Blinken: Hey, You Know What Would Fix This Problem? A Palestinian State

As hard as it is to believe, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was absolutely serious when he recently called yet again for the creation of a Palestinian state and promised that it would be the magic solution that would finally bring peace to the region. Get in line, Mr. Blinken. You’re only about the ten millionth person to make this confident recommendation, and to demonstrate that you haven’t learned the most basic and obvious lessons from what has happened to Israel ever since the Arabs rejected the first offer to create a Palestinian state back in 1947.

The Jewish Press reported Wednesday that Blinken said 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.”

Well, great. There’s just one problem: This “lasting solution” has been offered to the Palestinians numerous times, and they have always rejected it. Not only has it never worked, but it never will work, as it fails to take note of one of the most important elements of the conflict.

Oblivious to these facts, Blinken plowed on: “In today’s meetings I was also crystal clear: Palestinian civilians must be able to return home as soon as conditions allow. They must not be pressed to leave Gaza. As I told the prime minister, the United States unequivocally rejects any proposals advocating for the resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza, and the prime minister reaffirmed to me today that this is not the policy of Israel’s government.” As far as Blinken was concerned, that left the Palestinian state as the only other option: “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.”

Blinken didn’t explain what “steps” Israel has taken to “undercut Palestinians’ ability to govern themselves effectively.” 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 of the Palestinian Authority. 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.

Even worse, which Palestinian leaders are “are willing to lead their people in living side by side in peace with Israel and as neighbors”? Is there even one? Blinken didn’t offer any names, and if he had been asked, he wouldn’t have been able to come up with one unless he had resorted to lying. Arab intransigence has been clear from the beginning of the conflict: back on November 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” and Resolution 181 as the only path to peace for both Israelis and Palestinians, ever seems to ponder why so many years have gone by since Resolution 181 was originally passed without ever being implemented even for a single day. They don’t seem to regard the seven decades of its not being in force as any indication that maybe it isn’t the path to peace after all. There has been no indictment of its status as the “lasting solution that ends the long-running cycle of violence and ensures Israel’s security.”

What Biden, 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.

Those who tout the two-state solution today seem to think that somehow, in the decades since the tumultuous period following the end of World War II, this situation has changed. But it has not, and it will not. Islam is still Islam. Its Qur’an has not changed; neither has its theology. The imperatives that led the Muslim Arabs to reject a two-state solution in 1947, and to go to war to destroy the nascent Jewish state in 1948, still exist and are still believed by millions of Muslims worldwide. It is only by ignoring this, or by remaining in blissful willful ignorance of it, that diplomats and kings and presidents and pretend presidents such as Old Joe Biden could ever have thought that a negotiated agreement can be hit upon that would enable Israelis and Palestinians to lay down their arms and live side by side in peace.

That is not to say that the Israeli-Palestinian problem cannot be managed such that there is a minimum of bloodshed on both sides. But to think that a peace accord can be hit upon that will induce Muslims in the Middle East and around the world to give up Islam’s doctrines of jihad, its deeply rooted anti-Semitism, and its supremacist political ideology is a position that could only be held by the willfully ignorant and historically uninformed. Of course, they’re the people running Washington.