The Two-State Solution Could Become Another Final Solution
Intensifying decades of catastrophic policies.
By Bruce Thornton
At this point in the election season, we’ve had little communication from Kamala Harris about pretty much everything. Nor have we heard much from lame-duck Joe Biden. This reticence is appalling given how many threats the West is facing, especially the war against Israel which threatens to expand across the region. Before he was cashiered, Biden’s handling of Israel’s war with Hamas was incoherent, and dangerous for Israel’s efforts to secure the lives of its citizens, and neutralize a gang of murderers.
If Harris is elected, she will likely continue down Biden’s misbegotten path that has combined grudging materiel support for Israel with despicable hectoring about tactics, goals, and Lincoln’s “awful arithmetic” of war, the reality that some must die now so more don’t die later. It doesn’t help that Harris has already held discussions with antisemitic Hamas supporters and protestors about embargoing –– as Great Britain has shamefully just done –– any more munitions for Israel.
Moreover, this mistreatment of a critical ally will further weaken our prestige abroad, and signal our allies and enemies alike that we aren’t up to defending the West.
Unfortunately, the West’s behavior is intensifying decades of bad policies. One of the worst foreign policy failures of modern Western history has been this mistreatment of Israel, our cultural cousin and fellow liberal-democratic, rights-based government. Post-Holocaust antisemitism, especially in Europe, has been one factor. Short-sighted national and economic self-interests also have deemed Israel an impediment to accessing the rich reserves of oil in Muslim lands, as well as their markets and migrant labor.
But rather than attributing the conflict on confessional pride and hatred of Jews that’s been part of Islam for 14 centuries, it’s been easier to blame Israel, that “shitty little country,” as a French diplomat called a fellow democratic ally. The politician’s classic gaffe –– saying the quiet part out loud –– captures, as does anti-Israel policies, how many European states really feel about Israel, not to mention the tyrannies and totalitarian states that the West has been serially appeasing.
This anti-Israel synchrony with its –– and our –– enemies, permeates the biggest and most dysfunctional globalist institution, the UN. It has provided since its birth the evidence for this judgement. Take, for example, the anti-Israel bias in its Human Right Council –– which on specious grounds has condemned Israel more often than it has all the savage actual violators put together, while allowing representatives from totalitarian states like China, Cuba, and Iran to take seats on the Council, even as Israel is blacklisted.
Meanwhile, no other nation in the world has had to suffer the incessant violence Israelis have been subjected to since its birth in 1948, from terrorist bombings, car-ramming, knifings, and other violence against civilians; to three full-blown invasions by Arab nations, and thousands of missiles and now drones indiscriminately targeting Israeli civilians.
Worse is the insult accompanying this injury –– the Western nations who blame Israel for the violence, censure based not on historical facts and coherent principles, but on propaganda, national self-interest, and Orwellian terms like “occupation,” “settler colonialism,” “apartheid state,” and the monstrous lie of “genocide” coming from terrorists like Hamas, whose founding charter explicitly calls for annihilating Jews.
On October 7, the terrorist gang inflicted the worst and largest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, an orgy of kidnapping, murder, rape, torture, and mutilation. Iran, which gives Hamas and Hezbollah $800 million annually, sponsored the attack, and its other terrorist proxies and clients like Islamic Jihad, and Yemen’s Houthis joined in. But the flabby West issued only lip-service condemnations of the murderers, while recycling mendacious rationalizations that blame Israel and scold its leaders over alleged “famines” and Israel’s callous disregard for civilian casualties.
Equally shameful, Western nations, especially the Biden regime, continued to send billions of dollars to the Iranians, the Palestinian Authority, and other Palestinian terrorists, as do the EU, the World Bank, and the UN –– 12 of whose employees rampaged alongside Hamas’s thugs. For example, as Gatestone Institute’s Robert Williams wrote recently, “And yet, since October 7 the Biden administration has rewarded Hamas with the gift of close to a billion dollars in US taxpayer money, disguised as ‘humanitarian aid,’ most of which clearly ends up in the hands of Hamas (here, here, here, here, here and here).”
But it gets worse. The Taylor Force Act of 2017 forbids giving any U.S. funds to the PA if it is handing out stipends to imprisoned terrorists, or the families of the dead or wounded. According to another article by Robert Williams, “Not only has the PA not begun to change the pay for slay’ system, it is adding thousands of terrorist prisoners and ‘martyrs’ to be funded by the scheme, presumably including terrorists who actively participated in the October 7 slaughter, abductions, and mass rapes, torture and murder of Israeli children, women and men. According to Palestinian Media Watch:
“9,750 terrorist prisoners are now recognized by the PA as eligible for monthly terror rewards, up from 4,300 prior to October 7. This means the PA is committing to pay nearly NIS 60 million [$16.4 million] a month to terrorist prisoners. The PA has recognized Hamas’ Martyr count, and a total of 38,983 new Martyrs’ families are currently eligible for terror rewards. This means nearly 55 million shekels [$14.7 million] in additional monthly payments to the families of Martyrs.”
And where does that money come from? The useful idiots like the Biden administration who continue to appease with taxpayer money Iran, which according to our government is the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism, and is mere months away from producing nuclear weapons in order to achieve its and its proxies fervent aim to make the historical homeland of Israel judenfrei.
Finally, the pretext of Biden’s and the rest of the West’s astonishing appeasement and largesse is the feckless plan to encourage the PA to “reform” and stop subsidizing murderers: “The Biden administration,” Williams writes, “has its own reasons for giving the false impression that the PA is reforming itself. The administration plans to reward Iran and the Palestinians for their October 7 massacre and the nearly 20,000 rockets fired into Israeli towns and cities by forcing a two-state solution on Israel. Such a Palestinian state, according to the Biden administration, will be run by a ‘revitalized’ Palestinian Authority, and for that it is necessary to give the impression that the PA has started to ‘reform.’”
Biden’s plan for “reforming” Potemkin “moderates” like PA boss and Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas –– whom the West has propped up for decades, and now touts as the sine quo non for implementing the mythical “two-state solution” preposterously marketed as “two nations living side-by-side in peace” –– reminds me of what Churchill said in 1938 about Adolf Hitler’s smarmy, hypocritical speech describing his Anschluss of Austria as a “contribution to European peace.”: “One can hardly find,” Churchill snorted, “a more perfect specimen of humbug and hypocrisy for British and American benefit…What is astounding is that it should have been regarded with anything but scorn by men and women of intelligence in any free country.”
The two-state solution has been an opiate for the champions of diplomatic engagement, despite its decades of failure. The Palestinian Arabs have been offered a state at least five times, and their leaders have rejected Israel’s offers, with the support of a majority of their people. And when Israel has surrendered territory in southern Lebanon and Gaza, they have been met with terrorist attacks and barrages of missiles.
Then there’s the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995, which attempted to create the infrastructure of a government from which the Palestinian State would arise. Mostly Western nations spent $23 billion on civil development, aid, and police training and arming, yet it took only five years for the whole project to deteriorate in the terrorist violence of the Palestinian Second Intifada, which killed a thousand Israelis across the whole country.
Given that bloody history of failed “diplomatic engagement,” “summits,” “parchment barriers,” and “shuttle diplomacy,” why would Israelis ever surrender any territory that would become redoubts of a terrorist state surrounding its people and likely armed with Iranian nukes? How could they rely on the West, whose leftist political factions march and protest on behalf of murderous Jew-haters calling for another Holocaust?
Until the West recovers its civilizational nerve –– and puts into power leaders with moral clarity and a realist understanding of human nature and the tragic truths of conflict –– its foreign policies will end up turning the “two-state solution” into another Final Solution.