Piers Akerman: Palestinians could return to greater glory if they wished

The Nazis were defeated in Europe, Japan’s attempt to conquer Asia was smashed and both nations were restored to greater glories. The Palestinians could be, if they wished, given the same chance, write Piers Akerman.

Gaza has been smashed, the death toll is disputed, the living are in tents, and this is what the commanders of Hamas claim is victory.

It says a lot for the twisted ideology of Hamas that corpses and rubble could be seen as a triumph.

In the eyes of the Hamas leaders, most of whom are living in luxury in Qatar, and in the thinking of Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Israel has been humiliated because it failed to protect its people on October 7.

The surprise invasion, the corpses of the young men and women murdered at the Nova peace and love festival, the pacifists living agrarian socialist lives in neighbouring kibbutzes, slain or kidnapped, showed Israel was not invulnerable.

That Palestinians have been killed and the living displaced from their homes is not the point.

Such is the perverted ideology of Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood sponsored by Iran, that deaths of Palestinians are to be celebrated, particularly if they occurred in an action against the great Satan, the US, or the lesser devil, Israel, but actually in combat with any infidel, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Baha’i, you name it.

A poster of hostage Nadav Popplewell. Picture: AFP

A visitor mourns at a memorial for people who were taken hostage or killed in the Hamas attack on the Supernova music festival on October 7. Picture: AFP

What the Australian government, and other pro-Palestinian sympathisers, need to realise is there will be no resolution of the crisis and certainly no Palestinian state or two-state solution until all hostages, dead or alive, are returned and Hamas is weakened to the point of irrelevance.

In conversations with relatives of hostages in Israel last week, it was made clear while their overwhelming thought was for the return of their loved ones, the price could not include a free pass for Hamas.

Aching for his kidnapped son, Nimrod, 19, engineer Yehuda Cohen told me he wants a global deal that would lead to the release of all hostages but not if Hamas was permitted to survive.

“A diplomatic solution is the only way,” he said. “The fighting is going nowhere. We want a deal.”

But that deal must not include the survival of Hamas.

Gal Dalal, whose brother Guy, 22, was also kidnapped at the Nova festival, had a lucky escape. He is now focused on keeping the hostage issue before the international community.

“Without international pressure, the hostages will be held that much longer,” he told me. “Our soldiers are there to protect and defend our country. They are not invaders.

Israelis evacuated from northern areas near the Lebanese border due to ongoing cross-border tensions, take part in a rally near the northern Amiad Kibbutz, demanding to return home on May 23, 2024. Picture: AFP

“I do not hate Palestinians; if I hated Palestinians, the terrorists would have won. It’s not Palestinians against Israel, it’s terrorists against Israel. Palestinians can be executed for speaking out.”

There is a real sense among the many Israelis I’ve met that the Palestinians have won the public relations war with the help of pliant Left-wing media such as the ABC and public protests.

Gal said the manipulation of the narrative had led to a rise in Jew hatred among people who did not care about the realities of the conflict, those who did not understand it, others who just wanted to blame Israel.

“Many aren’t protesting for Palestine, they protesting against Israel,” he said.

Overlooked are the more than 600,000 Israelis displaced from their homes in the south and north Israel because of the constant rocket and mortar attacks from Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria.

Israel is barely a third the size of Tasmania and Iranian-supplied rockets and drones can have the range to threaten most centres.

Israeli refugees have been living in city hotels since the rocket attacks began after October 7.

Children were sent off with school lunches from the hotel I stayed at in Jerusalem and played their games in the corridors and public spaces when they returned and at the weekend.

The strain on their parents’ faces was evidence of the effect of the upheaval since the invasion but they hold on to the hope of return.

A firefighter and a Kibbutz member extinguish a near the Israel border with Lebanon after a drone attack on June 4, 2024. Picture: Getty Images

Life for the families of the kidnapped hostages changed forever.

“I would like to think my mother will recover when my brother comes home,” Gal said, “that we can continue when the hostages return from the murdering, raping, torturing kidnappers.”

Yehuda, who still has memories of living in Melbourne as a child, says he has given up work to devote himself to campaigning for the hostages’ return.

Then there is the question of the day after this war ends and Hamas is wiped out. The Arab nations immediately bordering Gaza don’t want to be involved.

Egypt passed on the opportunity to run Gaza when it was offered by Israel after the Oslo Accords were signed by US President Jimmy Carter, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Jewish Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in Washington in 1993.

Jordan expelled the Palestinians after the Black September uprising in 1970; they didn’t want responsibility for Gaza. Nor do the Saudis or the Emirati Arabs.

There is a suggestion a multinational force that excludes the UN be assembled to rebuild the infrastructure and oversee a deradicalisation of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and what remains of Gaza. This may be worth exploring.

The UN is a bad actor, controlled by an axis of evil comprising China, Russia and Iran with their proxies. The liberal democracies of the world are outnumbered.

Unfortunately, Australia has voted with the forces of evil, not with the supporters of democracy. But there is hope the Palestinians can be freed of their oppressors, Hamas, and the influence of the tyrannical ayatollahs in Iran can be weakened. That hope must be nurtured. The Nazis were defeated in Europe, Japan’s attempt to conquer Asia was smashed and both nations were restored to greater glories.

The Palestinians could be, if they wished, given the same chance.

My opportunity to explore the crisis with a group of Australian journalists was provided by the Australian Israeli Jewish Affairs Council, to whom I’m most grateful.

Originally published as Piers Akerman: Palestinians could return to greater glory if they wished