Kissinger’s Final Interview: Forget a Palestinian State, Let Jordan Rule
The late Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who passed away last week at the age of 100, gave a recent interview in which he suggested that Hamas’s terror attack October 7 had killed the two-state solution, and Jordan should rule the West Bank.Seth Mandel: Israeli Arabs vs. the ‘Pro-Palestinian’ West
The October 18 interview, published by Politico on Saturday, is thought possibly to be Kissinger’s last. It includes the following:
I am in favor of a peaceful outcome. I don’t see a peaceful outcome with Hamas involved in the conflict. I would favor negotiations between the Arab world and Israel. I do not see, especially after these events, that direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians are very fruitful.
A formal peace doesn’t guarantee a lasting peace. The difficulty of the two-state solution is shown by the experience of Hamas. Gaza was made quasi-independent by [former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon in order to test the possibility of a two-state solution. It has led, in fact, to a much more complex situation. It has become so much worse in the last two years than it has been in 2005. So the two-state solution doesn’t guarantee that what we saw in the last weeks won’t happen again.
I believe the West Bank should be put under Jordanian control rather than aim for a two-state solution which leaves one of the two territories determined to overthrow Israel. Egypt has moved closer to the Arab side, so Israel will have a very difficult time going forward. I hope that at the end of it there will be a negotiation, as I had the privilege to conduct at the end of the Yom Kippur War. At that time, Israel was stronger relative to the surrounding powers. Nowadays, it requires a greater involvement of America to prevent a continuation of the conflict.
Kissinger was referring to the “disengagement” by Israel from Gaza in 2005, when it pulled out all of its soldiers and civilians.
Instead of turning Gaza into a viable state, despite generous promises of international aid, the Palestinians turned it into a staging ground for terror attacks and rocket fire against Israel. Hamas aso seized power from the Palestinian Authority in a 2007 coup, making the problems of the Gaza Strip even worse and giving Iran a foothold in the area, leading to several conflicts with Israel.
The “Jordanian option” has long been favored by the Israeli right, though it has been, until now taboo in foreign policy circles.
The truth is more complicated but also more rewarding for anyone who wants to understand the conflict. Israeli columnist Nadav Eyal points to a new study, which finds a decrease in Arabs’ description of their “most important identity factor” as Arab and an increase in those “who say the most important part of their identity is Israeli citizenship, which now stands at over 33%, surpassing all other factors (religious affiliation, Palestinian identity, and Arab identity).”Nick Cohen: Why the far left sides with Hamas
Israeli was the top choice for the most important facet of Arab-Israeli identity. The least popular choice? Palestinian, with 8 percent. That certainly counts as “many” people if, say, you’re stuck in an elevator with all them.
It’s not too difficult to understand the trend. After all, on October 7, a foreign army invaded their state and butchered Jews and Arabs alike. A similar poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found a marked increase in Arabs who feel part of the state. A few months ago, Tamar Sternthal and Gilead Ini surveyed previous polling:
A 2019 Israel Democracy Institute report found that only 13 percent of those surveyed identify as Palestinian (“Jews and Arabs: Conditional Partnership”). Other surveys have similar findings. For example, a 2017 study by Arik Rudnitzky and Itamar Radai found that only 8.9 percent of Israeli Arabs identify as “Palestinian in Israel/Palestinian citizen in Israel” and 15.4 percent identify as “Palestinian” (“Citizenship, Identity and Political Participation… ” p. 22). A third study, conducted in 2020 by Camille Fuchs of Tel Aviv University, found only 7 percent of non-Jewish people in Israel identify as Palestinian. Similar findings are apparent in the 2017 Shaharit survey.
None of this means the Palestinian cause isn’t important to Israeli Arabs. The point is that much of the Western media and activist class sees Israel’s Arabs as their own personal agents of destruction within Israeli society, while Israelis of all stripes view them as citizens. Deep Western antipathy toward coexistence in the Middle East isn’t helping anyone. It is also, thankfully, unrepresentative of the people these activists claim to speak for.
The great fault of the global left is not that it supports Hamas. For how could western left-wing movements or left-inclining charities or academic bodies truly support Hamas if they were serious about their politics?
No one outside the most reactionary quarters of Islam shares Hamas’s aim of forcing the people of the world to accept ‘the sovereignty of Islam’ or face ‘carnage, displacement and terror’ if they refuse. You cannot be a progressive and campaign for a state that executes gay men. An American left, which includes in its ranks the Queers for Palestine campaign group, cannot seriously endorse lethal homophobia in its own country. Their kind will turn a blind eye in Palestine, but not in New York or Chicago. No left-wing organisation proudly honours the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the fascist tradition Hamas embraces, although in a sign of a decay that has been building on the left for more than a generation, many will promulgate left-wing conspiracy theories which are as insane as their fascist counterparts.
No, the problem with the global left is that it is not serious. It ‘fellow travels’ with radical Islam rather than supports it. The concept of ‘fellow travelling’, with its suggestions of tourism, dilettantism, and privilege, is well worth reviving. The phrase comes from the Bolsheviks. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 they looked with appreciation on westerners who supported them without ever endorsing communism. Artists, writers, and academics who were disgusted with the West, often for good reason, I should add, were quite happy to justify Soviet communism and cover up its crimes without ever becoming communists themselves.
Leon Trotsky put it best when he said of fellow travellers that the question was always how far they would go. As long as they did not have live under the control of communists in the 1920s or the control of Islamists in the 2020s, the answer appears to be: a very long way indeed. W. H. Auden said, as he looked back with some contempt on his fellow travelling past, if Britain or the United States or any country he and his friends knew were taken over by a ‘successful communist revolution with the same phenomena of terror, purges, censorship etc., we would have screamed our heads off’. But as communism happened in backward Russia ‘a semi-barbarous country which had experienced neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment’, they could ignore its crimes in the interests of seeing the capitalist enemy defeated.
