On Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will visit a White House whose vision of Israeli-Palestinian reality is getting blurrier all the time.
President Obama fails to differentiate hopes from facts concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and therefore he believes — in direct contradiction of the evidence — that a permanently peaceful two-state solution between Israel and Palestine is imminently possible if only the Jewish state would deconstruct its people’s settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and agree to shared ownership of Jerusalem. The above conditions, one should note, are conditions Obama adopted on his own; they are not conditions that Israel is offering and they are not conditions that will pacify Palestine for any length of time, based on the statements and behavior of the Palestinian Authority and its Legislative Council.
Obama asserts, in effect, that peace is up to Israel. It’s an invertebrate, Carteresque play: stay away from the scary guy and get tough with the friendly guy.
In asking Netanyahu to sit down with the Palestinian leadership, Obama is asking Israel to collaborate with those who openly seek to annihilate it. The truth is that the two sides can’t live side by side in peace because that is not what the Palestinians really want.
American advocates of the two-state solution point to polling data that they wrongly read as indicating that a majority of Palestinians favor a two-state solution. In fact, 80% of Palestinians will only accept a two-state solution on the condition that Palestinians are allowed to return to land lost when modern Israel was established, which will render the Jewish people a homeless minority.
One might have thought that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the Fatah party in Palestine, was hostile enough toward Israel for vengeance-minded Palestinians. Abbas’s Fatah party composes the majority of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, an on-again, off-again member of the United States’s terrorist organization list and which includes among its constitutional goals the “eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence.”
Apparently not hostile enough for Palestine.
In 2006, Palestinian voters gave Hamas a majority of seats in the Legislative Council plus all of the administrative cabinet positions. Hamas is classified as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, Canada and Japan. Its founding charter commits the group to replacing Israel with an Islamist state and to raising “the banner of Allah over every inch of [historic] Palestine.”
Hamas’s leaders have called suicide attacks the “F-16” of the Palestinian people, and the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, has targeted Israeli civilians with rocket attacks and suicide bombings for decades.
Publicly, Hamas leaders vacillate incoherently on the two-state question before settling, always, on positions incompatible with Israeli sovereignty.
After Hamas’s landslide electoral victory in 2006, Hamas co-founder Mahmoud Al-Zahar said he did not rule out the possibility of accepting a “temporary two-state solution” — he also stated that he dreamed “of hanging a huge map of the world on the wall at [his] Gaza home which does not show Israel on it.”
Al-Zahar also “did not rule out the possibility of having Jews, Muslims and Christians living under the sovereignty of an Islamic state” — in which, by Islamic law, Jewish residents would be of dhimmi (inferior) status.
Palestinian Prime Minster Ismail Haniyeh made the very bizarre statement that if a Palestinian state was formed within the 1967 political boundaries, Hamas would be willing to declare a truce that could last “as long as 20 years.”
The group is funded in part by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a rogue megalomaniac who hates Israel above all and is pursuing an illegal nuclear weapons program. Ahmadinejad funnels $20 million to $30 million per year to Hamas.
Ahmadinejad famously said on Israel’s 60th birthday in 2008, “Those who think they can revive the stinking corpse of the usurping and fake Israeli regime by throwing a birthday party are seriously mistaken. This regime is on its way to annihilation.”
Ahmadinejad said that Israel “has reached the end like a dead rat,” and warned, “They should know that regional nations hate this fake and criminal regime and if the smallest and briefest chance is given to regional nations they will destroy (it).”
Does that sound like support for a two-state solution?
David Andrukonis is a technology entrepreneur and occasional contributor to The Daily Caller.