“The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.”― William Hazlitt
The purpose here is not to analyze the merits of the extraordinary and controversial announcement by President Donald Trump during his press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this past week. Many and varied opinions continue to be offered elsewhere – everywhere – and in great detail, ranging as one might expect from the euphoric to the enraged.
The purpose instead is to expose the complete hypocrisy – the unmitigated dishonesty – of the latter camp, the naysayers who oppose anything that Trump might present. Transparent as it is to those not blind, the hypocrisy is nonetheless ignored.
February 4, 2025 will be remembered as the day that the American president dropped a diplomatic bombshell on the world – shocking friends and foes alike. It was fraught with ambiguities, contradictions, and wishful thinking. Even more significantly, it changed the ever-present narrative that defined the formula adopted by virtually all previous American decision-makers, a prescription that had proven totally fruitless in seeking to solve the impasse in the Middle East.
To be sure, the announcement exposed the essence of hypocrisy which was a deep-rooted element of the war of ideas – a war that Israel has been losing dating back to the Oslo Accords in 1993. Some might argue – to the post-1967 days.
Almost immediately, the criticism rained down on Trump. The bombast that characterized the impromptu manner by which he presented the news was matched only by the bombastic rhetoric which defined the subsequent attacks on the White House. They were nonstop, and most versions seemed to include the accusation of “racism”, “forced relocation”, “involuntary transfer”, “coercive displacement”, and the most frequent, almost ubiquitous, charge: “ethnic cleansing.”
Trump’s detractors rushed to defend the very people who supported and celebrated Hamas’s genocidal ideology, protesting that the American president’s irrational idea would force the Palestinian Arabs to become the victims of a human rights abuse.
The thread that ran through the vitriol that was directed at Trump was common to every angry complaint: Who indeed gave the president license to dictate the way things would be played out in the Middle East? A complaint that was never heard about the previous American Administration’s management of the war in Gaza.
Yes, there was utter silence, and a tacit approval, when Joe Biden and his foreign policy puppeteer Antony Blinken were working to impose a 2-State Illusion on Israel. That American interference and its demands were somehow understandable, and acceptable. Because their version of “the day after” was to Israel’s detriment. Notwithstanding that it rewarded Islamic terrorism.
It should be understood that what President Trump offered was an idea. It was not a plan. That didn’t seem to matter.
After all, the Democrats insisted: you cannot be seen as civilized if you are willing to remove a people from their homes. And – let’s be clear, they shouted, this ethnic cleansing was a violation of the basic human right to live in a designated land.
And herein lies the hypocrisy – blatant and undeniable.
Trump’s idea and his comments have done one very important thing. It conjured up the policies that characterized a generations-old US State Department concept – as first suggested by an architect of American foreign policy, decades ago.
George Ball, the former Under Secretary of State from 1961-1966, published his infamous essay “The Middle East: How to Save Israel In Spite of Herself” in April 1977 in Foreign Affairs. It represented the thinking of the anti-Israel element which was endemic to the philosophy of the Arabist-controlled State Department. Long understood to be the mentality of the US State Department, it then became, somewhat openly, the underpinnings of the department policies for the next forty-six years.
Until February 4, when Trump shoved a stick into the spokes of said policy. Ball’s piece – by every interpretation – was anti-Israel, echoing the concept that peace in the Middle East can be more readily realized with Israel “giving” and the Arabs “getting”. And, if Israel was not willing to play along, the ‘solution’ needed to be imposed, literally forcing it down Israel’s throat.
Ball’s opening sentence in Foreign Affairs, “Most Americans approach the problems of the Middle East with a pro-Israeli bias – and rightly so,” was the only proper thing that he stated. It was downhill from there. And his analysis of the conflict was as fraudulent as the lexicon used universally to describe the conflict for the first generation-and-a-half of Israel’s modern-day existence – as the Arab-Israeli conflict. Value free. It was of course something else: it was the Arab war against Israel. Or, following the Ayatollah take-over of Iran in 1979, it was the Muslim war against Jews. Instead, the US State Department took it even further, in the wrong direction: it redefined the conflict as Israeli-Palestinian. The poor stateless Palestinian Arabs. As such, it opened the door where conflict resolution could be enacted by imposing a settlement and a solution – of course – on Israel.
