It’s time for the US, and the rest of the international community to try something new in the Middle East

When Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters in Tel Aviv last Friday, with his characteristic solemn face, that the two-state solution is the only way forward in the Middle East, did he sincerely believe what he was saying? Or was his comment a diplomatic display of evenhandedness to calm Arab leaders and Muslims — not to mention Democratic Party members — enraged at America’s full-throated support for Israel’s all-out war on Hamas?

Either way, it’s equally disconcerting, from a variety of viewpoints. Especially after a weekend when tens of thousands of demonstrators jammed Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., Trafalgar Square in London, and public thoroughfares in Paris, Berlin, Rome, and even Montreal, waving Palestinian flags and shouting vile anti- Israel and anti-Semitic slogans. Israel’s grace period after the horrific Simchas Torah attacks is over. Jews feel unsafe wherever they live.

Blinken made it clear both in Tel Aviv, and in a visit with Arab leaders in Amman, that the US opposes a cease-fire that would give Hamas a chance to regroup. At the same time, he put the onus on Israel to facilitate humanitarian aid to Gaza civilians — the majority of which support Hamas’s genocidal goals. Blinken’s dogged insistence on clinging to a two-state solution that the Arabs have rejected on numerous occasions and in multiple formats over the last 100 years is a denial of history and a dangerous fantasy.

When Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union address in 2015 and defended his decision to normalize relations with Cuba, he said: “In Cuba, we are ending a policy that was long past its expiration date. When what you’re doing doesn’t work for 50 years, it’s time to try something new.”

A hundred years is twice as long as 50. It’s time for the US, and the rest of the international community to try something new in the Middle East.

Midcourse Corrections

Don’t expect much to change, at least not quickly.

Three days before Rosh Hashanah, and less than a month before the Simchas Torah massacres, Blinken delivered a policy speech at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The school is named for Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was renowned for advocating a policy of pressuring Israel when he was national security advisor to President Carter.

Saying that the Cold War era was over and a new era was just beginning, Blinken launched into a concept in political science known as “diplomatic variable geometry.”

Variable geometry is a term the aviation industry coined in the 1950s to describe the modification of aircraft wing angles during a flight so that the aircraft shape (its geometry) adapts to speed and altitude conditions.

Blinken admitted to his Johns Hopkins audience that his team sometimes gets tired of hearing about variable geometry, but to him, it means that policy makers must devise a strategy focused on a diverse coalition of countries, local governments, nonprofits, the private sector, and academia that collaborate to solve specific problems, such as providing aid to displaced Ukrainians or climate change.

Blinken then added in a dash of American good cheer saying that tinkering with the right formula will empower citizens of the world to be open, free, prosperous, and secure.

“That vision is not America’s alone, but the enduring aspiration of people in every nation on every continent,” Blinken said.

Avoiding Implosions

The problem is not everyone on every continent agrees on how to get there, or at what pace.

Back in 2004, Fareed Zakaria, who now hosts CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS and writes a weekly column for the Washington Post, penned a scholarly piece in Political Science Quarterly in which he described a diplomatic tête-à-tête between the US and Egypt.

“It is always the same splendid setting and the same sad story,” Zakaria wrote. “A senior US diplomat enters one of the grand presidential palaces in Heliopolis, the neighborhood of Cairo from which President Hosni Mubarak rules over Egypt…

“Passing layers of security guards, he arrives at a formal drawing room where he is received with great courtesy by the Egyptian president. The two talk amiably about US-Egyptian relations, regional affairs, and the state of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. Then the American gently raises the issue of human rights and suggests that Egypt’s government might ease up on political dissent, allow more press freedoms, and stop jailing intellectuals. Mubarak tenses up and snaps, ‘If I were to do what you ask, Islamic fundamentalists will take over Egypt. Is that what you want?’ ”

Zakaria noted that in their day, both Yasser Arafat and Saudi prince Bandar bin Sultan expressed the same sentiments when the US pressed them to adopt Western values, claiming that showing more moderation would backfire and result in more intractable radicals gaining power.

In his 2014 book The Irreverent Activist, Ammar Abdulhamid, a pro-democracy Syrian who fled his native country in 2005 and built a new life in Silver Spring, Maryland, explained the major misunderstanding that plagues Western thinking when it comes to exporting moderation to the Muslim world. While the development of democracy in Western countries was driven purely by internal dynamics, over a long period, sometimes a century or more, in Muslim-majority countries, modern values have reached their shores through various acts of imposition inspired by or directly supported by Western powers.

Abdulhamid contends that Western concepts such as citizenship, parliaments, elections, women’s rights, and freedom of religion and speech were introduced into Muslim societies simultaneously or within short intervals of one another, giving people little time to absorb the shocks often involved.

“Some societies and states will not be able to cope and will implode spectacularly under mounting pressures and contradictions,” he wrote, while also issuing a stark warning to the practitioners of variable geometry.

“The current inability on the part of governments in powerful countries around the world to recognize that certain ‘local’ developments are bound to have global consequences poses a serious security challenge to the current order.”

Israel’s war with Hamas is a local development that poses serious security challenges to the world order. It’s not like Blinken or Biden don’t understand this. They do, and that’s one reason they rushed two US aircraft carriers to the region, while forcefully warning Iran and other malevolent actors to stay out of it.

But when all is said and done, for Jews — and Arabs — to live as open, peaceful, prosperous, and secure nations, then Gaza — and even the areas of Judea and Samaria now controlled by the Palestinian Authority — will have to be ruled much differently than they are today.

And it will take much more than noble and cerebral political science theories to produce political change in a region shaped by 4,000 years of religion and culture where the future can never be severed from the past.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 985)