President Donald Trump achieved success in the Abraham Accords by setting aside the failed idea that peace between Israel and the Arab world depended on a Palestinian state.
President Joe Biden has evidently returned to that failed model for the region.
On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken pushed Israeli leaders to see a Palestinian state as part of the post-Hamas future in Gaza, despite the plummeting support among Israelis for a state composed of people who support terror against them.
Blinken seemed unconcerned about the possibility that giving Palestinians a state in the aftermath of the October 7 terror attack would reward them for terror. Nor did he seem to have learned anything from the recent history of diplomacy in the Middle East.
Prior to Trump, it was an article of faith in Washington, DC, foreign policy circles that an Israeli-Palestinian agreement had to precede any deals between Israel and the Arab states. Then-Secretary of State John Kerry mocked the idea of a separate peace.
John Kerry in 2016: “There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world. I want to make that very clear to all of you. ” pic.twitter.com/qsNO7CVhxQ
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) November 23, 2020
Trump tried to strike a deal with the Palestinians, but found their leadership incorrigible. So he turned to Saudi Arabia and to several Gulf states — all of which have maintained peace and relations with Israel in spite of the ongoing war against Hamas.
Prior to October 7, Saudi Arabia — the key player in peace talks between Israel and the Arab states — indicated that a Palestinian state was not a prerequisite for peace.
But the Biden administration pushed the idea of a Palestinian state and other concessions — delaying a Saudi-Israeli peace deal in the process.
As Breitbart News reported October 2, “The Biden administration is … demanding that Israel offer more concessions to the Palestinians — which not even the Saudis have demanded.”
That failed approach has evidently continued to guide Biden administration policy, even in the aftermath of October 7.
In a press conference Tuesday, Blinken said that peace depended on a “regional approach that includes the pathway to a Palestinian state,” and that you can’t have one [peace] without the other [a Palestinian state].” He also demanded that Israel “stop taking steps that undermine the Palestinians’ ability to govern themselves effectively,” as if the Palestinian Authority corruption and support for terror was somehow Israel’s fault. He also added that the Palestinian Authority needed to “reform itself.”
Reports emerged during Blinken’s visit to Israel of growing tension between the Israeli government and the Biden administration.
It is not hard to understand why: Israel is worrying about the future, while Blinken and Biden want to turn back the clock to 2016.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the 2021 e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now updated with a new foreword. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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