John Kerry Addresses the American Jewish Community Global Forum on Middle East Peace Prospects

Secretary of State John Kerry addressed the annual American Jewish Community Global Forum on Monday, June 3rd.  He focused on the limited time he believes the Palestinians and Israelis have to come up with a workable "two-state solution."

So I want to ask you this: Whenever you think about this challenge and how hard it is, think about what will happen if it doesn’t work. We will find ourselves in a negative spiral of responses and counter-responses that could literally slam the door on a two-state solution, having already agreed, I think, that there isn’t a one-state one. And the insidious campaign to de-legitimize Israel will only gain steam. Israel will be left to choose between being a Jewish state or a democratic state...

Personally, I believe the two-state solution is dead, and was probably never viable.  The "negative spiral" he cites is an ongoing death spiral of what might have been Democratic Israel, with equal rights for all its citizens.

The ultra-Orthodox are growing in numbers, population percentage and political power.  They do not want a two-state solution.  They want to expel the Palestinian Christians and Muslims, either across the Jordan into other countries, or onto increasingly smaller allotments, similar to the former South African Bantustans, or the kinds of Indian reservations one finds in upstate New York, or along the California coast.  So that they can have their ethnically cleansed, and - in their minds - pure Judea and Samaria.

Kerry paints the growing isolation of Israel and its few supporters glumly, without acknowledging why this is happening [emphasis added]:

So before anyone gives up on this hope, we have to ask whether we are prepared to live with permanent conflict, with the possibility of widespread civil disobedience, with the possibility of a civil rights movement that grows in the West Bank, with the possibility of another intifada always looming around the corner. If the parties don’t agree to come back to the table, the Palestinians have already said that they will go to the UN and seek to join more UN organizations, where, despite the best efforts of the United States, they will probably get more votes in their favor than they got last time. And last time, we only got nine votes against. And the Palestinians have also threatened to take their case to the International Criminal Court.

Why is "the possibility of a civil rights movement that grows in the West Bank" a bad thing, in the face of the continuing land confiscations, ghettoization, repression and random violence that Palestinians face daily?

Overall, it is an excellent speech.  However, it offers nothing imaginative regarding the dangerous impasse with Iran.  it is more than a bit too obsequious.  But it is no more of that than any typical speech about Israel by any leading American politician.



Discussion of the speech:

Mondoweiss

JTA

The Forward

Text of the speech