Goal for both should be two states for two groups

In the March 30 edition of the Marin IJ, I noticed an interesting placement of two news articles on adjacent pages.

One featured the foreign minister of the Palestinian National Authority, Riyad al-Maliki, complaining that the international community was able to quickly level sanctions against Russia for its brutal invasion of Ukraine, yet had not done the same against Israel. The other reported on the latest episode of Palestinian terrorism against Israeli citizens, an attack in which a gunman killed four civilians and for which the Fatah party, which rules the Palestinian Authority, took responsibility.

The reason that Ukrainians have not been labeled as terrorists is that they are not entering Russia to conduct mass murders against civilians there. Nor are they launching indiscriminate rocket attacks against Moscow and St. Petersburg, while simultaneously claiming that those are rightfully Ukrainian cities.

There is, however, one key similarity between the two situations. Russian President Vladimir Putin believes that the Ukrainian people should not have the right of self-determination, and that they should instead be a minority within Russia. Likewise, the Palestinian Arab leadership has stated since the 1930s that they will never accept a Jewish state in any part of the Jewish people's indigenous homeland.

Al-Malki acknowledged that this is the underlying cause of the conflict when he noted that the international community had refused to isolate Israel for “over 70 years” — dating back to before Israel took over the Jordanian-occupied West Bank in the Six-Day War, after Jordan initiated rocket attacks on Israel.

The long-term goal in both conflicts should be the same: two states for two groups of people.