During Trump’s time in office there was virtually no mention of a two-state solution.
The phrase is anathema to most Israelis and to America’s Jewish Conservatives.
But Israel’s (temporary) prime minister Yair Lapid couldn’t resist mentioning the ineffable, which is even a profanity to people who value Israel’s sovereignty over the Holy Land.
Trump sidelined the Palestinian Arabs.
He viewed their “cause” as unnecessary and hopeless, and instead focused on what would become the meaningful Abraham Accords.
The two-state imbroglio appeared to be trashed into the dustbin of politics, and the Israelis, during that time, were spared any further talk of surrender, which, since the 1993 Oslo Accords, is what the two-state solution has been all about, through code. The Israelis give. The Arabs take…regardless of their ongoing threats to annihilate the Jews.
Some may remember another state-within-a-state “solution” when Yasser Arafat, mentor to Mahmoud Abbas, turned Lebanon into hell on earth.
The reign of terror over there, should have been a signal to Israel’s leaderships that the same gang, PLO, Fatah, Hamas, is still in business with the same designs.
Has anything been learned? Not when so many leaders, mostly on the left, today Lapid, are still okay with exchanging Jewish land for a piece of paper.
Why fix something that ain’t broke? Peace with the Palestinian Arabs, some might say, is for dreamers. The Palestinian Arabs are who they are and always will be.
But never mind all that when every politician wants his own glory.
So along came Joe Biden in America, followed by Yair Lapid in Israel, and Biden wasted not a minute to stamp his legacy and to undo everything Trump did.
Lapid, center left, in need of leftist votes and campaigning for office Nov. 1, follows a similar path.
Spigots open for gas and oil to render and sustain the United States energy independent? Undone by Biden.
Secure borders? No more, as Biden lets them all come in. Welcome, y’all.
Then, the Abraham Accords, a measure of “peace in the Middle East,” which no one thought possible until Trump did it together with then PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
This triumph for Trump was singularly irksome for Biden and his team of foreign policy specialists, namely Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Could this be undone?
No, not when it’s working so well out in the open, and neither Biden, nor Blinken even acknowledged the Abraham Accords, unless they were pressed.
In that case, they mumbled that the results were still far off, and that no real peace can be achieved until a peace process led to a Palestinian Arab state within the Jewish State.
In a word, Biden needed a win.
He needed something, anything, to cover up, to make people forget his disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.
The two-state solution would then be Biden’s win, if he could pull it off. For that, he would need Israel’s Lapid to join the team.
To prove himself a worthy teammate, Lapid addressed the UN on Thursday, and announced that “an agreement with the Palestinians, based on two states for two peoples, is the right thing for Israel’s security, for Israel’s economy, and for the future of our children.” One condition – that this new Arab state, in the heart of Israel, ought to be “peaceful.”
Like Gaza?
Oddly, in the next sentence, Lapid brought up Gaza, but as proof that Israel is willing to make concessions for the sake of coexistence and peace.
So Israel, he said, gave up Gaza, handed it over to the Palestinian Arabs, expecting peace, but instead got Hamas and a “terrorist state.”
Does Lapid miss the point, the irony of his own words, the contradiction of his message?
This time a different result? Indeed yes, say the dreamers.
And Biden, smiling, could not agree more.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com
