Antony Blinken, once America's top diplomat, has ventured into the quagmire of Middle East politics with a Wall Street Journal op-ed that attempts to thread an impossible needle. He insists that recognizing a Palestinian state is not a reward for Hamas's barbarism but a "rebuke" to it, a claim as idiotic as it is bewildering. Yet, in the same breath, he relegates this grand gesture to the back burner, behind the more pressing matters of freeing hostages, averting famine in Gaza, and ending the war.
"Israel long ago achieved two of its three stated objectives in Gaza," Blinken writes, nodding to the dismantling of Hamas's military machine and the elimination of those behind the October 7 massacre, a slaughter that needs no recapitulation for anyone with a pulse. But the third objective, the return of hostages, remains elusive. And here, Blinken takes aim at Benjamin Netanyahu's plan to occupy Gaza, arguing it will only prolong the conflict and deepen the misery on both sides.
Blinken's answer is a familiar diplomatic sleight of hand: dangle the carrot of Palestinian statehood, but only if it meets a laundry list of conditions.
Meanwhile, Blinken urges Israel to play nice: address Gaza's humanitarian crisis, halt settlement expansion in the West Bank, stop demolishing Palestinian homes [that Hamas has booby-trapped], and crack down on extremist violence. Oh, and support the reform of the Palestinian Authority, that creaking relic of Oslo, rather than undermining it.
The deeper problem with Blinken's vision, aside from the fact that he isn't the brightest bulb in the tool shed. is its refusal to grapple with the mutual delusions at play. "Israel cannot maintain the idea that Palestinians will tolerate being a 'non-people without national rights,'" he writes, and he's not wrong. The status quo is a pressure cooker. But then he adds, "Palestinians must understand that ideas of a state 'from the river to the sea' are unfeasible."
Blinken's op-ed, at best, is a study in well-meaning futility. He wants Arab states to rebuild Gaza and keep Hamas at bay, but only if there’s a "credible political path toward Palestinian self-determination."