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Unilateral Recognition of a Palestinian State Would Reverse Longstanding U.S. Policy
(National Interest) John Hannah and Michael Makovsky - U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has pressed for "a concrete, time-bound and irreversible path" toward a Palestinian state. This amounts to saying that it doesn't matter how corrupt and incompetent the Palestinian leadership remains, if they continue to incite their people to hate Jews, or if their ultimate goal remains Israel's destruction. What matters is that the Palestinians will be rewarded with a state after Hamas committed the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. It's not an overstatement to say this is lunacy and disastrous for U.S. interests. It rewards terror. It will just perpetuate instability, anti-Israel terror, and pro-Hamas sentiment. It reverses longstanding U.S. policy, enshrined in the 1993 Oslo Accords, that Israelis and Palestinians must negotiate all final status issues, including the possible establishment of a Palestinian state. Israel will never agree, and America will achieve nothing except a breach in U.S.-Israeli relations and American diplomatic failure. Israeli President Isaac Herzog, a man of the left, told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month: "If you ask an average Israeli now about his or her mental state, nobody in his right mind is willing now to think about what will be the solution of the peace agreements because everybody wants to know: Can we be promised real safety in the future?" To underscore the point, 99 out of 120 members of the Israeli Knesset recently voted against any unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state. As one senior Israeli official said, "not even Moses could get that many votes." It is impossible to convince Israelis that a Palestinian state in the West Bank - just a few miles from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv - would not pose a mortal threat to them. What lessons would other prospective partners of America draw about aligning with Washington if the U.S. is willing to throw one of its closest partners, Israel, under the bus? And the big winner would be Iran. John Hannah is a senior fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), where Michael Makovsky, a former Pentagon official, is President and CEO.