Kerry again warned of the looming dangers of stalled peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, placing the onus of responsibility solely on Israel.
PA head Mahmoud Abbas. (AP/Darko Vojinovic)
US Secretary of State John Kerry again voiced his exasperation over the stalled diplomatic process between Israel and the Palestinians, while warning that things could get worse for Israel if they do not actively seek a solution, which he believes they are not.
In an interview for The New Yorker magazine that will be published later this month, Kerry expressed his belief that Israel is headed toward becoming a “unitary state that is an impossible entity to manage” because of a lack of a diplomatic solution.
He said he is particularly concerned that the Palestinian Authority (PA) could collapse. In that event, he fears the PA’s thirty thousand security officers would scatter, and that chaos and increasingly violent clashes with Israel would follow.
“I understand the passions that are behind all of this—I get it,” Kerry said in the interview. “If it were easy, it would have been done a long time ago. I happen to believe there is a way forward. There’s a solution. It would be good for Israel; it’d be great for the Palestinians; it’d be great for the region. People would make so much money. There’d be so many jobs created. There could be peace. And you would be stronger for it. Because nobody that I know or have met in the West Bank [Judea and Samaria] is anxious to have jihadis come in.”
“The alternative is you sit there and things just get worse,” Kerry went on. “There will be more Hezbollah. There will be more rockets. And they’ll all be pointed in one direction. And there will be more people on the border. And what happens then? You’re going to be one big fortress? I mean, that’s not a way to live. It seems to me it is far more intelligent and far more strategic—which is an important word here—to have a theory of how you are going to preserve the Jewish state and be a democracy and a beacon to the world that everybody envisioned when Israel was created.”
Despite the threats, Kerry does not see the State of Israel disappearing.
“No, I don’t believe that’s going to happen,” he said. “It’s just, what is it going to be like, is the question. Will it be a democracy? Will it be a Jewish state? Or will it be a unitary state with two systems, or some draconian treatment of Palestinians, because to let them vote would be to dilute the Jewish state? I don’t know. I have no answer to that.”
He then accused Israel of not knowing what they were doing.
“But the problem is, neither do they. Neither do the people who are supposed to be providing answers to this. It is not an answer to simply continue to build in the West Bank and to destroy the homes of the other folks you’re trying to make peace with and pretend that that’s a solution.”
The destruction of the homes of “folks” he was referring to are apparently the homes of terrorists recently demolished by the IDF as part of Israel’s war on the recent wave of Palestinian terror attacks that have claimed the lives of 21 victims and wounded over 220.
His remarks are reminiscent of remarks made by President Barack Obama, who downplayed the murder of four French Jews who were intentionally shot by a Muslim terrorist at the Hyper Cacher market in Paris last January, calling them “a bunch of folks” who were “randomly” shot.
By: Max Gelber, United with Israel