Egyptian Analyst Looks Forward to ‘End of Hamas,’ the ‘Main Obstacle to Peace’ “The Jews have been in this land since the days of the Prophet Abraham. This is their land.” by Hugh Fitzgerald
Magdi Khalil does not mention a “right of return” for Palestinians. Nor does he mention the Palestinian insistence that its future capital must be in east Jerusalem. He thinks it must be left up to the parties to figure out what kind of modus vivendi will be possible. “Egyptian analyst sanity on Lebanese TV: ‘Hamas is the problem, Arabs have to stop thinking Israel will disappear, Hezbollah hijacked Lebanon,’” Elder of Ziyon, January 11, 2024:
He expressed his optimism that a solution would be reached immediately after the end of the war and after the end of Hamas, the main obstacle to peace, “since serious peace talks will begin to reach a demilitarized Palestinian state under security supervision by Israel for years, but there is not yet a qualified party [on the Palestinian side] to enter into these negotiations.”
Magdi Khalil looks forward to the “end of Hamas,” which he describes as the “main obstacle to peace,” and fully accepts the Israeli demand that any Palestinian state would have to be “demilitarized,” with Israel in charge of security “for years.” He recognizes,too, that Israel does not have a partner for peace; the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas is not the “moderate’” political force that the Western world seems to think it is. Abbas on only one occasion, during a phone call with Venezuela’s President Maduro, criticized Hamas for the October 7 attack, and then had that criticism promptly taken down. This shows just how “moderate” this corrupt leader, whom 90% of Palestinians want to resign at once, really is. His quarrel with Hamas is not over morality, but over power and money.
He stressed that “Israel announced its endeavor to eliminate everyone involved in the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, as it did previously after the Munich operation in 1972. It has reactivated the assassination squad and the spy teams that had been neglected, and will carry out many assassinations.”…
The killing so far of nine of the top Hamas commanders, including one, Saleh Arouri, who was killed by an airstrike in Beirut, have struck terror in the upper ranks of Hamas and Hezbollah. Obviously the Mossad has lost none of its deadly flair. It will continue to assassinate Hamas leaders until they are almost all eliminated, as was done to the Palestinians who planned and carried out the killing of Israel’s Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972. Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza, remains alive only because he has surrounded himself with Israeli hostages. The minute those hostages are either freed or killed, Sinwar will be a dead man walking.
Khalil sees Iran, not Israel, as the “real enemy” of the Sunni Arab states. Iran sees itself as the rightful Great Power in the Middle East. Iran has supported Shi’a Houthis in Yemen, the Kataib Hezbollah Shia militia in Iraq, the Alawite-led army in Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and in every one of those countries, those Iran-backed Shi’a groups have started, or taken part, in civil wars. Iran hopes to establish a “Shia crescent” extending from Yemen through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon. Israel, on the other hand, has no territorial claims on any Arab state; the Israelis only want to ensure the survival of their own tiny Jewish state against those who would destroy it.
Khalil concluded by saying, “The Jews have been in this land since the days of the Prophet Abraham. This is their land, even if their number decreases or increases according to persecution. The region has not been devoid of them throughout history, and there was no state called Palestine and no Palestinian people. “
This conclusion is the most surprising, and welcome, part of Khalil’s article. He recognizes that the Jews are native to, and not “settler-colonialists” in, the Middle East, in “this land” — what the Jews call the Land of Israel — and they have been there, he says, from the time of the Prophet Abraham, that is, from the 18th century B.C. The Jews have lived there uninterruptedly in numbers that went up and down, “according to [the] persecution” they endured. And then Magdi Khalil dares to speak, even more amazingly, this truth: that the Jews lived there, where Israel is today, several millennia before there was a place called “Palestine” or the “Palestinian people,” who were created in the 1960s for obvious political purposes. Khalil must be very brave to say these things. He is, after all, a Copt living in Cairo, stating one truth after another that are bound to enrage Muslim Arabs. He deserves great respect.
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