About a month ago during a live press conference on Israeli television, Secretary of State Antony Blinken — otherwise known as America’s top diplomat — announced the most undiplomatic plan that the Jewish state has ever heard. After the war between Israel and Hamas is over the U.S., along with the UK as sidekick, will create a Palestinian state essentially by fiat, simply by recognizing it as such. As a quid pro quo for going along with this plan he offered Israel two things neither of which the U.S. is in a position to deliver: security assurances and formal recognition by Saudi Arabia.
For reasons that are by now familiar it’s easy to imagine what a jaw-dropper Blinken’s plan must have been for the vast majority of Israeli viewers. For one thing it would award the Palestinians for having perpetrated the barbarities of October 7 with a state from which they could repeat them on a vaster scale and from a bigger and better base. Moreover, what are America’s security assurances really worth — how, for example, are they working out for Ukraine? As seasoned observers, most Israelis would have been acutely aware of the fact that, as the U.S. tries to implement this plan it will create more problems than it will solve and therefore make the already volatile region even less stable than it already is.
It is ironic and indeed pathetic that just as America’s power and prestige are waning it feels it has the ability to order around all of the major players.
In fact, merely by announcing his plan Blinken immediately did a great deal of damage. The terms of his plan completely contravene the Oslo Accords and therefore effectively nullify them. The Oslo Accords — to which, by the way, America is a signatory — clearly stipulate that Israel and the Palestinians are to settle their differences through bilateral negotiations leading to the creation of a Palestinian state through mutual recognition. In announcing this plan Blinken was saying that America is basically flipping over the diplomatic chessboard, trashing the Oslo Accords and planning on resuming diplomacy by an entirely different set of rules. Though it’s true that when Blinken trashed them the Oslo Accords had not achieved their goal of creating a Palestinian state that would peacefully coexist alongside the Jewish state, the principles upon which they were framed are enduring, bilateral negotiations leading to mutual recognition. Nothing that Blinken is offering even comes close. (READ MORE from Max Dublin: Israel: Unifying Around the Center)
In the immediate term Blinken’s plan is also astonishing because at present neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians, the two major actors in this fight, are ready to go along with it. On the Palestinian side, not one leader has yet to categorically condemn the October 7 Hamas pogroms and, on the contrary, Palestinian Authority President Abbas has promised to give the families of the terrorist perpetrators pensions. Furthermore, the Palestinian people are right behind their leader. A poll conducted in December by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 64 percent of Palestinians oppose a two-state solution while another 69 percent want to return to “confrontations and armed intifada.”
Meanwhile, on the Israeli side, a survey the same month by the Direct Polls organization found that 81 percent of the Israeli public, including 70 percent of leftist voters believe that making peace with the Palestinians is impossible and a full 88 percent say that they don’t trust the Palestinians. Taking these two surveys together what is inescapable is that the Israelis don’t trust that the Palestinians want to make peace while the Palestinians confirm that this distrust is justifiable. At least the Israelis and Palestinians understand one another. What does Blinken think the Palestinians meant when they said they didn’t want a two state solution?
Too bad that America refuses to understand either side of this conflict.
Setting aside the fact that there is no way that America could guarantee Israel’s security, there is also no reason to believe that the Saudis would necessarily do their part at America’s bidding either. Ever since Biden was elected, the Saudis have been demonized by his administration because they assassinated Jamal Khashoggi. It must be remembered that though Khashoggi was nominally a columnist for the Washington Post he was also an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood whose avowed aim is to overthrow the Saudi government and replace it with a much more radical Islamic one. One might be forgiven for wondering, after being treated this way, why the Saudis would agree to be used as pawns by the U.S.
This war between Israel and Hamas is not going as expected because Israel is actually winning it. Everyone, including Hamas, expected that the October 7 pogroms would lead to a ground invasion. But most observers expected, and some probably hoped, that Israel would suffer enormous and unbearable casualties during the ensuing fighting and give up and withdraw due both to public and international pressure before achieving its stated goal of utterly destroying and defeating Hamas in Gaza.
Instead, the IDF has been steadily moving towards achieving its war aims with relatively light casualties and the least amount of collateral damage under the circumstances while decimating Hamas in the process. Given that Blinken has maintained that America will not implement its plan until the war is over, it is obviously critical who at that point will have won. If Israel achieves its war aim then it will have won. However, if Hamas is allowed to retain its grip on Gaza it will be able to rebuild and rearm and for all intents and purposes it will have won. So, it is no small matter that America is presently pushing very hard for a so-called humanitarian pause followed by a permanent ceasefire before the IDF finishes getting the job done.
