288 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 79 PART 2 MARCH 2021
former U.K. Labour Prime Minister
who has visited Israel over 250
times, concluded that the rift
between the Palestinians and
Israelis has almost nothing to do
with land and everything to do
with culture. In his opinion, Blair
said that the wisest strategy that
the Israelis could embark upon is
to negotiate peace with all of its
neighbours and forget about the
Palestinians unless they want to
participate.
Over the past 73 years, the Palestinians
have been offered multiple
peace deals, most of which
included ninety-eight per cent of
the land they wanted. Nevertheless,
they always walked away
from the peace table. In one
instance, their response to a very
generous peace deal during the
Clinton administration was to walk
from the table and commence an
intifada, which led to the death of
countless innocent civilians. When
recently interviewed, Palestinian
leader Yasser Arafat’s widow, who
lives in Paris on an estimated $1
billion fortune, stated that her husband
always regretted commencing
the intifada.
With respect to Campbell’s wild
assertions that Israel misused the
UN partition plan to dispossess
750,000 Palestinians from their
land, she would do well to spend
the time to review some legitimate
historical sources. In 1948, Israel’s
neighbours planned their invasion
of the new nation from all sides
and urged the Palestinians to flee.
Most did without securing any
compensation for the land.
The same thing happened to the
Jews of Morocco, Tunisia, Syria,
Iran and other nations where Jews
had lived in peace with their neighbours
for hundreds of years and
faced expropriation of their property
and execution if they remained.
This diaspora has never
received compensation for their
losses, both material and personal.
Israel has been struck by over
2,600 rockets and mortars over the
past two years. Would we accept
such pressure in Canada? The
October Crisis was generated by a
few mailbox bombings and the kidnapping
of a diplomat, at which
point our prime minister’s father
declared martial law and instituted
the War Measures Act.
Since the concept of a two-state
solution has been rejected repeatedly
by both parties to the dispute
and seems to exist as a viable solution
only in the minds of the countries
that are not directly con-
nected to the dispute, perhaps it is
best for the world to cease promoting
a solution that is not acceptable
to either side but has merely
become the politically correct
statement of the solution.
Michael L. Warsh
Nanaimo