committed by Hamas against civilians on the 7th of October” followed by “we also condemn the attacks by Israel against civilians in Gaza” ... almost in the same breath! It’s like comparing a serial killer with a doctor killing the fetus to save the mother’s life. Only a maniac would compare the two. There is a world of difference between Hamas’ evil use of civilians as human shields and hostages to Israel’s rules of engagement apropos  minimising civilian death consequent to targeted strikes against differing levels of commanders. What a joke.
• The contingent release of Hamas’ hostages - Para 8 actually calls upon Hamas to release all hostages but, strangely, “in the context” of stopping the war in Gaza. That makes the release of hostages part of the 2SS, and thus contingent on Israel to “exchange of Palestinian prisoners” (even, presumably, if they’ve committed serious crimes). We’re not doing that rubbish again. We’ve learnt our lessons.
• Gaza and the Westbank unified under one regime - is unobjectionable in theory. But how to do this? Are they going to form a landbridge over the two completely unrelated pieces of land.
• Israel to hand over East Jerusalem - Nope. Not going to happen. East Jerusalem was never part of Palestinian territories, under the original UN plans. Jordan annexed it illegally from 1948 to 1967, and ethnically cleansed Jews from the area. In 1967, Israel immediately took it back. Israel has a much stronger claim to East Jerusalem than Palestine.
• Hamas must end its rule and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority - OK. Fine. But no mention to what happens to remaining Hamas operatives.
• Calling for the return of UNRWA - No way. They have been caught teaching violent ideology to the children of Gaza, providing books with virulent antisemitism. A few UNRWA workers even participated in Oct-7 attacks. Another joke.
• Calling on Abbas to lead the new Palestine - No acknowledgment of him as a corrupt dictator of 20 years.
• Calling for “Right of Return” (by endorsing UNAR 194) - Total non-starter. This will be the destruction of Israel. There is no “Right of Return”. There will never be a “Return” for the sons of the sons of the people who declared war on old Israel and then fled after their attempted genocide failed. No country will ever dictate to Israel its sovereignty and security through its immigration policies.

Does friendship nowadays require homogeneity of political ideas?

Today, I think, for my generation, politics very strongly intrudes into the domain of friendship.

Some months ago I gave a friend of mine my traditional-conservative take on something and was told “if I knew these were your opinions, I wouldn’t be your friend” line -- what bothers me is why/how we’ve become like this? (I can’t remember the subject, but it was a fairly innocuous topic of current events).

Society didn’t used to be like this, and I think the below article shows this.

I suspect it’s the nefarious influence of social media on our culture.

Politics is about ideas; and civil discussions - especially among friends - should be the norm in a liberal society with a diversity of opinions. Ideas are either right or wrong. And we should engage and discuss things, and I always love a discussion that makes me re-think something. And I have quite often reversed positions on issues because of it.

But today, we’re walking on eggshells. A hypersensitivity to just about everything. And at any moment people can be ostracised for wrongthink.

I think we’ve been subtly programmed to hate people who think differently to us. Buckley and Galbraith (who were very anti and pro New Deal) always remained good friends. That, I don’t think, seems very possible today.

I sometimes think I was born in the wrong age.

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Jeff Greenfield writing in “The Pleasure of Disagreeing with Bill Buckley” (National Review, Feb 2025):

If you’re at all familiar with the contours of Buckley’s life, you likely know that he was friends with and/or an admirer of an array of figures on the left: the brilliant socialist columnist Murray Kempton, longtime activist Al Lowenstein, novelist Norman Mailer, economist (and skiing buddy) John Kenneth Galbraith. The intriguing question is why. Why, given the withering “take no prisoners” persona he presented in public debate, was he so comfortable in the company of his political adversaries?

The key, I think, is less our scintillating personalities and more how much he savored the give-and-take of argument — emphasis on the give and take. As William Kristol put it, “Buckley really believes that in order to convince, you have to debate and not just preach, which of course means risking the possibility that someone will beat you in debate.” ... Those whose exposure to political “debate” these days is confined to outlets that never open themselves to contrary views would likely be startled by the parade of figures who jousted with Buckley on air: Noam Chomsky, Saul Alinsky, Allen Ginsberg, Julian Bond, and Jesse Jackson, among literally dozens of other ideological adversaries.

It was one of Buckley’s admirable attributes — one unfortunately shared by too few across the political spectrum — that he was comfortable with changing his mind. He came to regret his early arguments about race; he came to see that Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose work he had championed in a book, was an impediment to the cause of anti-communism, and he wrote a novel reflecting that revised view. 

From a more civic point of view, Firing Line stands as an unhappy reminder of the distance that political discourse has traveled since its time, mostly because it would be difficult if not impossible to find a host both ideologically committed and open, even delighted, to engage in lengthy, civil discourse with his or her foes (much less breaking bread with them).