The administration, and many who claim to back Israel, still favor a two-state solution the Palestinians don’t want. Unlike the Israelis, they’ve learned nothing from Oct. 7.
(December 21, 2023 / JNS)
It’s a debate the Israeli government neither wants nor thinks it needs to engage in right now. But as much as Jerusalem would like to postpone any discussion about who will govern or be responsible for security in Gaza until the war with Hamas is finished, it’s increasingly becoming clear that is impossible. U.S. President Joe Biden is already pushing hard for the revival of a peace process that’s been dead in the water for more than two decades, as well as for Israel to accept that the eventual outcome of negotiations will be the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state alongside it.
That makes sense to a lot of people, including many American supporters of Israel, who still believe a two-state solution is the only rational solution to the conflict with the Palestinians. And in theory, two states for two peoples coexisting in peace does sound ideal.
The president may blieve that it’s a political necessity for him to force the Israelis to agree to this plan so that his administration is able to continue supporting the war against Hamas. And he may be right that many, if not most, Democrats want the increased “daylight” between the two nations over the peace process that largely characterized U.S.-Israel relations when his former boss, Barack Obama, was sitting in the White House.
The collapse of the Israeli left
But as even The New York Times reported this week, in the aftermath of Oct. 7, the overwhelming majority of Israelis rejects any thought of a renewal of negotiations, let alone the imposition of a two-state solution.
That’s in spite of very low levels of confidence and support for Netanyahu after a year of political strife over judicial reform and failure to prevent the Hamas atrocities. Though the Israeli left that once dominated the country’s politics has been a shadow of itself since the the Oslo Accords collapsed in the bloodshed of the Second Intifada, remnants of those who advocated for more territorial retreats and Palestinian statehood are now completely discredited.
Indeed, as the Times noted, even people who considered themselves peace activists have finally drawn conclusions from a century of Palestinian hate and terrorism that culminated in the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. They have realized that the conflict is impossible to resolve in the foreseeable future. The fact that many of the victims of the Hamas pogroms living in the border communities were ardent peace advocates and yet were still murdered, raped and kidnapped by the Palestinians made a deep impression on the Israeli people.
In rejecting the policies that created Oct. 7, Israelis aren’t merely showing their grief. They’re demonstrating common sense.
Yet Biden is doubling down on the two-state myth. The same is true for most of the international community, as well as the United Nations.
At this point, there are only two reasons to revive the peace process. One is to give Biden some re-election campaign wiggle room with the majority of Democrats that favor the Palestinians over Israel. The other is to advance the cause of the Hamas terrorists who committed the Oct. 7 atrocities that launched the current war.
While the minority of Democrats, who know that Biden might be the last member of their party to sit in the White House who will have any sympathy for the Jewish state, think he deserves the help, anyone who cares more about Israel’s security and survival needs to understand that support for actions that ultimately aid those who share Hamas’s goal of destroying Israel is too high a price for Israel’s people to pay.
Biden’s problems
Contrary to the gloom and doom headlines about the latest polls in liberal outlets like the Times, Biden’s declining re-election prospects aren’t entirely the consequence of his decision to support the war against Hamas after Oct. 7.
He is currently trailing former President Donald Trump for many reasons, including the state of the economy, the collapse of security at America’s southern border, his age and widespread perception of his weakness as a leader.
But there is no question that Biden’s clear sympathy for Israel after Oct. 7 and his backing for the goal of destroying Hamas are costing him the support of left-wing Democrats. That’s especially true for young voters, who are more likely to have been indoctrinated in the toxic myths of critical race theory and intersectionality that falsely label Israel and the Jews as “white oppressors” of Palestinians.
Biden has undermined Israel’s military campaign against Hamas by buying into the false narrative that it conducts “indiscriminate” bombing of Palestinian civilians and pressuring the Jewish state to risk the lives of Israeli soldiers to avoid killing any of Hamas’s civilian human shields. The constant talk about pushing Israel to end the war prior to finishing the job of eliminating Hamas from all of Gaza is also stiffening the resistance of the terrorists, delaying the return of remaining hostages and actually leading to more loss of life.
But pressuring Israel to fight Hamas less effectively isn’t doing much to ameliorate Biden’s problems with leftists, who aren’t so much interested in two states as they are increasingly in supporting Hamas’s genocidal goals (“from the river to the sea”) or justifying terrorism against Jews (“globalize the intifada”).
