Middle East talks collapsed in recent days, after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas publicly reunited with the terrorist group Hamas and triggered Israel’s exit from further negotiations.
Critics of U.S. policy are also furious at Secretary of State John Kerry for suggesting that Israel’s failure to embrace a two-state solution with the Palestinians could leave the only Middle East democracy branded as “an apartheid state”. The Daily Beast reports Kerry made the comments in a closed door meeting with “influential world leaders.”
The term immediately takes listeners to the decades-long policy of racial separation and inequality in South Africa. The understood implication in Kerry’s comments is that Palestinians living in disputed territories controlled by Israel would suffer from prejudice, persecution and inequality if a two-state solution is not achieved.
Dr. Mike Evans is a Middle East expert and a longtime personal friend of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He says the U.S. and the Palestinians are demanding that Israel made concessions in the full knowledge that the Palestinians want to exterminate them.
“What this is about is terror strategy. It works like this. ‘Israel, you give us what we want or we kill you. We’ll kill you.’ Therefore, (Abbas is) going back to full-blown terror. They’ve done it many times before and they’re doing it again,” said Evans.
“So what does John Kerry do? Instead of condemning them, he goes after Israel. ‘Israel, what’s wrong with you? Geez, just because they want to kill you and on the week of the Holocaust Memorial they want to blow you up,'” he said.
“John Kerry needs to apologize to the state of Israel. Here’s a democracy that Arabs live in very happily, better than anywhere in the Muslim world, because they won’t embrace a terror state and people want to destroy them. John Kerry now calls them an apartheid state. He needs to go back to school. He doesn’t even know the meaning of the word apartheid. That’s nuts. Israel has never been an apartheid state. It’s not an apartheid state, and you sure don’t chastise the state of Israel because they don’t want to get into bed with terrorists,” said Evans, who says Kerry’s philosophy suggests evil should never be confronted.
“If you’re going to go with that logic, you might as well apologize to Osama bin Laden’s family. What did you kill him for? What are you some kind of apartheid state? The guy just wanted something. Couldn’t you negotiate with him?” mused Evans.
“John Kerry has lost his mind. He has damaged American foreign policy worldwide with one swift stroke of his tongue. It’s unbelievable that he would be so shameful to say what he said,” said Evans, who says the damage done by Kerry’s comments extend far beyond the Middle East.
“He sent a signal to all the bad actors. He sent it to Putin in Russia. He sent it to Iran. He sent it to North Korea. He sent it to Syria and Al Qaeda. ‘We’re afraid. We’re weak. Come after us. It’s insane, It’s completely outrageous,'” said Evans.
According to Evans, the Obama administration is aggravated that Netanyahu sees the Middle East impasse in black and white terms and not in the nuanced shades of gray that Obama, Kerry and other liberal academics prefer. He also wonders how Israel can be expected to trust anyone affiliated with Hamas, which denies the Nazi Holocaust but openly calls for a Jewish holocaust in Israel. Evans also rejects Abbas as any sort of moderate, saying the Palestinian leader has decades-long ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization and even played a financial role behind the terrorist attacks against Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Germany.
So with Middle East talks breaking down and the U.S. and others placing the lion’s share of the blame for that upon Israel, what can we expect in the near future?
“Terror with a big ‘T’. Al Qaeda is embedded in Hamas, so now what did they just get? They just got a free ticket to Bethlehem and Jericho. They just got a free ticket to Ramallah. So Al Qaeda is going to start circling Israel big time. You’re going to have an acceleration of terror,” said Evans.
“Abbas has just played the terror card. And Kerry just played the (Neville) Chamberlain card. He basically told Hamas, ‘Oh, I understand. I feel your pain.’ He sided with terror against the state of Israel. So it’s going to accelerate terror. It’s going to accelerate it against Jews globally. It’s going to accelerate against the state of Israel,” said Evans.
“Thank you, John Kerry. Wonderful job you did going over there and kissing up to those terrorists. Once they pull out their swords and their guns, then you side with them against the only democracy in the Middle East. Wonderful. Lovely,” he said.
