Biden's 'Two-State Solution' Is Afghanistan Redux

As published in Newsmax

September 27, 2021.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett met with U.S. President Joe Biden in D.C. a day after the attack in Kabul took the lives of 13 U.S. service members. The Taliban now controlled Afghanistan and the U.S. was running for the exit in one of the worst debacles in American foreign policy history.

Biden’s main message to Bennett was that Israel and America must focus on building a Palestinian state. Bennett, who would rather have concentrated on the imminent Iranian nuclear danger, refrained from pointing out that this decades-long belief in a “two-state solution” to the Palestinian conflict with Israel is a delusion similar to America’s Afghan fairytale of building a democracy in that tribal Muslim backwater.

America entered Afghanistan to destroy the terrorist movement al-Qaeda that perpetrated 9/11. It evolved into an effort to create an Afghan liberal democracy.

Under four American presidents spanning two decades, that effort failed. Our foreign policy elites completely ignored or didn’t care that Muslim nations have their own model for governance: the Koran and Sharia law which they believe provide the divine model for success in this world and the next.

The notion of freedom contradicts submission to Allah’s laws. Some Afghans embraced political and economic change, but the pious majority saw American efforts as an affront to Islam and their cultural mores and traditions.

Motivated by the same religious beliefs, the Palestinian Arabs will reject America’s two-state dream.

It was George W. Bush who spearheaded this unrealistic vision in his “Roadmap for Peace”— a democratic Palestinian state living peacefully alongside Israel. Yes, the same President Bush who believed that tribal, Islamic Afghans were yearning for democracy.

In 2013, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry attempted to convince former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that America’s effort to train an Afghan army able to resist terrorists like the Taliban and al-Qaeda could be a model for preventing a Palestinian state from becoming a terror enclave. And we know how that turned out.

Netanyahu wrote on Facebook: “We will get an identical result if … we give parts of our homeland to the Palestinians. The Palestinians will … establish a terror state…a short distance from Ben-Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv … and Netanya.”

A terror entity already exists in the Gaza Strip where Israel relinquished control in 2005. Gaza, with about 2 million Palestinian Arabs, is totally controlled by Hamas (aka the Islamic Resistance Movement).

This U.S.-designated terror group quickly congratulated the Taliban for its victory over America, calling it a 20-year jihad.

Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party, which oversees more than 2 million Arabs in the West Bank, are the two factions vying to rule Palestinians since 2007. This is an unstable political situation.

The sole reason Abbas is still president of the Palestinian Authority is that there has been no Palestinian election since 2006.

Were elections held today, a majority of Palestinians would vote for Hamas and Abbas critic Marwan Barghouti, now serving five life terms in an Israeli prison for his role in murdering five Israelis.

Hamas has used rocket attacks and border violence to harass and kill Israeli civilians. It remains committed to its Islamist Covenant: “Palestine, which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west (including all of Israel proper) … is … an Arab Islamic land. … The establishment of ‘Israel’ is entirely illegal … contravenes the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and goes against their will and the will of the Ummah (Islamic religious community).”

Hamas believes it’s the duty of the Islamic Ummah to liberate all of Palestine, including the state of Israel, to establish an Islamic emirate similar to the new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, just created by the Taliban.

“Very soon, Allah willing, we will be standing in the courtyards of the Al-Aqsa Mosque (Jerusalem) as liberators,” declared Yahya Sinwar, Gaza’s Hamas leader, in June.

For decades, Palestinian Arabs have listened to their leadership preach that all of Israel is “occupied Palestine.” They have heard President Abbas justify inciting violence in Jerusalem as a “ribat” (i.e., religious conflict over land claimed to be Islamic).

Their children have been indoctrinated to hate Jews and encouraged to become martyrs by killing Israelis.

An August 25 poll indicates that a majority of West Bank Palestinians believe that Israel has no right to exist and should be replaced with a Palestinian state, an endorsement of the Hamas Covenant. Sixty percent oppose a “two-state solution.”

Accepting Zionism, the Jewish claim to self-determination in their historical homeland, undermines their doctrinal belief that Islam is the only true religion and will dominate the world. And they are willing to wait, believing Allah will provide.

In the meantime, they will continue to pocket money from American taxpayers and other Western donors.

As the leader of the free world, the U.S. must critically examine the animating religious ideology of the Palestinians, without being fearful of offending or succumbing to demagogic charges of Islamophobia.

Biden made U.S. national security contingent on the Taliban's ability to act like a "normal" government and is trying to make Israel’s national security contingent on the Palestinians’ ability to govern themselves in Western fashion. The Biden administration simply ignores what the Palestinians and the Taliban tell us about themselves.

Hamas member Mahmoud Merdawi told Al-Monitor, “Hamas and the Taliban are Islamist movements. ... There is no doubt that we are looking forward to defeating Israel in Palestine, following the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan.”

In 2002, an unidentified senior White House advisor told journalist Ron Suskind, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." Twenty years and more than $2 trillion later, Afghanistan proved him wrong — just as Biden’s delusion of a democratic, peaceful Palestine will be proved wrong.