Say this for the Biden administration: It never runs out of bad ideas or the energy to pursue them.
Take its tone-deaf badgering of Israel to accept the creation of a Palestinian state.
Coming after the savage Hamas terror attack on Oct. 7, the taking of hostages and the continuing war in Gaza, the idea understandably has near zero support in the Jewish state.
In addition to rewarding terrorism, a self-governing Palestinian nation, even with international help, would likely throw Egypt, Jordan and the entire region into turmoil and be a nightmare for Israeli security.
Yet the idea lives on as a “Kumbaya” solution because nothing else has worked.
But there’s a reason why peace is elusive: Palestinian rejectionism of Israel.
Starting with the United Nations partition plan in 1948 and including several Israeli governments, there were repeated offers of a separate Arab state, and all were rejected by Palestinians.
That hasn’t changed, with Hamas saying again last week it doesn’t want a two-state solution.
Its leaders demand a one-state solution, with Israel eliminated.
But undeterred by facts, Secretary of State Tony Blinken took the administration’s loopy fixation to Davos, where he declared that Israel can never achieve “genuine security” without a pathway to a Palestinian state.
He would have been closer to the truth if he had also admitted Israel wouldn’t have “genuine security” with a Palestinian state.
Trying to strengthen his weak argument, Blinken added the silly claim that the move could isolate Iran.
He doesn’t say how a Palestinian state would isolate Iran for the simple reason that it wouldn’t. In addition to Hamas, Iran uses its other proxies, especially Hezbollah and the Houthis, to carry out its fiendish aim of destroying Israel.
Nonetheless, President Biden, whose record of being wrong on the global stage for five decades remains unblemished, keeps pushing a two-state plan with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Their Friday talk was the first in nearly a month, with the last call coming to a sudden, tense end when Netanyahu rejected Biden’s demand for a Palestinian state.
The Biden call last week came after Netanyahu said Thursday that Israel must maintain security control “over all the territory west of the Jordan,” referring to Gaza and the West Bank.
Asked about American pressure, Netanyahu told reporters: “The prime minister needs to be able to say no, even to our best friends.”
Palestinian statecraft
That statement apparently sparked the Friday Biden call and infuriated other usual suspects.
The European Union’s foreign policy chief said a Palestinian state might need to “be imposed from the outside,” with Israel cut out of the decision.
Josep Borrell said that without intervention, the “spiral of hate will continue generation after generation,” and that “the international community will have to impose” a Palestinian state.
In fact, imposing a Palestinian state would exacerbate the spiral of hate if Hamas or another terrorist group gained control.
And if not Israel, who would stop that from happening?
Certainly not the United Nations, which has fomented hatred of Israel among Palestinians for seven decades.
And there is no domestic support for putting American boots on dangerous ground, nor could Europe be trusted with the job.
Besides, there is a Palestinian state — Gaza. How did that work out?
Hamas had total control for nearly two decades, but didn’t give a fig about civil government, which it left to the UN.
The leaders spent their time and hundreds of millions of foreign aid dollars, much of it American, on building tunnels, buying and making weapons and plotting the elimination of Israel.
And let’s dispose of the fiction that Palestinian civilians want peace.
Polls taken after the October massacre show up to 80% support in Gaza and the West Bank for what Hamas did.
So most Arab civilians, including many in Europe and America, are in sync with Hamas, whose leaders reject any deal with Israel.
Khaled Mashal, a senior Hamas official living in Qatar, dismissed a two-state solution last week as an international gift to Israel.
As reported by the Islamic Republic News Agency and other outlets friendly to Hamas and Iran, Mashal said the proposal would mean “we have a promised state and we should recognize the other side, which is the Israeli regime, as a legitimate entity, but this issue is definitely rejected.”
He said even going back to Israel’s pre-1967 borders was not acceptable because that would concede 20% of the landmass to Israel.
All of the land, he emphasized, belongs to Arabs.
His remarks echo the outburst of another Hamas official, Ghazi Hamad, who said in November that “We will repeat the October 7 attack time and again until Israel is annihilated.”
Appearing on Lebanese television, Hamad said “Israel is a country that has no place on our land,” and “we must remove that country.”
Against that backdrop, the White House push for a two-state resolution is another example of its bended-knee approach to foreign policy.
Because of Biden’s feckless withdrawal from Afghanistan and his minimalist military support for Ukraine, the axis of evil doesn’t take seriously the threat of American firepower.
Our adversaries watched as Biden lifted sanctions on Iran without getting major concessions, and saw the mullahs use the new riches to fund their aggressions without American pushback.
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Joe’s Saudi blunder
The president also misplayed the relationship with Saudi Arabia.
He began by aiming to make it a pariah nation, and is now reduced to considering its demand for our nuclear technology as part of any normalization pact with Israel.
In contrast, the Trump administration forged the historic Abraham Accords by stressing the economic advantages to the region of peace, trade, tourism and security cooperation.
Four Muslim countries — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco — recognized Israel and Saudi Arabia would have joined had Trump been re-elected.
Importantly, the creation of a Palestinian state was not something the Saudis insisted on then.
But now Biden says the Saudis will normalize relations with Israel only if a Palestinian state is part of the deal.
Some Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, have fallen into the trap and support a two-state solution, believing it will protect the Saudi monarchy from domestic and regional Islamists.
None of this is meant to suggest a Palestinian state is permanently off-limits.
But current conditions offer no reason to believe creating one will bring about a magical peace.
More likely it would become an enormous staging ground for nonstop attacks on Israel.
A mainstay of bipartisan American policy since 1948, when President Harry Truman recognized Israel just 11 minutes after its birth, has been support for the Jewish nation’s survival and independence.
There have been many perilous moments since then and this is certainly one of them.
A big difference now is that the primary problem is not neighboring Arab armies, but Iran.
To keep faith with history and our closest ally, Biden must end his pressure campaign against Israel and finally get tough with Iran.
Source link: https://nypost.com/2024/01/20/opinion/a-two-state-solution-would-be-a-disaster-for-the-biden-administration/