Thomas Nides, the American ambassador to Israel, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former just-about-everything John Kerry are all very sure of themselves, especially when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. More on these three can be found here: “The Biden Administration continues the willful blindness of its pre-Trump predecessors,” by Daled Amos, Elder of Ziyon, January 15, 2023:
On January 4, Hamodia posted an interview with Thomas Nides, the US Ambassador to Israel, an interview initially conducted via Zoom during Chanukah. Nides makes a point of emphasizing US support for Israel and for its security while talking about US support for Palestinian Arabs as well.
As Nides puts it, “I fundamentally believe that if we give hope and opportunity to the Palestinian people, that will hopefully over time benefit the State of Israel, limit the amount of terrorist attacks, and keep this place a strong democratic Jewish state.”
When last month’s interview by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research is brought up, showing that 72% of Palestinian Arabs support the creation of new terrorist groups like Lion’s Den, Nides does not skip a beat:
“I firmly believe, and you might disagree with me, but the vast, vast majority among the average Palestinians doesn’t wake up in the morning wanting to kill someone who happens to be Jewish. They want to live just like you and I do.
“[We need to do everything we can] regarding the small percentage of people who exist who do want to harm Israel… [emphasis added]
Thomas Nides likes to assert, rather than to present evidence: “I fundamentally believe” and “I firmly believe,” and thus and so. His assertion – the one that he so firmly and fundamentally believes – is that the “vast, vast majority among the average Palestinians” don’t wake up wanting to kill someone who happens to be Jewish.” But all the evidence we have suggests quite the opposite. In every opinion poll, those “average Palestinians” express support for terrorism, whether from Hamas or Hezbollah or Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade; they celebrate and honor their “martyrs” – those who die while killing Jews. When confronted with unpleasant facts, such as the results of a new opinion poll in which 72% of Palestinian Arabs declare their ardent wish that still more terrorist groups emerge – such as the murderous “young bloods” of the Lions’ Den group – Ambassador Nides blithely ignores the evidence. Instead, he simply repeats his insistence that the “vast, vast majority” of Palestinians want peace. Being an ambassador, and before that a well-heeled investment banker, means you need never apologize, never explain.
When he says that we need only give “hope and opportunity” to the Palestinian people, and then all manner of things shall be well, including their placing a ”limit” (but apparently not halting entirely) on their terrorism, one must remind him of all the opportunities the Palestinians have been given, and spurned. Think of the 3,000 greenhouses in Gaza that the Israelis had used to build a flourishing fruit-and-flower export business, and then turned over as a turnkey operation to the Palestinians when they left Gaza in 2005, hoping the Arabs would continue the business. And what did the Palestinians do? They vandalized and destroyed all the greenhouses, ripped out the copper tubing and made off with it. That was the end of that major business opportunity. And think of the offers for peace made by Israel to the Palestinians, with generous territorial concessions, offered, first in 2000, when Yasser Arafat turned down Ehud Barak, and then in 2008, when Mahmoud Abbas turned down Ehud Olmert. In its 2008 offer, Israel was prepared to give up some 95% of the West Bank, as well as, in compensation for the 5% of the West Bank Israel wanted to keep, giving the Palestinians part of Israel proper, and in addition, put Jerusalem under international control. Abbas did not even bother to reply; he simply walked out. Palestinians, like other Arabs, as Abba Eban famously said, “never miss an opportunity to. miss an opportunity.”
The Israelis have tried repeatedly to help the Palestinian economy. Their efforts get almost no publicity in the international media. They lent the P.A. $800 million USD in 2021 to help it survive a financial crisis. This was not reciprocated in any way; the P.A. continued its diplomatic, legal, and propaganda war against Israel at the U.N. And it continued to pay out large sums to imprisoned terrorists and the families of terrorists killed while murdering Israelis, in its “Pay-for-Slay” program, that both rewarded past, and incentivized future, acts of terrorism. Finally, Israel has distributed more work permits to Palestinians in the last year, raising the number working in Israel to 17,000 Palestinians from Gaza and 100,000 Palestinians from the West Bank. They are paid Israeli wages, which are several times what they could earn in Gaza or the PA-ruled parts of the West Bank. That too has not done anything to dampen the Palestinians’ enmity toward Israel. Nides never mentions this increase in work permits,, and the other ways that Israel has tried to help the Palestinians.
The Bidenites have adopted a pro-Palestinian policy that is based on the belief in the existence of a great many peace-loving Palestinian Arabs – but their existence is not proven, and the assertion is contradicted by all the evidence we have of overwhelming Palestinian support for continued terrorism.
The administration can’t give the Palestinians hundreds of millions of dollars every year if it believes they support terrorism. It can’t advocate giving them a sovereign state along Israel’s old nine-mile-wide borders if it believes that they support terrorism.
So, the Biden administration has its party line, and Ambassador Nides’s job is to stick to it and articulate it as best as he can. Maybe he even believes it. Maybe he really thinks, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the “vast, vast majority” of Palestinians oppose terrorism.
When Nides assures his interviewer that he is not an ideologue, he might not realize that there is a degree of bias.
Condoleezza Rice, a former Secretary of State in the George W. Bush administration, had a similar problem.
In 2006, Rice was interviewed by Cal Thomas, who asked her about prospects for Middle East peace, specifically, “what evidence do you have out there that if they had an independent state that they would lay down their arms and not complete the mission of killing the Jews and throwing them out?”
