With the help of a supportive administration, it is to be hoped that the complete defeat of Hamas will still be achieved
To be sure, perfidy on that level struck me as somewhat unbelievable, but not totally implausible. Fortunately, the rumor turned out to be wrong. But the reasons that it was not beyond the realm of imagination are worth exploring.
For one thing, the departing Obama administration did something almost identical, less than a month before Trump’s inauguration in 2017. UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which the US did not veto, demanded an end to all Israeli construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and further instructed all states to distinguish in their relations between the territory of the State of Israel and territories occupied since 1967. In short, all the new neighborhoods of Jerusalem, built since 1967, in which close to half a million Jews dwell, the Kosel Plaza, and the Temple Mount became, according to the UN, occupied territories.
Second, the Biden administration had long been obsessed with the creation of a Palestinian state, the north star of American Middle East policy for half a century.
DAVID WURMSER, a former senior advisor to Vice President Cheney and National Security Advisor John Bolton, in “How Trump Can Avoid Transition Traps Set by Biden,” sets forth the twin pillars of President Obama’s Middle East policy, which came to define the Biden administration as well. The first was that Iran could be “moderated, integrated, and harnessed to provide regional stability.” The second, that regional instability is primarily driven by the lack of a Palestinian state.
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