Ken Burch
2 min readFeb 29, 2024

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Ok...maybe a Palestinian state won't solve the dispute in and of itself, but the real point is this: the conflict can't be ended without A) Israel admitting that it HAS inflicted numerous injustices and wrongs on ordinary Palestinians and that Palestinian resistance is largely based in legitimate anger about those grievances, not "hatred of Jews"; B) An acceptance that ordinary Palestinians have to be made whole by Israel and the international community for the largely unjustified suffering they've been subjected to; C)That there was never any justification for invoking the Holocaust and the previous two millennia of unjustified European Christian persecution/oppression/vilification of Jews, combined with the refusal of the US and Canada to do the simple decent thing and let Jewish refugees and have sanctuary and at least temporary American or Canadian nationality- because the fault for that and the responsibility to have done that decent thing lies solely with the UK/US/Canada, not with Palestinians, and it must be admitted once and for all that Palestinians and Arabs bear no responsibility for Hitler's monstrous acts OR anything European Christians did to Jews before that(and I say that as a person of European Christian ancestry) ; and D) Must avoid forcing any Palestinian leadership to play the role of the vanquished, humiliated leader in the conflict.

It isn't possible to end the conflict by having the Arab simply renounce the cause of Palestinian self-determination and demand that Palestinians renounce their own reality. Peace can't be made by doing what you seem to want, which is somehow getting the Arab world scream "you were never a real people! You never had any valid grievances against Israel! You just hated Jews and you need to get over yourselves, know your and take whatever pathetic crumbs are thrown at you!". You are not an idiot, so why would you even think such an arrogant, bloodyminded approach could work?

It's never been as simple as hatred and peace through humiliation can never work anywhere in the world again- so what's the point of even trying it?

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Ken Burch
Ken Burch

Written by Ken Burch

Retired Alaska ferryboat steward, grandparent, sometime poet. Radical yet independent of dogma. Likes nice days, playing banjo and not as yet dying of Covid.

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