Blinken's "vision"
Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Israel yesterday. At a joint news conference with Prime Minister Netanyahu, Blinken opined that maintaining the “vision” of a two-state solution — a Palestinian state alongside Israel — is “the only way forward.”
Blinken stopped well short of calling for the creation of a Palestinian state in the foreseeable future or even calling for talks to that end. He simply advocated maintaining the “vision.”
I assume he used this word advisedly, thereby signaling that there will be no U.S. pressure on Israel, for now, to negotiate a “peace treaty” with the Palestinians. With Israel having just experienced the worst terrorist attack in more than a decade, even Blinken understands that, as he put it, “if your backyard is on fire, then we can’t get anything done.”
But even without a fire in the backyard, a two-state solution is a pipe dream. According to the Washington Post, it has the support of only one-third of Palestinians and one-third of Israelis. No wonder there hasn’t been a serious effort to move forward on two-state talks since 2014.
For Israelis, a one-state solution is basically the status quo. For Palestinians, it’s the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state at a minimum, and the elimination of Jews from the land of Israel in their best case scenario.
The status quo isn’t perfect for Israelis, but it’s vastly preferable to having a bordering state controlled by a population that doesn’t accept an Israeli state.
Blinken’s claim that maintaining the vision of two states is “the only way forward” is nonsense, as this locution almost always is. However, it’s an improvement over the claim of his predecessor, John Kerry, that Israel “will never have true peace with the Arab world without solving the Palestinian question.” In fact, as the Washington Post acknowledges, in the very next administration — Donald Trump’s — Israel normalized relations with several Arab-world states.
According to reports, the focus of Blinken’s talks with Netanyahu was on countering Iran’s threat to the region and beyond. Exactly where it should be.
It’s also possible that the two discussed Netanyahu’s proposal to overhaul the Israeli judiciary. The Biden administration has expressed concern over this.
The left’s view of the judiciary is, shall we say, transactional. If the U.S. Supreme Court issues a couple of decisions the left doesn’t like, the leftist Democrats attacks its “legitimacy.” But if Eastern European countries or Israel try to rein in the judiciary, the left is outraged, going so far, in some cases, as to claim that democracy is under threat.
The proper rule of the judiciary in a democracy is a complex subject. In my view, there is no description of it that deserves universal application.
In general, though, the more involvement the judiciary has in policymaking and prosecuting elected officials, the less democratic a nation is. Democracy means rule by the people or their elected representatives, not by unelected judges.
To be sure, the role of the judiciary shouldn’t be curtailed to help a nation’s leaders avoid prosecution for wrongdoing, as Netanyahu’s critics say he’s attempting to do. However, this article makes a plausible case that Israel’s judiciary is badly in need of an overhaul because its Supreme Court has hijacked policymaking authority in ways that go well beyond the power of the U.S. judiciary and that are incompatible with democratic governance.
I have no opinion on the merits of Netanyahu’s proposed reform of the judiciary except for this: The matter is one for Israel to work out on its own; the U.S. should not involve itself.
That would be the case, even if the Democrats who govern the U.S. had a consistent, coherent position on the proper role of the judiciary. Having such a position is not the same thing as having one that should be imposed on other nations.
Still, it would be nice if the Democrats had one.
The fact that Blinken responded to the murderous terror attack by implying that there were "casualties on both sides" is itself rather appalling. It points to an utter lack of moral fortitude on his part, but also a lack of public diplomacy on Israel's part, as I have seen this point too often repeated in the mainstream international media in recent days. Alas, it is not much different than things were in 2000, during the Palestinian terror campaign that erupted following Arafat's refusal to come to any terms at Camp David. To be clear: there was a raid in a city called Jenin in the West Bank, last week. Ten people were killed. Of those ten, nine were terrorists, and to make matters even clearer, they were imminently going to be engaging in a terror attack. To the non-informed Western observer, why would a terror attack emanate from Jenin? Lots of reasons, which I will try to touch on, but I will note that Jenin was a center of Palestinian terrorism also in 2000, and most recently, last May, during which time an Islamist extremist lunatic from there went to an ultra-Orthodox community near Tel Aviv, and systematically butchered Jews in a religious seminary there, chopping up their bodies with knives. He did so on the occasion of Ramadan, perversely believing that by committing this act of wanton slaughter, he was somehow glorifying himself before his maker. Some kind of perverse new twist on ritual slaughter. In ancient times during Passover, Jews would sacrifice lambs in the Temple at Jerusalem. Similar rituals are followed by the tiny religious group called the Samaritans, who are an ancient relic of the Judaic presence in the land of Israel and reside ironically, not too far from Jenin, in the foothills of Nablus, and who worship at a place called Mt. Gezirim, which was one of the locations of the Ark of the Covenant before it was moved to Jerusalem. Well worth a visit in safer times. But I digress.
