Now, when we came into possession of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, and when we came back to our ancestral homeland into these disputed lands and built some communities, some settlements, we uprooted them according to the book. They changed the narrative. After ’67 what the Palestinians did is turn the result of their aggression – our presence in those territories – into its cause. And the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon made a decision with which I disagreed.
They uprooted all the Israelis from Gaza, disinterred the graves, gave the territory to Abu Mazen and he promptly handed it over to Hamas under the force of their guns. Well, we didn’t get peace. We got thousands and thousands of rockets hurled into our cities. And when we asked Hamas, “Why are you firing these rockets on our cities? Is it to liberate the West Bank?” And they said, “Yeah, that too, but it’s to liberate Palestine – Haifa, Akko, Jaffa, Jerusalem of course.” That is what they said.
We turned to the others, to Abbas and the Palestinian Authority and I said, “What about you? Are you willing to recognize the Jewish state? You demand a nation-state for the Palestinian people. Assuming we solve the problem of the border, of the settlements and so on, would you then be prepared to recognize a Jewish state, a nation-state for the Jewish people?” They hem and haw and basically say no because they’d have to give up the fantasy of the so-called right of return because they have to end the conflict, because they don’t want a state to end the conflict because they want a state to continue the conflict and eradicate the Jewish state. This is what this conflict has always been about. That’s what it’s about. You can’t deny the facts. You can stick your head in the sand and be an ostrich, but we Jews do not stick our heads in the sand. We see the territory, we see reality as it is and we confront that reality.
And here’s the tenth, final myth – and this is a doozer for some of you. This one shows how persistent and absurd these myths are and this was common parlance for our critics, for commentators, for political leaders, for the greatest news media in the world and this was uttered day in, day out, every hour by the hour, by the international community and even some here and even by our own people. And they said this as though it was self-evident truth and here’s what it said: The core of the conflict in the Middle East – conflict always in the singular – the core of the conflict in the Middle East is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Remember that one?
Now four years after the Arab Spring and the convulsions that take place, the disintegration of Syria, the disintegration of Iraq, the disintegration of Libya, the wars in Yemen, the chaos in the Sinai and everything else that convulses North Africa and the Middle East from India to the Atlantic, from the borders of India I’m happy to say to the Atlantic, there is great convulsion. What’s that got to do with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? And the answer is: Nothing. Yet this was repeated over and over and over again. There were two truths – this was one of them. The core of the conflict was the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; and the core of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict were the settlements. Neither one is true.
Now it’s evident. The first one is, you know, there are still true believers – not many – walking about us, but they’re fairly silent about the first one because when millions are displaced, when hundreds of thousands are butchered, when every week in Istanbul now they had… in Ankara they had 100 people die in one day and thousands die every month – thousands – in Iraq, in Saudi Arabia, in the Sinai, in Libya. It’s patently absurd. And yet people believe this. They believe this with religious fervor, I would say. I’m talking about the West. Now they believe the settlement myth even though they see it before their eyes. We left Gaza. We left every settlement – nothing. The conflict continues. We offer a deal and we say, “Okay, assuming we solve the settlement problem, what about the settlement called Tel Aviv? What about Jaffa? Give up the ghost.” Nope.