With the help of a supportive administration, it is to be hoped that the complete defeat of Hamas will still be achieved

PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK.COM/NOAMGALAI

ON the eve of President Trump’s inauguration, an acquaintance sent me a report from the head of Republicans in Israel that the UN Security Council would convene the following day, two hours prior to the Trump inauguration, to take up a resolution recognizing a Palestinian state, and the United States would not veto it.

To be sure, perfidy on that level struck me as somewhat unbelievable, but not totally implausible. Fortunately, the rumor turned out to be wrong. But the reasons that it was not beyond the realm of imagination are worth exploring.

For one thing, the departing Obama administration did something almost identical, less than a month before Trump’s inauguration in 2017. UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which the US did not veto, demanded an end to all Israeli construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and further instructed all states to distinguish in their relations between the territory of the State of Israel and territories occupied since 1967. In short, all the new neighborhoods of Jerusalem, built since 1967, in which close to half a million Jews dwell, the Kosel Plaza, and the Temple Mount became, according to the UN, occupied territories.

Second, the Biden administration had long been obsessed with the creation of a Palestinian state, the north star of American Middle East policy for half a century.

DAVID WURMSER, a former senior advisor to Vice President Cheney and National Security Advisor John Bolton, in “How Trump Can Avoid Transition Traps Set by Biden,” sets forth the twin pillars of President Obama’s Middle East policy, which came to define the Biden administration as well. The first was that Iran could be “moderated, integrated, and harnessed to provide regional stability.” The second, that regional instability is primarily driven by the lack of a Palestinian state.

There is a corollary to the second proposition: Israel has grown too strong, and as a result, no longer longs for peace. Therefore, Israel must be weakened if a Palestinian state is to be created. That was the message Obama delivered to the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations shortly after coming into office. Obama had been marinated in post-colonialism at Columbia by Edward Said, and had no sympathy for Israel over the Palestinians to say the least.

The preference for a weak Israel was evident in the Biden administration’s approach to the events of October 7, an event that showed Israel at its weakest and most vulnerable. On that day, 1,200 Israelis were slaughtered and 250 taken hostage by a ragtag invading force that had no trouble traversing a billion-dollar high-tech border.

The Biden foreign policy team, nearly all of them veterans of the Obama administration, immediately saw in October 7 an opportunity to bring Israel to heel. From the very beginning of Israel’s entry into Gaza, Secretary of State Blinken began pressing Prime Minister Netanyahu to enunciate his vision for Gaza after the removal of Hamas. The only answer Blinken himself could provide was eventually turning over Gaza to the rule of a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority, under whose banner the West Bank and Gaza would be united.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, after the October 7 invasion, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan announced that “all the pieces are there” to put together a comprehensive Middle East peace, “in the near term.” But that depended on creating a clear pathway to a Palestinian state.

The Biden administration, in Wurmser’s estimation, did everything possible to prevent Israel from achieving a complete victory on the scale of 1967, and restrained Israel from attacking all the proxies constituting Iran’s ring of fire, not to mention Iran itself. Thus, the Biden administration held back armaments from Israel and sought to keep Israel from entering Rafah and seizing control of the Philadelphi Corridor. At the same time, the focus of the State Department’s efforts was “the attempt to tap into Israeli vulnerabilities — such as the hostages — and desires — like peace with Saudi Arabia — and leverage them to impose on Israel strategic weakness and dependency.”

With respect to Israel’s desire to bring Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords, Blinken and Sullivan stated repeatedly that Saudi Arabia would never enter into a peace treaty with Israel, absent a clear path to Palestinian statehood. There is little reason to think that is true. After all, the three Arab parties to the Abraham Accords did not require Palestinian statehood. But by continually stating the requirement of statehood to be the minimal Saudi demand, the Biden administration effectively bound the Saudis to that position.

ON ITS FACE, the Simchas Torah massacre would seem to be a powerful argument against a Palestinian state. Israel withdrew entirely from Gaza in 2005, creating a de facto Palestinian state, at least in Gaza. Yet the only thing Hamas did once in power was to use Gaza to launch attacks against Israel. Six times since 2005, Israel has been forced to reenter Gaza to suppress rocket fire at its citizens. And most of the billions of dollars in international aid directed toward Gaza has gone into creation of a maze of underground tunnels for warfare against Israel.