Fifty years ago, during the Yom Kippur War then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger knew how to deal even-handedly and effectively with the warring opponents and his even-handedness led to good outcomes all around. Towards the end of that War, after a great deal of bitter fighting, the IDF had encircled the Egyptian Third army and could, theoretically, have destroyed it.
But Kissinger advised Israel to let it go and Israel duly obeyed. Some pundits at the time thought that Kissinger’s order was unwise and unfair given all of the sacrifice that the IDF had made to that point. But on that occasion Kissinger’s counsel was sage. The IDF’s rules of engagement would not have allowed it to destroy an entire army through battle or by siege and to take so many Egyptian soldiers prisoner would have been a costly and burdensome process. In any case they all would have eventually been released in a prisoner swap. The humiliation that that would have caused Egypt beyond that which it had already endured might have made it impossible for Sadat to offer to make peace with Israel shortly after. (READ MORE: Moloch Is Back: Sacrificing Our Children)
Many pundits have been opining that the reason that Biden is trying to maneuver Israel into snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory is to win favor with Muslim and student voters in the upcoming election. Others believe that he is being fed anti-Israel propaganda by his National Security Director of Intelligence, Maher Bitar, who was formerly an activist in the radical Jew-hating BDS movement and also an UNWRA employee. Bitar is in charge of compiling U.S. intelligence and presenting Biden with his daily morning intelligence briefing. Who knows who is whispering foolish ideas into Biden or Blinken’s ears but unfortunately it appears that they have been listening to them.
It’s easy to have bright ideas but implementation is everything, especially when it comes down to details. Let’s say that for whatever reason Blinken’s plan is actually implemented and that it does help Biden win the election, then what? Then they will own it and what a mess it will be that they own. When the Arab states that are in on this see how unreliable an ally the U.S. is to Israel in order to protect themselves, they will probably move away from America once they’ve gotten what they wanted. And so will the Europeans who always want America to do the dirty work and heavy lifting for them. So, the burden of trying to pull this off will fall mainly on America.
Think of some of the details of what that would entail. Part of the plan is to remove most if not all of the Israelis currently living in Judea and Samaria who now number 600,000. This is called ethnic cleansing and who exactly is going to do that? Not the Israeli government that’s for sure. Even the sanctimonious Europeans draw away when the ugliness of their clients is exposed as they have recently done when it was revealed that UNWRA employees were numbered among the Hamas terrorists.
Two states, one for Jews and the other for Palestinians has always been the right idea because that is the only way that the Jewish state can survive as such. The Oslo peace process was never going to be a magic wand that would quickly lead to peace between Israel and the Palestinians but when it was formalized that pact did offer hope. Politics is supposed to be about compromise and there is a middle ground that would work for both sides if they were both arguing in good faith, which the Palestinians, by rejecting offer after offer without even making counter-offers, objectively have not been. That middle ground would be a federation similar to the first stage of the EU which was called the European Common Market and was precisely designed to prevent conflict between the member states.
In order to accomplish that goal, there are preliminary matters that must be attended to and they are almost entirely on the Palestinian side. First, the population must be deradicalized. Secondly, it must build uncorrupt democratic institutions. Thirdly, there must be mutual recognition and a real commitment to peace. After that the wall and the checkpoints could come down and infrastructure could be built to allow the free flow of goods and labor between the two states. Under any other conditions a two-state solution is a non-starter. (READ MORE: In Their Words: The Families of Hamas’ Victims)
It is ironic and indeed pathetic that just as America’s power and prestige are waning it feels it has the ability to order around all of the major players in a very complicated geopolitical situation. We are, after all, entering terra incognita. If America tries to implement Blinken’s plan through the U.N. it is possible that China might block the way if it sees that it would be in its interest to do so. And even in the noisy sanctimonious European Union Germany may be unwilling to go along with it. In a way one has to pity Blinken. Compared to Kissinger he is a vastly less competent statesman working in a much more difficult milieu. America is looking now like a wounded animal lashing out helplessly and the sad thing is that all of its wounds have been self-inflicted through stupid and reckless foreign policy decisions. And now, moving forward, America may never again be viewed as an honest broker.
