Douglas Murray: Shameful Biden tries to reward Hamas terror with a Palestinian state
On October 8th — as terrorists were still running wild across the south of Israel — Blinken told CBS “We think the best way to resolve [the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] remains a two-state solution.”Michael Oren: The US charge of ‘indiscriminate bombing’ is over the top
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A month later he could be found claiming that a two-state solution was “the only way to end a cycle of violence.”
By the time he was in Davos in January Blinken was telling the New York Times that creating a Palestinian state would solve all the problems of the region, including (bizarrely) regional instability caused by Iran.
By the end of January Blinken was reported to have ordered the State Department to review options for American recognition of a Palestinian State.
In recent weeks Blinken has been sending out his British counterpart — Lord Cameron — to bang on about the creation of a Palestinian state. He was doing it in Washington this week. Cameron is clearly acting as Blinken’s warm-up act.
Blinken recently boasted that he was in Ramallah with Mahmoud Abbas “to reiterate US support for reforming the PA and establishing an independent Palestinian state.”
But such a policy is an embarrassment.
As Israeli politicians of left, right and center have told me in recent months, even if you believe that the Palestinians should be given another state, now is not the time to discuss it.
To push for a two-state solution now is to say to the Palestinians “You carried out a horrific terror attack on October 7th, and as a reward you will be given another state.”
I wonder how many more terror attacks will come about by incentivizing terror in this way?
But the other reason why it is so wicked is that since 2005 we know what a Palestinian state in the West Bank would look like. It would not just be one more failed Arab state.
It would be another Palestinian terror state. One which had views over the entirety of Israel and where the rockets could this time easily hit Tel Aviv, Haifa and Ben Gurion airport.
So long as the Palestinians celebrate terror, encourage terror and pay for terror they should not have another state.
Two-states? It’s not a solution. It’s part of the problem.
Another country, struck by the type and immensity of the atrocities committed against Israel on Oct. 7, would likely have responded with vastly greater force and inflicted far greater numbers of civilian casualties. But Israel is a Jewish state in the moral manner in which we defend ourselves. Even when the enemy is using its own population as a human shield, Israel must do its utmost to reduce the damage to civilians. This is not only a strategic interest but also a moral imperative.‘We’ll Be Seen as Losers if We Don’t Complete the Job:’ Israeli Historian Benny Morris Addresses the War Against Hamas
The IDF takes unprecedented measures to warn civilians of impending actions and to evacuate them from combat zones. It's why Israel has maintained the lowest combatant-to-civilian casualty rate in modern warfare - as Hamas' own statistics show. How, then, can the Biden administration accuse Israel of "indiscriminately bombing" Gaza and of reacting "over the top" to the events of Oct. 7?
President Biden and his staff continue to uphold Israel's right to self-defense, to supply us with vital forms of ammunition, and to resist mounting calls for a permanent ceasefire. Yet, the accusations they level at Israel do far more than insult our soldiers. They fundamentally endanger our security.
By asserting that Israel is violating international humanitarian law, our American ally is bolstering those who accuse us of committing war crimes and perpetrating genocide. The next time Israel faces these charges in an international court, statements by the U.S. president and the secretary of state will be Exhibit A for the prosecution. That evidence, moreover, would be demonstrably false. Israel's efforts to reduce civilian casualties, often at the expense of our own soldiers' safety, are well-documented.
Outrage at the civilian casualties must be directed at those who cynically engineer them. Hamas' goal is to brand Israel as a war criminal. That is precisely the objective served by accusations of "over the top" reactions and indiscriminate bombing.
With the US maintaining its role as the leading outside power in the region, talk of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been revived, causing tensions between Netanyahu and US President Joe Biden’s Administration. Morris believes that a Palestinian state alongside Israel is theoretically the correct solution, but he doesn’t see a “roadmap” — the phrase much used by successive US administrations in their peacemaking efforts — for getting there.Seth Mandel: The Rafah Hostage Rescue Was a Game-Changer
“The problem is that the occupation is immoral and bad,” he said. “It was forced upon us, but we didn’t do enough to get out of it.” Meanwhile, in the wake of the Hamas atrocities, Israelis have become hardened. “The Israeli public is staunch in its desire to destroy Hamas and pay them back for what happened,” he said. “It’s not just a matter of revenge, it’s understanding that without that, Israel will appear weak.”
