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As Israel continues its systematic assault on Hamas deep inside Gaza, the conversation has already begun to shift away from the warfare on the ground. True, much painful fighting likely remains; true as well, no one can predict the extent to which Hezbollah or the Iranian regime itself might escalate.
But the war will, at some point, end. And a gap has already emerged between the positions of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Joe Biden when it comes to what happens in Gaza the day after Israel deems Hamas defeated.
On the one hand, Netanyahu avowed that Israel "will for an indefinite period have security responsibility" in Gaza after the war. On the other hand, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated "it is clear that Israel cannot occupy Gaza" after the war.
Something has to give.
The Biden administration's specific position on Gaza after the war is downstream of its broader obstinance when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a speech in Tel Aviv on Nov. 3, Blinken reiterated the Biden administration's continued support for a so-called "two-state solution" to the conflict.
The Biden administration, in other words, is of the opinion that the Hamas Holocaust of Oct. 7 was not a paradigm-shifting geopolitical event. Biden, Blinken and the rest of the Democratic foreign policy establishment are of the belief that the single biggest slaughter of Jews since Hitler was not a game-changer.
The original proposed "two-state solution," following the European powers' post-World War I carving up of the Middle East, would have made all of "Mandatory Palestine" — encompassing the entirety of the Land of Israel, "from the river to the sea" as it is now said — a Jewish state, and would have made the Emirate of Transjordan (today, the kingdom of Jordan) a so-called "Palestinian" state. But the modern "two-state solution," which would have Gaza and the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria form the basis for an independent "Palestinian" state, should have died after Yasser Arafat's Second Intifada.
To continue to believe in a "two-state solution" is to reveal oneself to be entirely out-of-touch to anything smacking of empirical reality. It is to reveal one's worldview as so deeply ideological, so completely divorced from facts on the ground, that one will have inadvertently outed himself as a complete and utter fool.
There is an alternative explanation for those still stubbornly peddling a "two-state solution." It is a darker explanation than mere incompetence: a desire to simply see more Oct. 7 pogroms. After Oct. 7, it is clear that the 2005 disengagement from Gaza will go down as one of Israel's all-time historical mistakes, along with ceding the Temple Mount to the Jordanian waqf after the Six-Day War, the disastrous lack of preemptive action before the Yom Kippur War, and the Oslo Accords with Arafat. The world has seen what leaving Gaza to "Palestinian self-determination" results in: a jihadist entity that indiscriminately fires rockets at Israeli civilians and commits Nazi-like war crimes. The very least Israel must do is reassert operational control of Gaza's borders and security; ideally, a military occupation or formal re-annexation would be on the table. Biden is concerned about his reelection prospects next fall. There is only so much in the way of Muslim-American support he can afford to lose. Like a true cynic, he has apparently chosen to shore up that support to the exclusion of our close ally's existential security.
To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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