Prior to Oct. 7, just about everyone in Israel was prepared to accept the status quo that left Hamas in control of Gaza. They now realize that those in the military and security establishment, who sold them and their political leaders on the idea that the Islamists could be deterred from launching a war, were disastrously wrong.
Allowing Gaza to become a Hamas-ruled independent Palestinian state in all but name was a fatal mistake. Israelis already knew that the late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s decision to withdraw every soldier, settler and settlement from Gaza in the summer of 2005 was an error. The hope that it might be an incubator for peace—or at least a way to defuse the conflict—was proven wrong.
Instead, the billions in aid the Palestinians received from the international community were used to create a terrorist stronghold that led inevitably to both rocket and missile attacks on Israel and then mass slaughter and unspeakable atrocities.
What Israelis understand, and Biden and most Americans refuse to accept, is that a diplomatic solution that would place Gaza under the role of the Palestinian Authority will simply be a formula for more terrorism. Even worse, should the Americans and the international community succeed in forcing the Israelis to accept a two-state deal removing Israeli forces from Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”), that would just repeat Sharon’s catastrophic Gaza experiment on a much larger scale.
They share Hamas’s goal of destroying Israel and slaughtering its people because their national identity is inextricably tied up with their century-old war on Zionism.
The choice is security or Hamas
It’s hard for those who believe in the two-state solution as something akin to a religion rather than a policy proposal to accept that aspect of the Palestinian national identity.
And it’s equally difficult to accept for politicians like Biden, who has spent his career advocating for a two-state solution. But if he is now in a minority in his own party about Israel, it’s because the “progressives,” who advocate for the woke diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) catechism, are likelier to support the Palestinians than Israel.
The further he goes to appease them, the more it strengthens the will of the Palestinians to continue their quest for Israel’s destruction. As with every previous attempt to impose a peace process on Israel, the only thing that will be achieved will be more terrorism and more Israeli bloodshed.
After Oct. 7, it’s time for even liberal American Jews to say “enough” to this farce.
The choice isn’t between Netanyahu and peace. It’s between Israeli security and Hamas’s vision of endless war, which most Palestinians support.
Anyone with a shred of sense or even the most minimal knowledge of Palestinian politics knows that another two-state push will fail. But if you care about preventing more Oct. 7 slaughter, then you need to respect the sensible desire of the Israelis to defend themselves and give up on fantasies about the Palestinians choosing peace.
The only way Palestinians will ever come to their senses will be after the complete defeat of Hamas. It will also require the Arab and Muslim worlds, in addition to the international community, to cease propping up a national movement—whether led by Hamas or Fatah “moderates”—whose ultimate aim is wiping out the one Jewish state on the planet and killing its people. That is exactly what a return to two-state diplomacy won’t do.
Most Americans continue to support Israel. But friends of Israel must not betray that stand by advocating for two-state diplomacy that Israelis deem to be not merely ill-advised but insane. Like the Israelis, Americans must draw conclusions from Oct. 7 and oppose giving the Palestinians the chance to do it again.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
The Israelis are, on the whole, quite capable of protecting themselves as long as the government doesn’t deprive them of weapons. Even a baseball bat is no match for any firearm. After serving in the IDF, almost everyone knows which end of a rifle is the dangerous one. Give them back their weapons and trust them for a change instead of listening to the complaints from NGOs. If that had been the case on October 7, a lot less harm to Israelis would have happened. If that becomes the case, the next evident attack can also be dealt with in a more Israeli manner rather than trying to hide from the terrorists as reported by so many.
@Carl Goldberg,
Palestinians, so called, are those that the KGB and Arafat convinced to call themselves so. That was only possible after the previous Palestinians, namely, the Jews, vacated that name in favor of Israelis.
Gimme a break! They are training as we speak for the next Oct. 7 in Judea and Samaria. And let’s not forget the recent Arab riots (pogroms) in Israel.
It’s patronizing idiocy to think they will suddenly change their minds after over 100 years of war!
@Carl I’ve settled on a name for these demonic beasts: The Piranhastinians.
Biden doesn’t need to “sober up” about the palestinians, as if he isn’t seeing them clearly . He, or his handlers, certainly know what the pals are all about. They don’t want a state. They want Israel gone and the Jews dead. To the extent that anyone (like Biden) goes along with the two-state solution, they are working toward the same goal.
As far as Biden goes, he is the poster child for the Democratic party, who has come to represent everything evil, immoral, perverse, and destructive in our society.
I am thinking this article was written for US leftists who voted for Biden in 2020. That is a shrinking demographic, and it is shrinking for many reasons, the least of which is Biden’s initial support for Israel, which he almost immediately withdrew.