As Morris explains it, the dilemma for Israel revolves around how to withdraw from the West Bank without turning it into a Hamas stronghold. Israel has been able to weather two decades of rocket and missile attacks from Gaza, but similar salvos from Ramallah, which is just a short drive from Tel Aviv, would amount to an “existential threat,” Morris said. “In the West Bank, there is no way of assuring the benign nature of a Palestinian state,” he said. “They want all of Palestine. That’s the essence of the problem.” Additionally, Morris has little faith in international guarantees, citing Hezbollah’s refusal to move its armed forces north of Lebanon’s Litani River, as part of a broader disarmament process envisioned by UN Security Council Resolution 1701 of Aug. 2006, as an example of the difficulty of implementing compromises that are not enforced.
“The sense among Israelis is that, along with the rapes of Oct. 7, Israel itself was raped,” Morris said. “The world didn’t seem to care about that, and there was an instant rise in antisemitic abuse and anti-Israel rhetoric even before the military response.” The political context is also changing, he observed. “The further away the western world gets from the Holocaust, particularly the younger generations, the less they know and care about World War II,” he said. At the same time, “Islam contains a large antisemitic element” that stems from the bombastic accounts in the Qur’an of the battles in the seventh century between the Jewish tribes of Hijaz and the prophet Muhammad and his followers. “There’s this inherent anti-Jewish element that’s been reinforced by Israel’s existence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” Morris said. “Israel is an innovation in that sense — a Jewish state projecting power at the Muslims. That was not the situation for 1400 years since the rise of Islam.”
It’s impossible to say for sure how much has been changed by Israel’s dramatic hostage rescue in Rafah. But it’s clearly altered the conflict.
The fact that Israel wasn’t bluffing about going into Rafah, and the revelation to the world that the IDF had legitimate reasons to do so, convinced the other players in this conflict that the Israelis meant what they said and to prepare accordingly.
Hence we have a rather important story about the adjustments Egypt’s government is making for the possible influx of Gaza evacuees: An eight-square-mile walled camp is under rapid construction in the Sinai Peninsula, the Egyptian desert region that borders Gaza.
The history here is important. Rafah was divided between Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, briefly reunited after the Six-Day War, and then divided again when Israel pulled out of the Sinai. It became, and remains, the only border crossing between Palestinian-controlled territory and Egyptian-controlled territory.
Given the history, the last thing Egypt wanted to do was accept a large number of Palestinian refugees fleeing Gaza, and the last place they wanted to do it was Rafah, despite the fact that it would obviously save lives.
Egypt’s sensitivity toward an IDF operation in Rafah is twofold. One, tunnels running underneath have long plagued Egypt’s anti-smuggling efforts. (Though those efforts have gotten feebler over the years.) Two, Egypt does not want to take responsibility for any part of Gaza nor any Gazans. As Israel’s experience shows, that is a difficult entanglement to disengage from. Perhaps all the more so because of Rafah’s identity as a divided city.
The latter point has been a running theme of the broader Arab-Israeli conflict since 1967. Egypt does not want Gaza. Israel does not want Gaza (it went so far as to leave Gaza unilaterally, without a single guarantee about what the Strip would be used for thereafter). Hamas does not want Gaza—not in the traditional sense. Hamas does not want to govern the people of Gaza. It put all the Strip’s resources into building a second Gaza underground that is inaccessible to most Gazans, and it does not want statehood. There is nothing that Hamas wants, in fact, that is in any way beneficial to the Palestinians unless those Palestinians are members of Hamas (or UNRWA, the UN refugee agency that is essentially Hamas’s very own Learning Annex). Hamas is a terrorist army that is controlled and funded by non-Palestinian entities.