Kerry spoke the truth on Israel and Palestine

John Kerry will be stepping into retirement from government service after decades serving his country in a variety of capacities — as a soldier in Vietnam, an anti-Vietnam War activist stateside, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts and as secretary of State. Whether or not you like his brand of diplomacy or his perpetual sense of optimism in impossible situations, nobody can take away Kerry’s stamina, his boundless energy or his firm belief in the power of what diplomacy can accomplish.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the dispute in the Holy Land that not only goes on but seems to get worse with each passing year, is the international crisis that got away from him. Lord knows Kerry has tried to solve it; as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he offered himself as a back-channel to both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in order to determine whether peace talks could get going again.

He plunged full-steam ahead into the conflict immediately after he was confirmed as secretary of State; indeed, at the time, people thought that Kerry was the only reason why the nine-month peace process between the Israeli and Palestinian delegations lasted so long. In the end, however, Kerry’s acumen wasn’t enough — the Israelis slow-walked the release of Palestinian prisoners that they agreed to as a confidence-building measure, Abbas negotiated a unity government with Hamas and both sides walked away more bitter than they ever were before.

{mosads}So Kerry’s hour-long speech on Wednesday about the state of the Mideast conflict and the storm that Israeli and Palestinian leaders are barreling toward was not only appropriate, but absolutely necessary.

But the fact that Netanyahu was livid at Kerry devoting most of his address to the issue of settlement building leaves no love lost between the two. “Maybe he doesn’t realize it,” Netanyahu fumed, “but Israel is only place in the Middle East where Christians can celebrate Christmas. All of this doesn’t interest the U.S. secretary of State, unfortunately.”

Republicans and some Democrats on Capitol Hill were also viscerally angry that Kerry would call out and embarrass a major ally in public the way he did, leading Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to release a scathing statement that essentially blasted the secretary of State as an enemy of freedom.

And yet none of the critics seemed to dispute the substance of what Kerry was saying, perhaps because nothing that he said is overly controversial. In fact, Kerry’s entire address was based on longstanding U.S. policy since 1967: Israeli settlement construction on Palestinian land is a death sentence to the two-state solution, Palestinian glorification of terrorist attacks is a cancer that will kill any openness that Israel has left for a diplomatic process with Ramallah and the status quo will inevitably force the Israelis to decide whether their Jewish character is more important than their democracy (or vice versa). To the settlement movement, destroying the two-state concept is the goal; for everybody else, it’s still an aspiration.

When Kerry says that “Israel has increasingly consolidated control over much of the West Bank for its own purposes,” who can argue to the contrary? We have facts to back that statement up: Martin Indyk, a two-time U.S. ambassador to Israel and Kerry’s special Mideast peace envoy, writes that the West Bank settlement population has increased by 100,000 during President Obama’s tenure, with 90,000 now living outside the major settlement blocs.

When Kerry claims that Palestinian development is off-limits in Area C of the West Bank, it really isn’t a claim at all but rather another fact; the Palestinian is largely centered in Areas A and B, which only comprise 40 percent of the West Bank’s territory.

And when the Secretary makes the case that Palestinian leadership in the Gaza Strip is more concerned with rebuilding their tunnel and terrorist infrastructure than on caring for the 1.8 million civilians in that area, all one has to do is ask the United Nations agencies and Israeli businesses responsible for distributing cement into the coastal strip and they’l tell you the same thing.

These are hard truths that have either been buried in the political noise or are ignored as events that are somehow inevitable. Kerry, however, was bold enough to say these things in public in the hope that the doomsday scenario that represents the one-state solution will scare people straight.

John Kerry ought to be applauded, not chastised. If we’ve learned anything over the past four years, it is that nothing will change in the Holy Land if inconvenient truths are swatted away as irrelevant.

Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a Middle East and foreign policy analyst at Wikistrat. He has written for The National Interest, Rare Politics, and The American Conservative. Follow him on Twitter @dandepetris.

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