Dennis Mitzner criticized Timo Stewart for suggesting that he believed Israel was an obstacle to the two-state solution. Mitzner argued that the Palestinians had not accepted Israel's state proposals in direct negotiations, the latest of which were the Camp David and Taba offers in 2000–2001, as well as Ehud Olmert's offers in 2008. He added that Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005. According to Mitzner, the PLO's decades-old support for the two-state solution did not indicate that the Palestinians accepted Israel's existence as a Jewish state. Mitzner wrote that Stewart viewed the destruction of Hamas's ideology as unrealistic without killing all people. Mitzner interpreted this to mean that Stewart considered all Gazans as supporters of Hamas's ideology, but he himself said he would not go that far. He referred to Hamas's election in Gaza and claimed that no Gazan had attempted to help Israeli hostages in the past couple of years. Mitzner compared the situation to the Allies' victory over Nazism and the defeat of Japan, as well as the actions of the United Arab Emirates against the Muslim Brotherhood. He stated that the Western left should stop rewarding Palestinian violence and anti-Semitism. According to Mitzner, Stewart claimed that there was no Palestinian state because Israel occupied the territory and did not allow it to become independent. Mitzner denied this and described the area's history: according to him, it belonged to the British mandate from 1917 and prior to that to the Ottoman Empire. He wrote that the Arab leadership rejected the UN's 1947 partition plan, after which Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt controlled Gaza without establishing a Palestinian state. According to Mitzner, the territories came under Israeli control in the 1967 war, which Jordan, Egypt, and Syria initiated with the intent to destroy, and the Arab world's negative attitude towards Israel continued with the Khartoum resolution of the three no's. Mitzner claimed that Stewart ignored Palestinian actions and concluded by asking whether the dispute ultimately related to the fact that the opposing side was the Jewish state of Israel. #IsraelinVastaisetAsenteet #Palestiinalaiskysymys #KansainvälinenPolitiikka (translated)
