Ben and Jerry’s decision to suspend sales in the West Bank has once again brought to the fore the ongoing conundrum of how to solve the Palestinian problem: a stateless people with millions living for more than seventy years in refugee camps. Though once a strong supporter of a two-state solution, columnist Peter Beinart evolved to become the most influential proponent of eliminating the Jewish state in favor of a binational Arab-Jewish one. He has also promoted the right-of-return for a substantial number of descendants of Palestinian refugees. While his aspirations may be understandable, his justifications are not.
The broad Palestinian animus towards Jews, he believes, is based on the oppression that they experienced. He sees the failure of Israeli Jews to apologize for their role in displacing Palestinians from their homes during the 1948 war (or what Palestinians call Nakba) as a huge stumbling block. By contrast he doesn’t see the Palestinian educational system as a problem. He writes,
It’s because of the Holocaust lens that so many Jews are convinced that Palestinian schools teach Palestinian children to hate Jews when academic studies have shown repeatedly that Palestinian textbooks are no more incendiary than Israel’s own.
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