I guess what turned me against them was when it became chic to wear t-shirts emblazoned with Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s portrait in a heroic pose.

Che was Argentinian, and a committed and ruthless Marxist of fanatic and brutal determination. You can respect that, at least he was willing to put his life on the line, and he paid the ultimate price for it.

But Fidel picked him as Minister of Security because he was ready to do the job no Cuban was willing to do: sign the death warrants. Cuba is a small country, and every man you kill has friends and relatives. Only a foreigner would want that job.

My stepfather came from a military family. He was a sergeant in the army, his brother a lieutenant. When Castro took over, he offered amnesty to all the forces that he defeated. They were offered a post in the Revolutionary Army. But when my stepfather’s brother turned himself in, he was arrested, and eventually executed. My stepfather went into exile.

Che Guevara signed the death warrant. The Revolutionary State Security apparatus was a stickler for the formalities. Every ‘i’ was dotted, every ‘t’ was crossed.

The Israelis are indeed operating a policy of apartheid on occupied land, and they are indeed coercing and intimidating Palestinians in order to settle on their ancestral villages and farms. Even many Israelis see this, and bravely fight against the brutality and barbarity of their own government. And of course, cheap and docile Palestinian labor is crucial to the Israeli economy.

But the Palestinian resistance does not restrict its military actions to attacking the Israeli military and constabulary, or even purely economic targets. They blow up pizza parlors and beauty salons, attack rock concerts and murder indiscriminately in a campaign of deliberate terrorism that relies on intimidation and humiliation and rape of their enemies. If the Israelis are becoming fascists, then the Palestinians are medieval savages.

They take hostages, coerce their own people, crush their moderate factions brutally, and place their military installations deliberately in places where Israeli countermeasures will result in the slaughter of innocents, which they then use for political propaganda. And they bombard Israeli civilian targets with crude missiles too inaccurate to be used against hardened and dispersed military sites, and they launch from places where the Israeli counterbattery is most likely to kill innocent civilians.

Meanwhile, both sides are supplied and encouraged by Cold War sponsors to carry out their own geopolitical goals.

And in the USA, the partisans of both sides seem unable to see the atrocities carried out by their friends, and only those done by their enemies. I say, a plague on both their houses.

Arabs calling themselves “Palestinians” have refused two-state proposals multiple times, starting with the Peel Commission in 1937. Here’s a list of Palestinian Arab refusals, going back more than a century now.

1919: Arabs of Palestine refused to nominate representatives to the Paris Peace Conference.

1920: San Remo conference decisions, rejected by the Arabs of Palestine.

1922: League of Nations decisions, rejected by the Arabs of Palestine.

1937: Peel Commission partition proposal, rejected by the Arabs of Palestine.

1938: Woodhead partition proposal, rejected by the Arabs of Palestine.

1946: Anglo-American Commission proposal, rejected by the Arabs of Palestine.

1947: UN General Assembly partition proposal (UNGAR 181), rejected by the Arab League and the Higher Arab Committee for Palestine.

1949: Israel’s outstretched hand for peace (UNGAR 194), rejected by the Arab League and the Higher Arab committee for Palestine.

1967: Israel’s outstretched hand for peace (UNSCR 242), rejected by the Arab League and the PLO.

1978: Begin/Sa’adat peace proposal, rejected (except for Egypt) by the rest of the Arab world, including the PLO.

1994: Rabin/Hussein peace agreement, rejected by the rest of the Arab League (except for Egypt and Jordan).

1995: Rabin’s Contour-for-Peace, rejected by the Palestinian Authority.

2000: Barak/Clinton peace offer, rejected by Yasser Arafat, who then initiated the preplanned second intifada.

2001: Barak’s offer at Taba, rejected by the Palestinian Authority.

2005: Sharon’s peace gesture, withdrawal from Gaza, rejected by the Hamas takeover in 2007.

2008: Olmert/Bush peace offer, rejected by Mahmoud Abbas.

2009 to present: Netanyahu’s repeated invitations to peace talks, rejected.

2014: Kerry’s Contour-for-Peace, rejected by the Palestinian Authority.

2018: Trump’s “deal of the Century,” rejected in advance by Mahmoud Abbas.

2019: US Conference on Economic Benefit for the Palestinians, rejected by the Palestinian Authority.

2020: PA reiterates rejection of Trump’s “Deal of the Century” before it’s even presented.

2020: PA attempts (and fails) to pass an Arab League resolution to sanction the UAE and Bahrain for signing the Abraham Agreements with Israel.

Now with a history like this, why do you think that it’s Israel that doesn’t want peace?