Davos: Blinken, Biden Continue Deadly Obsession with Palestinian State
Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday that there needs to be a “Palestinian state” as the result of the conflict launched by the terrorist group Hamas with the murder of 1,200 Israelis October 7.
Blinken and President Joe Biden have stuck doggedly to their position, claiming that a Palestinian state is a necessary condition for Israel’s integration into the Middle East — precisely the dogma that President Donald Trump junked in the Abraham Accords.
Trump set aside the conventional wisdom of Washington — and Davos — to negotiate peace agreements between Israel and the Arab states that did not depend on a Palestinian state, which Secretary of State John Kerry, among others, said could not be done.
Blinken and Biden seem unconcerned that Palestinians have no interest in a state. Hamas, given the chance to govern Gaza, used aid money and materials to import weapons and build 350 miles of underground tunnels — none of which are for civilian use.
The Palestinian Authority, the so-called “moderate” alternative whose armed forces were trained by the U.S., continues to pay Palestinian terrorists and their families, even though doing so means losing U.S. funding for economic and social development.
Both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are primarily interested in replacing Israel, not in living alongside Israel in peace. The events of October 7 have convinced even left-wing Israelis that it would be unsafe, and foolish, to allow Palestinians sovereignty.
Blinken and Biden also do not seem to care that giving Palestinians a state, after the worst mass murder of Jews since the Second World War, would reward and incentivize future terrorism, giving Palestinians what they refused to achieve through diplomacy.
Worse, Blinken and Biden are suggesting that the October 7 terror attack was caused by the Palestinians’ statelessness, thereby providing a retroactive justification for the mass murder, rape, and abduction of civilians, and continued rocket attacks on Israel.
The Biden administration is staffed with many of the same foreign policy elites who embraced the old, failed “Palestinians first” model. It is no surprise, then, that not one Arab or Muslim country has joined the Abraham Accords since Biden took office.
Indeed, when Saudi Arabia sought peace with Israel last year, the Biden administration reportedly stalled progress by insisting concessions to the Palestinians. The Washington and Davos elites want a Palestinian state more than Palestinians, or Arabs, do.
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.
Surrender: Blinken Tells Netanyahu Israel Can’t Defeat Hamas
Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week that Israel cannot defeat Hamas — that there is no “military solution,” and that Israel will have to accept a Palestinian state.
Netanyahu reportedly rejected the idea.
NBC News reported Wednesday that Blinken, and Biden, are therefore trying to work around Netanyahu — the democratically-elected leader of Israel — in a departure from the Biden administration’s posture as the supposed defender of democratic ideals:
Blinken told Netanyahu that ultimately there is no military solution to Hamas, according to the officials, and that the Israeli leader needs to recognize that or history will repeat itself and violence will continue. But, the officials said, Netanyahu was unmoved.
The officials said the Biden administration is trying to lay the groundwork with other Israeli and civil society leaders in anticipation of an eventual post-Netanyahu government. In an attempt to work around Netanyahu, Blinken also met individually with members of his war Cabinet and other Israeli leaders, including opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, officials said.
But Blinken faces two obstacles: one, that Israelis believe that they are, in fact, capable of winning the war, and that they are doing so; two, that Palestinians themselves do not want a state more than they want to destroy Israel, meaning a state is doomed to fail.
On the first point, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, delivered a comprehensive summary Wednesday night of the war’s progress. While fighting in the southern portion of Gaza remains challenging, he said, the IDF had largely destroyed Hamas in the northern and central regions of the territory. The south is where Hamas’s leaders are believed to be hiding underground — surrounded by over 100 Israeli hostages, whom they are using as bargaining chips and human shields.
Israelis are nearly unanimous in their determination to destroy Hamas — a dramatic shift in attitudes since the October 7 terror attack, when Israelis were largely prepared to ignore Hamas as long as it did not attack them. The mass murder of 1,200 people, along with the abduction of 253 more, mostly civilians, changed attitudes in Israel across the political spectrum.
Many left-wing Israelis who once considered themselves “more Palestinian than the Palestinians” now see all Palestinians as a potential threat.
According to Gallup, nearly two-thirds of Israelis now oppose a Palestinian state, given what Hamas did to them, and to Gaza — and given the pro-terror sympathies of the corrupt Palestinian Authority, which governs most Palestinians in the West Bank.
That is a radical reversal from the position of most Israelis just a decade ago, when “twice as many Israeli adults supported an independent Palestinian state (61%) as opposed one (30%).” Hamas’s rocket and terror attacks are responsible for the change.
Blinken and President Joe Biden are committed to the old, failed model of Middle East peacemaking, in which the Palestinian issue must precede all others. President Donald Trump rejected that idea — and the result was the historic Abraham Accords.
Now, Biden and Blinken are trying to make new peace agreements — such as a Saudi-Israeli peace deal — contingent on the creation of a Palestinian state. And Blinken is casting Israelis as if they are not ready for peace, in contrast to the Arab world.
That is a total inversion of the truth, according to opinion polls, which suggest that the vast majority of Palestinians support Hamas’s terror attack of October 7. Arab public opinion is similar, though the Abraham Accords have remained intact so far.
NBC News also reports that Blinken is pushing a deal in which Saudi Arabia would agree to normalized relations with Israel in return for a Palestinian state. Ironically, Saudi Arabia was on the verge of a deal without a Palestinian state before October 7.
It was the Biden administration, according to one report, that actually stalled that deal by insisting on additional concessions to the Palestinians — concessions that the Saudis did not demand and for which the Palestinians did not agree to any compromises.
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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