Article published in the Opinion Page of The Australian newspaper on 25 September 2025, p. 11.
Below: The article as it appeared in the newspaper:
A lot is being asked of Israelis, the Jewish diaspora, and friends right now.
The whole world seems thirsty to recognise the “sovereign state of Palestine”. I hope Australia, France, Canada, the UK and Portugal are right to think the moribund “peace process” might get a new lease of life, hostages are released, and a new era begins.
But I hesitate to break out the champagne. I am enough of a realist to pause to consider the implications. Israel is 22, 000 sq. km., less than a third of the size of Tasmania. At its narrowest point, the border near Netanya is 15 km deep, the distance a fit runner could cross before breakfast. Since 1948, Israel has had to defeat enemies, powerful adversaries pledged to annihilate the state and the Jewish population. Losing in ’48, ’67, ’73 and every conflict in-between and since meant the end, a new holocaust. Violent Islamism and eliminationist antisemitism are on Israel’s doorstep.
That, and the context of the foundation of modern Israel, the Shoah, the return of Jews to their ancestral land, sears into the hearts and minds of every Israeli that “never again” means being ready for the worse.
In 2020, the Abraham Accords with Israel, the UAE, Morocco, and Bahrain vaguely envisaged support for Palestinian self-governance. Those agreements were crafted as if there was still life in the September 13, 1993, Oslo Accords, the signed Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, between then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chief negotiator Mahmoud Abbas.
Israel then accepted the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians, and the PLO formally renounced terrorism and recognised Israel’s right to exist in peace. Both sides agreed that the PA would be established and assume governing responsibilities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip over a five-year period. Then, permanent status talks on the issues of borders, refugees, and Jerusalem were supposed to be held.
That sounded promising. But Rabin was slain, and PLO leader Arafat was no Mandela. The PA rejected proposals by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000 and Ehud Olmert in 2007/8, including substantial land-swaps based on the 1967 borders. The Palestinian intifada, suicide bombers and domestic terrorism, and Hamas as rulers of Gaza, destroyed the spirit of Oslo and the ‘security’ credibility of the Israeli centre left.
Israelis concluded that the Palestinians and their representatives could not be trusted.
Optimism about a two-state solution evaporated. The current Israeli Government, a coalition of Likud, far right, and religious parties, is pledged to annex the West Bank. That coalition and the rise of the far-right, can be directly correlated with the Palestinians’ rejection of moderate Israeli peace proposals.
Hamas is like the Vietcong, hoping the world will grow tired of the conflict, annoyed about the continued loss of lives – although every casualty, directly or indirectly, is because of Hamas’s hatred of Jews. Hamas’s strategy is to bide their time and come roaring back. Israelis are rightly fearful. It is the optimism of fools to wish upon a star and expect love and affection from a people who in large numbers supported 7 October, whose society is rife with antisemitism, whose leaders hold loopy ideas.
For example, the ageing PA President, Mahmoud Abbas, once wrote a PhD thesis titled The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism. He argued that the Zionists collaborated in killing European Jews to encourage the rest to embrace Zionism and emigrate to Palestine. In 2023 in a speech, Abbas said Adolf Hitler ordered the mass murder of Jews because of their “social role” as moneylenders, rather than out of animosity to Judaism.
This guy is the leading ‘moderate’, the main interlocutor over the past thirty years, the person Israelis are to trust with their lives.
This week, Abbas promised that pay-to-slay payments are over. Why the wait to now? Palestine Watch posted a video from last May of children ‘mock killing’ Jews at the Dalal Mughrabi Coed Elementary School, named after terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, who led the murder of 37 Israeli civilians in 1978. There are hundreds more such videos.
Will Palestinians accept Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people? Will Abbas, however, pursue maximalist ‘right of return’ claims – not of just of the surviving 50,000 or so actual refugees from 1948, but of the six million or more (counting the population in Jordan) Palestinians, and swamp Israel? Who thinks free and fair elections will be conducted across Palestine in 2026?
I believe Palestinians deserve their own state. I am no fan of Israeli PM Netanyahu, or the minister responsible for law and security in the West Bank, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a nine-times convicted felon, including for acts of terror. That’s one aspect of a complex mosaic.
But right now, as celebrations around the 5,785th Jewish New Year end this week, we ask the Israeli people to take a giant leap to the unknown. That worries me.
