Second, when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it offered the Fatah leaders a deal: make your peace with us and we will help you develop Gaza into a thriving entrepot. Infrastructure was left in place and investment offered. What happened? Fatah was ousted by Hamas in a brutal coup, the Israeli offer was spurned, the infrastructure torn up because it was Jewish, and the metal from torn-up pipes was used to make rockets to fire into Israel. Hamas is not in the business of negotiating for any kind of viable settlement with Israel. Its agenda is the destruction of Israel by any means available.

Third, the so-called "peace process" with regard to Israel and the Palestinian Arabs centres on calls for a "two state solution". Yet the Peel Commission, in 1937, proposed a two state solution under which two-thirds of what is now Israel would have formed an Arab state and the Jews would not have had control of Jerusalem. The Jewish leaders reluctantly accepted the plan. The Arab leaders flatly rejected it. There would be no Jewish state in Palestine, they insisted.

Further Jewish proposals were rejected. The Second World War and the Holocaust exacerbated the Jewish situation. In the wake of those colossal upheavals, the United Nations again proposed a two state settlement in Palestine. It would, once more, have given the Arabs a more than equitable share of the territory. The Jewish leadership again accepted the offer. The Arab leaders again flatly rejected it. They then launched a three-pronged attack on the nascent state of Israel, to destroy it in its cradle. To almost everyone’s surprise, they were roundly defeated.

Fourth, the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank are deemed refugees, because half a million Arabs fled their homes during the Arab war against Israel in 1948. Yet in the years after 1948, some 600,000 Jews were expelled from Arab lands, from Morocco to Yemen and Iraq, and their property confiscated. None of them, nor any of their descendants, is considered a refugee now; nor do they claim a right of return and they have certainly not been compensated for their property. Yet the Arabs claim such things from Israel.

Fifth, in the mid-1990s, Israeli elder statesman Shimon Peres wrote a book called The New Middle East, proposing that Arabs and Jews co-operate to develop the Middle East free of the trammels and polarities of the Cold War. He reiterated what Zionists had proposed to the Arab leaders long before Israel had ever been formed: we Jews are Semites just like you; we are brothers and can bring science, education and finance to the table. What happened? His book was translated into Arabic in Cairo, but published with a preface denouncing it as proof positive of the Jewish conspiracy to take over the whole of the Middle East and dominate the Arabs.