Blinken Unveils Grand Plan for Mideast Peace, and Yes, It’s Ridiculous

If you’re a leftist in the Washington establishment, it doesn’t matter how often your fail or how frequently you’re proven wrong. That’s how we ended up with Old Joe Biden as president and Antony Blinken as Secretary of State.

Blinken was in Davos Wednesday for the big Commie shindig, uh, that is, the World Economic Forum, and he was peddling the same faulty analysis and failed remedies that have caused so much trouble in the world already as the cure-alls for the world’s problems. He has done this before. And he’ll do it again.

Blinken unveiled his grand plan for Middle East peace: a Palestinian state. Yes, that’s right: Hamas murdered 1,200 Israelis, many in unimaginably gruesome ways, with Palestinian civilians gleefully cheering them on, and Blinken wants them to end up being the ones who emerge the winners from this present conflict.

A Palestinian state would seem to be the last thing any sane person would recommend now after we have seen Gaza become a jihad terror statelet, but Blinken has not bothered to let the experience of history, much less the power of common sense, revise his preconceived notions. As far as he is concerned, the Palestinians are violent because they lack self-determination.

Giving them self-determination (you know, like when they elected Hamas in Gaza) will therefore fix the problem. Never mind that they’ve turned down numerous quite generous offers to give them a state. Remember: the facts don’t matter in Washington.

Nor do they matter in Davos. And so Blinken said Wednesday that Israel could only attain “genuine security” if it allowed the Palestinians another base for jihad attacks in addition to Gaza, that is, a Palestinian state. He even had the audacity to present this tired, multiply failed, ill-conceived “solution” as a daring new idea that the Israelis needed to have the imagination and courage to seize upon.

“The problem is getting from here to there,” he explained, “and of course, it requires very difficult, challenging decisions. It requires a mindset that is open to that perspective.

Blinken appears deeply committed to this idea. The Jewish Press reported that he also brought it up last week at a press conference about his latest trip to Israel: “We continue to discuss how to build a more durable peace and security for Israel within the region. As I told the prime minister, every partner that I met on this trip said that they’re ready to support a lasting solution that ends the long-running cycle of violence and ensures Israel’s security. But they underscored that this can only come through a regional approach that includes a pathway to a Palestinian state.”

As far as Blinken was concerned, Israel was the problem. Regarding a Palestinian state, he added: “To make this possible, Israel must be a partner to Palestinian leaders who are willing to lead their people in living side by side in peace with Israel and as neighbors. And Israel must stop taking steps that undercut Palestinians’ ability to govern themselves effectively.”

Unfortunately, this foreign policy wizard didn’t bother to explain what “steps” Israel has taken to “undercut Palestinians’ ability to govern themselves effectively.” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has done that well enough by himself; he is now 88 years old and is in the eighteenth year of his four-year term as president. Then there are the Hamas top dogs Ismail Haniyeh, Khaled Mashal, and Mousa Abu Marzouk, who have become billionaires by siphoning off aid money the witless Western left has sent to the Palestinians.

Nor did Blinken elucidate his fantasy that Palestinian leaders “are willing to lead their people in living side by side in peace with Israel and as neighbors.” Is there even one? If Blinken had been asked to name one, he wouldn’t have been able to do so without lying.

Arab intransigence has been clear from the beginning of the conflict: back on Nov. 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181, calling for the creation of an Arab state and a Jewish state in Palestine. The Arabs had rejected it immediately. Neither Biden nor Blinken nor anyone else who still advances the “two-state solution” ever seems to ponder why.

What Blinken and the rest of the foreign policy establishment fail to realize, or refuse to realize, is that the UN partition plan failed for one reason only: The Muslim Arabs of Palestine and the surrounding Arab countries will never accept a Jewish state, even if it were the size of a postage stamp.

As “The Palestinian Delusion” shows, that refusal is rooted in Islamic concepts and commands, most notably the Qur’anic command to “drive out those who drove you out” (2:191) and its underlying assumption that any land that has been ruled by the Muslims at any time belongs to the Muslims forever and can never be ruled by anyone else. If a Palestinian state ever were established, it would quickly become a jihad terror base, as did Gaza when the Israelis withdrew from it.

AUTHOR