Had Trump been cleverer, he would have incorporated the following as part of his announcement of moving the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza to some neighboring or other countries:
“…Thus the parties will never come anywhere near agreement by the traditional processes of diplomatic haggling unless the United States first defines the terms of that agreement, relates them to established international principles, and makes clear that America's continued involvement in the area depends upon acceptance… of the terms it (the US) prescribes.”
The author of that short paragraph was again George Ball. In 1977. It defined the possible need, and the right, of an imposed solution. And everyone who was not a strong supporter of Israel accepted and adopted that position, then, and since then.
Israel’s critics – the same ilk that have been shouting about ethnic cleansing – readily endorsed that philosophy. The anti-Israel US State Department. The media. Academics everywhere. And by every measure, the Democratic Party of the past many years. Impose a settlement. After all – we will be saving Israel in spite of herself! And, they argued, it is the right thing to do.
Well, on February 4, Donald Trump echoed, and reframed, the suggestion by George Ball. You tell them what will be! Saving the Palestinian Arabs in spite of themselves. And, the very ones who for decades lauded the State Department’s prescription of a forced solution became apoplectic. Completely. Had Donald Trump plagiarized Ball and used that very comment, verbatim, the same detractors would have demonized the president – for the very language and proposition that they celebrated for forty-six years. Until the day before...
As presented by Trump, the hypocrites screamed their denunciations. The man is mad they barked into every microphone. Denying a people “the right to live in their own land” – a violation of human rights they roared in unison.
Recall that Yair Lapid – a self-professed champion of human rights – wailed the same objection just last year, when Jews who had been forcibly dragged by the IDF from their homes in Gaza in August 2005, expressed the desire to live again in a rebuilt Gush Katif after the war with Hamas would end. “Only the mad and insane would think to remove the Arabs of Gaza, and they must be stopped,” Lapid screamed before the television cameras.
One wonders if he now thinks the American president is mad and insane – and must be stopped. It really doesn’t matter, does it, having to wonder what a failed former interim prime minister might think – the one who surrendered significant Israeli territorial areas of the Mediterranean to the Lebanese, pretending it was not really to the Hezbollah. That, we were told, was seemingly not mad and insane.
Let’s expose an even greater and more obvious hypocrisy.
One doesn’t need to rely on any formal survey to know this: Every voice that is screaming about “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza has absolutely no objection to Jews being ethnically cleansed from the state of Palestine when they expected it to be established. Judenrein. No problem.
The Arabs who speak and write about a Palestinian Arab state as if it were inevitable – those who have advocated for it before and after October 7 – have been quite straightforward: no Jews in Palestine. And yet, despite the candid – and quite brazen – Arab admission of an inescapable and necessary “relocation”, “transfer”, and “displacement” of Jews (!) there seemed absent the ubiquitous charge of “ethnic cleansing” from the Western World.
Do the math: 530,000 Jews in Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, and 340,000 in the post-1967 suburbs of Jerusalem. A total of 870,000 to be relocated, transferred, and displaced – ethnically cleansed – to accommodate a Palestinian Arab state. Trump’s opponents, the media, academia, and the Democratic Party have absolutely no problem with that.
The hypocrisy doesn’t end there.
Never mind a future Palestinian Arab state. How about the very denial of the Jewish right to live in Israel proper – and the genocidal ideology that preaches the removal of seven million Jews from Israel. Can we please hear some liberals scream about “ethnic cleansing” that accompanies “from the river to the sea”? Of course not.
Let’s look at just one such voice of protest, echoing the sentiments of so many others. Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a key Democratic Party member, who claims to love Israel and who criticized harshly Trump’s idea: “You can put me down as this is between offensive and insane and dangerous and foolish,” he said. And yet, as a strong proponent of removing Jews from their homes to assuage the Palestinian Arabs who supported and celebrated October 7 – well, that seems a sound plan.
William Hazlitt – in his “Selected Essays, 1778-1830” – was right when he wrote: “The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.”
The problem is – the hypocrites who attack Trump because he would reverse an American policy that supported the 2-State Delusion – even if imposed – are not at all repentant. They don’t even realize they need to be.
Meir Jolovitz is a past national executive director of the Zionist Organization of America, and formerly associated with the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.