Rice responded:
“Well, you can look at any opinion poll in the Palestinian territories and 70 percent of the people will say they’re perfectly ready to live side by side with Israel because they just want to live in peace. And when it comes right down to it, yeah, there are plenty of extremists in the Palestinian territories who are not going to be easily dealt with. They have to be dealt with — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories — they’re terrorists and they have to be dealt with as terrorists.
“But the great majority of Palestinian people — this is — I’ve been with these people. The great majority of people, they just want a better life.
This is absurd. Did Condoleezza Rice not consider that “these people” — Palestinian big shots — would have presented themselves to her as peace-loving, eager to pretend to her that they only “wanted a better life”; the no-one-here-but-us-accountants Mahmoud Abbas would certainly have told her so; he’s a dab hand at putting on a “moderate” mien for gullible Americans. And clearly, Condi Rice is gullible.
She did not point to any polls that backed up her claim. Writing in The Washington Times, Joel Mowbray criticized Rice’s assertion, noting then too that polls of Palestinian Arabs indicated that a majority supported suicide bombings.
When Rice says that “70 percent” of the Palestinians say “they are ready to live side-by-side with Israel,” she is hallucinating, or lying, or both. There are no polls that suggest more than a handful of Palestinians would ever accept living in permanent peace with Israel. Some members of the “moderate” PA are willing to live, as a first step toward Israel’s ultimate disappearance, side-by-side with an Israel squeezed back within the 1949 armistice lines, with a nine-mile-wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea. But the ultimate goal of these “slow Jihadis” of the PA is the same as the goal of the “fast Jihadis” of Hamas – the destruction of the Jewish state. The “moderates” simply want to undertake that task in stages.
Condoleezza Rice simply chose to ignore — or was she unaware of? — the dismaying fact that every opinion poll of the Palestinians reveals their deep and inexhaustible animus toward the Jewish state.
That same month, Rice gave the keynote address at the American Task Force on Palestine Inaugural Gala, where she defended the US support for including Hamas in the Palestinian elections. Here is some of what she said:
“And now look at how things are changing. For decades, Hamas dwelled in the shadows, able to hijack the future of all Palestinians at will, without ever having to answer for its actions. Today, however, the Palestinian people and the international community can hold Hamas accountable. And Hamas now faces a hard choice that it has always sought to avoid: Either you are a peaceful political party, or a violent terrorist group – but you cannot be both.”
Hamas hasn’t “hijacked” the Palestinians against their will. Hamas is popular, both in Gaza, and among those Palestinians in the West Bank who are fed up with the corruption and mismanagement of Mahmoud Abbas; if an election were held today in the West Bank, a Hamas candidate would soundly defeat Mahmoud Abbas. Despite Rice’s claim, the “Palestinian people” are not holding Hamas “accountable,” but instead are supporting its terrorist activities. A majority of Palestinians have told pollsters that they support suicide bombings, a trademark of Hamas. Nor is the “international community”(i.e., the U.N.) doing anything to restrain Hamas in Gaza; it is Israel, not Hamas, that is perennially in the dock at the kangaroo court of the U.N.
In fact, as we have seen, Hamas did make a choice, and has found that it could continue to be a terrorist group not only without being held accountable, but also gaining traction with progressives in the West.
It is not just a question of staying dedicated to the idea of a two-state solution, come what may. The insistence on supporting the idea of a Palestinian state requires a particular mindset about how receptive Palestinian Arabs are to peace — a mindset that flies in the face of reality.
Yet the experts seem to believe that this approach is the only game in town.
If the Palestinians do not want peace with Israel – except, for some, merely as a way station leading to Israel’s ultimate destruction – then there is no point in supporting a Palestinian state. So those who insist that there must be a Palestinian state – such people as Thomas Nides and Condoleezza Rice – have to believe that the Palestinians, despite all the evidence to the contrary (evidence they simply refuse to accept), do want a real and permanent peace. They declare, they claim, they insist on how very many Palestinians want peace but never do they come to grips with all those opinion polls that tell a different story.
Another example of being blinded by the prevalent ideology is of course John Kerry, who with great satisfaction assured his audience in 2016 that there could not be peace between Israel and the Arab world until there was first peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.
The complete and total dedication to the understanding of the Middle East that Kerry articulated postponed what became known as the Abraham Accords, when Trump and those other “amateurs” had the opportunity to try what the experts laughed at.
On YouTube you can see the famous 2016 video of John Kerry insisting that there was NO possibility of any Arab state – beyond Jordan and Egypt, with their “cold peaces” — making peace with Israel, until the Palestinians had been given their state. Of this he was absolutely certain: NO, it will never happen, NO, NO, NO,NO. And about this he was absolutely wrong – see the Abraham Accords, signed in 2020, in which Israel was joined by the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.
These three – Ambassador Thomas Nides and former Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and John Kerry – have given ample evidence of their miscomprehension of the Palestinians, but they are hardly alone. All of the chief Bidenites, including Biden himself, Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Hady Amr, and others, claim to be convinced that the Palestinian “moderates” will prevail, if only Israel were to show a willingness to compromise. Israel has been trying to compromise with the Palestinians and other Arabs for the last 75 years. Bidenites, give it a rest.
Jim J Fox says
Where can I access the opinion polls you mention, please?