It seems there is a new, perverse Islamist custom unique to the land of Israel perhaps. Ritual slaughter of human beings on Ramadan. In the "honor" of one of the Mosques that stands on the site of the ancient, destroyed Temple of Jerusalem.
It was the brutal attack in the Orthodox seminary that prompted the IDF to then conduct a raid in Jenin, at which the Al Jazeera reporter Shiren Abu Akleh was present, and somehow killed in the crossfire. It's unclear whether an IDF bullet or a bullet from one of the terror groups killed her, but what is clear is that neither group would have intended it. What was appalling then as now, is that much more energy was invested by Blinken in condemning this unintended casualty, then the act of wanton brutality that necessitated the raid in the first place. And the implicit equivalence between the barbarity that occurred in Jerusalem on Friday, and the precision counter-terror raid on Thursday, is simply unacceptable from any moral perspective. I don't think even the US Army can achieve a 9 to 1 ratio of combatants to non-combatants in pretty much any counterterror operation, or any other operation. And this one, took place in one of the most fortified cities in the entire West Bank, so lawless that not the Palestinian Authority and not even Hamas, have any ability to impose order there. So it has been for at least 60 years.
Two elements are new. The religious extremism motivating the terror attacks. It is unusual for Palestinian terrorists to target religious Jews. Traditionally, they used to target secular Israelis, and Orthodox Jews have enjoyed an unusual "alliance of the weak" with anti-Zionist Arab parties in the Israeli Parliament. The second new development is the implication that the killing of terrorists, is somehow a massacre. Both are morally repugnant in the extreme. And it is precisely this type of moral equivalence that retards the ability of the Israeli army to stop this bloodshed, which they absolutely can do. I vividly recall some of the reporting from CNN back in the days when the second Intifada reached such proportions of violence that they compelled a forceful military response from Israel. The final straw was a brutal suicide bombing that claimed dozens of lives at a Bar Mitzvah on the eve of Passover. Then PM Ariel Sharon, in 2002, ordered a comprehensive counterterror operation in all of the cities of the West Bank, and then as now, a lot of the energy was focused on Jenin. At the time, he closed the perimeter of the city to press, and CNN's Nic Robertson started wondering, with horror, about what kind of massacre or genocidal act might be transpiring there. In the morning, the press was invited and the facts emerged. The army went to specific locations, removed terrorists from their whereabouts, and eliminated those who did not surrender. There were almost no civilian casualties whatsoever. Ever since then, Nic Robertson apparently has known to better trust the IDF, and the lengths to which it goes to protect civilian lives on all sides. What is especially appalling, is that Anthony Blinken, cannot seem to know better. And worse than Nic Robertson, he seems to regard the killing of actual terrorists, as some kind of regrettable "massacre." An Israeli PM cannot reprimand the representative of a superpower for showing such appalling moral blindness and indifference to innocent life. But Americans can, and should. It is by stopping such repugnant equivalences, that the terrorism can finally be dealt a well needed blow, now as then. Following the 2002 operation, with the exception of the evacuation of 10,000 Jews from Gaza and the subsequent rise of Hamas, with ensuing rounds of rocket fire every few years since, violence ebbed to historic lows. It can and will happen again, provided there is a clear distinction made, once again, between the intentional murder of civilians, and the actions taken to stop those who engage in such mass homicide.
There is another aside that is more sobering. Jenin has actually prospered in recent years, and has become the wealthiest city in the West Bank. And the Jerusalemite Arab who massacred his neighbors the other day, was a graduate of an Israeli engineering college in Jerusalem, enjoying all the benefits of participation in Israeli society. Even more disturbingly, his Arab neighbors celebrated the attack with fireworks. And some Arab Jerusalem municipal workers posted favorable emoticons on their Whatssap social media pages upon hearing the news of the murder. There is a culture of murderous violence, that economic enrichment does not seem to cure. It afflicts Arab society often from within, resulting in a spate of killings that has gone on for years on end. And when not turned inward, it is directed outwards, as the Jerusalemite Bassem Eid remarked with characteristic courage in a column posted yesterday. There are no quick panaceas for the deep seated cultural problem. But there are ways to address the killing, and the Secretary of State is currently, it would seem, serving as a human shield standing in the way. The Israeli army does not butcher civilians, (in fact it routinely and controversially endangers its own servicemen to save civilian lives), it does know how to effectively and preemptively stop jihadist killing, and it should be allowed to do its job. Blinken's remarks were wholly inappropriate for an American diplomat addressing an allied country, with shared values, and shared global commitments.