There is one thing that Palestine obsessives never seem obsessed with: the opinions of Palestinians. There’s no mystery here—asking what Palestinians believe exposes a fundamental problem with the liberal approach to the peace process, which is based on the belief that Palestinians are willing to live peacefully beside Israel.
Remember the neocons? Those promoters of democracy and human rights in foreign policy, adherents of Andrei Sakharov’s mantra that “a country that does not respect the rights of its own people will not respect the rights of its neighbors”? The neocons can criticize Trump today. Everyone else is posturing, and their hypocrisy is too annoying to go unnoticed.
Campus branches of the liberal group J Street have been helping anti-Israel activists gain support for student government resolutions calling for boycotts of Israel, according to a Washington Free Beacon review of BDS campaigns on college campuses during the recently concluded 2017-2018 school year.
Media coverage of Hamas’s attacks on the Israeli border have been, as usual, a dumpster fire of idiocy and ignorance. Hamas itself now admits that “50 of the 62 martyrs” were card-carrying terrorists. One of the heads of Hamas just boasted to an interviewer: “This is not peaceful resistance.” No facts or admissions will intrude on the media narrative, which is that Israel is diabolically slaughtering civilians because Israelis enjoy killing people.
President Trump appears set to announce the United States’ departure from the Iran nuclear deal, and thus the deal’s supporters are working hard doing something they are admittedly very good at: crafting narratives for the media and political class.
For the American left, the Iran nuclear deal is becoming the peace process—that is, a landmark foreign policy project of a Democratic president reflecting the most cherished liberal beliefs about the world, that is failing at great cost to millions of people yet whose failure cannot be admitted.
There was an unnoticed moment of old-school continental condescension from French President Macron yesterday regarding the nuclear deal with Iran:
On Saturday, Bernie Sanders observed Passover by shilling for Hamas.
On foreign policy, the isolationist right and the progressive left always manage to arrive at the same destination: withdrawal and isolation, ceding the world to its worst actors, ignoring small problems until they become large crises. Caroline Glick summed it up several years ago: “The far Left argues the U.S. should withdraw from world leadership because the U.S. is evil. And the far Right argues the U.S. should withdraw from world leadership because the world is evil.”
“I have received a number of letters from Palestinian academics,” Stephen Hawking said in his declaration of support for the BDS movement. “They are unanimous that I should respect the boycott. In view of this, I must withdraw from the conference.”