President Herzog spoke for almost all Israelis at the same World Economic Forum where Blinken and Sullivan laid out their rosy vision of a peaceful Middle East, with an independent Palestinian state: “Israelis have lost faith in the peace process because they have seen that terror is glorified by our neighbors.... [F]or the vast majority of Israelis right now, talking about a two-state solution — while the hostages are being held, while Israel is fighting on various fronts, and while Palestinian polls are giving Hamas a staggering amount of support in the West Bank — is just a pipe dream.” He might have added, that the Palestinian Authority has refused to unequivocally condemned Hamas’s Simchas Torah savagery.

The train of a Palestinian state has long since left the station, and it is instructive to understand why: Palestinian “aspirations” remain the same as they have been from time immemorial — not a Palestinian state, but the destruction of the Jewish state.

The Palestinians could have had a state in 1948, but chose to go to war with the newly created Israel instead. After the Six Day War, Israel would have been willing to return most of the newly captured West Bank in return for peace. But instead, the Arab League responded with the infamous “three nos” of Khartoum: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.

In 2000 at Oslo, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat virtually everything he asked for, yet Arafat walked away, without even making a counteroffer, telling American president Bill Clinton that acceptance of peace with Israel would leave him a “dead man walking.” Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas, who commanded none of Arafat’s popularity, apparently felt the same way, when he rejected Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s even more generous offer of statehood in 2006.

Both Arafat and Abbas knew that they had done nothing to prepare their people for peace. Just the opposite.

As Khaled Mashal, the head of Hamas’s political bureau, said last year, “We reject this notion of a two-state solution, as Palestinians would have to recognize the legitimacy of the Zionist entity.”

That point of view is not limited to Hamas. The desire to prevent the Jews from remaining sovereign in any part of their historic homeland begins with the Islamic concept of “dar al Islam” — i.e., land that was ever under Islamic rule must forever remain so. But it has mutated into secular forms even where the religious attachment has waned.

The desire to prevent the Jews from having a state remains, according to Einat Wilf, a woman of the left, the essence of “Palestinianism” until today. To speak of the current war as one against Hamas, she says, is like describing World War II as a war against Japanese pilots. Hamas is but one arm of the Palestinian movement.

At no point has any Palestinian entity put its energies into demonstrating its fitness to run a state if given the chance or of having chosen a path of placing the advancement of its own people over the killing of Jews. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas remains in office 14 years after the expiration of his term. And the PA has failed entirely to build any kind of civil society, with freedom of expression and of the press.

Were a Palestinian state to come into existence, it would soon be taken over by Hamas, unless the latter decided to let the PA handle street-cleaning while it focused on preparing for the next war with Israel. Hamas seized power in Gaza from the PA in 2006, and tossed supporters of the latter off of roof tops. And it is more popular today than the corrupt PA in Judea and Samaria as well.

EVERY INDICATION is that the Middle East policy views of the incoming Trump administration are much more closely aligned with Israel than were those of its predecessor. Recall that Trump 45 immediately withdrew from the JCPOA and imposed heavy sanctions on Iran.

In addition, the first Trump administration invested no energy in peacemaking between the Palestinians and Israel. The Abraham Accords between Israel and three Gulf states constitute the ultimate rebuttal of the consensus view of the State Department over decades that the creation of a Palestinian state is the prerequisite for peace between Israel and any of its Arab neighbors. (Israel already had peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, even prior to the Abraham Accords.)

And it appears that Trump will seek to expand his signal diplomatic triumph by bringing Saudi Arabia into the Accords. His first call in office to a foreign leader was to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the kingdom.

The Trump foreign policy team has spoken with one voice that Hamas should have no role in administering Gaza and must be defeated entirely. One of President Trump’s first acts in office was the restoration of supply of all weapons to Israel that had been held up by the Biden administration.

The only hope for peace between Israel and the Palestinians is the de-Nazification of Palestinian society, including the replacement of the current textbooks holding forth the vision of a world without Israel by those that describe the benefits that peace can bring. The current textbooks were one of the principal reasons that the first Trump administration cut off all funding of UNRWA, which underwrites the Palestinian textbooks, and will do so again.

But de-Nazification first requires the recognition of thoroughgoing defeat. That is why the Allies in World War II insisted on the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan and a period of rule by the victorious military authorities. Without that, the cult of the emperor in Japan and the hold of Hitler in Germany would have persisted.

With the help of a supportive administration, it is to be hoped that the complete defeat of Hamas will still be achieved, and that it will serve as a lesson to the larger Palestinian society that Israel is here to stay.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1047. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)