Mideast: Maybe you heard the kerfuffle over Mitt Romney's comments about those who don't pay taxes. But you likely didn't hear his other remarks — that Palestinians don't really want peace. He was right about that, too.
'I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say, 'There's just no way.'"
That's how Romney put it at a donor gathering, surreptitiously recorded for posterity. Some were shocked — shocked! — that a U.S. politician would say such a thing.
After all, official U.S. policy is that we favor a two-state solution that would include a peaceful Palestine and a peaceful Israel living together in harmony and brotherhood, side by side. If we could only get them to sit down together and talk, there would be peace in the Mideast — a real Kumbaya moment.
Nice ideal. But the fact is, it will not happen.
And those who think it will are either disingenuous or totally ignorant of the region's history.
The so-called Palestinians don't want a two-state solution — their preferred "solution" is one state, Palestine, inhabited solely by Muslim Arabs. This is the bedrock of their claim, that Israel is an illegitimate state made up of foreign Jewish interlopers who stole the land.
All of the major groups in the region — the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hamas, Hezbollah — have as their central tenets the destruction of Israel. That idea is enshrined in their founding charters and constitutions. They've never given that up.
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