The people who were on the left and who are leaving the left are doing so because they see that the left which used to stand for freedom, e.g. in the Civil Rights movement, now stands for racism 2.0, in which it is only the color of your skin that matters, not the content of your character.
There are plenty of people on the left who would never have voted for Trump in the past, but now see that the left has given up on democracy, free elections, decency, and the American Experiment in constitutional republicanism. Instead the left stands for anti-democratic actions such as trying to remove Trump from the ballot, election interference, indecency such as sodomy committed in a Senate hearing room, and the President’s son making videos of himself smoking crack with prostitutes, and developing a government/corporate-imposed censorship program that is straight out of Nazism or Stalinism. Due process has been dispensed with. Harassment of, and arrest of innocent civilians who simply disagree with the Left by the FBI has taken the place of the FBI investigating criminals. And many cities run by the Left have become crime ridden, drug infested places safe only for criminals but unsafe for the law abiding. It is all these things and more that have turned many on the left away from the left.
Let us not forget the experimental gene therapy mandates, the refusal of the government to acknowledge the massive number of adverse effects of the gene therapy, and the refusal on the part of the government to allow doctors to treat their patients as they always have: using their best judgment. Too many people have died, not from a respiratory virus, but from government bureaucrat derived treatment protocols that made no sense at all to doctors, and that actually killed many patients. Doctors had to go along with their protocols or lose their licenses. This has caused something akin to the destruction of the US health care system, which was turned into a genocide machine. Nobody wants to have to go to the hospital anymore – everyone fears that if they go in they won’t come out except in a body bag.
In addition, the imposition of critical race theory, the demand that an infinite number of genders be respected by using “correct pronouns,” men competing with women in sports and undoing all the efforts of the women’s movement to encourage girls and women to enter the athletics fields, and the normalization of Jew hatred has also made many on the left feel things have just gone way too far.
The attack on 7 October and the thousands of college students who came out in support of the genocide of Hamas, was for many on the left, just the final straw.
Most of those on the left, even those who have left the left, do not even realize just how pro-Iranian Joe Biden has been. They don’t even realize that 7 October might never have happened if Biden hadn’t shoveled something like $100 billion dollars to Iran since he became President, with additional funding to Hamas, the PA, and money to the Free Lebanese Army which works with Hezbollah. In addition Biden took the Houthis off the terrorist list, which the Trump administration had them on. Now the Houthis, an Iranian proxy, is controlling shipping through the Suez Canal, costing Egypt millions of dollars a day in lost revenue, and setting the world up for shortages and delays, as the Biden Administration doesn’t seem to be able to cope militarily with a ragtag bunch of terrorists. Even the US military is upset with the administration over this. The Biden administration has essentially neutered US naval deterrence in the middle east by standing down instead of responding with adequate force, not just against the Houthis but against all the Iranian attacks on American assets throughout the middle east, including Iraq.
The article above is nominally about the Two State Solution. But I think it is important to realize that Biden’s demand for it is not about two states for two people, but about inserting an Iranian proxy inside Israel, ready to attack and destroy Israel whenever Iran gives the go ahead.
So I think the language needs to be changed. This is not about the Palestinian people. They have become a proxy force for the genocidal aims both of the Palestinian people and Iran.
The Palestinian people DO NOT NOW WANT AND NEVER DID WANT A STATE SIDE BY SIDE WITH ISRAEL. Anyone who thinks they did or do, is simply ignorant of the truth. They have been offered a state of their own repeatedly and have never once agreed to it.
So let’s call it what it really is: the Two State Solution = the Iranian solution for Israel.
You use the word “Palestinians” to describe Israel’s enemies, but I don’t think this is a good idea. Israel’s local enemies are no more “Palestinians” merely because they call themselves that, than a biological male is a woman merely because he calls himself that. Israel’s enemies are Arab Moslems some of whose ancestors lived in the territory of the British Palestine Mandate. They were not “Palestinians” then, and calling them that now only helps to legitimize their claims to be the rightful owners of the entire territory of the British Palestine Mandate from the River to the Sea – which excludes Israel and the Jews. If you have to use the word “Palestinians”, at least put it in quotes, or add “so-called”.
Whatever side you are on, one major point has crystalized: common sense is, unfortunately, not so common after all.
On the other hand, OBiden and Co are following a different agenda of achieving world dominium, which isn’t working out too well. In the meantime, teasing Israel and expecting her to comply to every dumb suggestion is a nice game to play.