“The question is should the Palestinians have a place to call their own? Yes, I have no problem with that. Should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That’s what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic,” he said. – Huckabee says 2 states in Holy Land ‘unrealistic’
First we had Rep. Eric Cantor, now it’s Mike Huckabee. The rapture, pro-settlement crowd is really on a roll. Using foreign soil to announce a separate foreign policy than the President.
But does Mr. Huckabee get that what he’s proposing is tantamount to ethnic cleansing? Eradicating all Arabs from Israel and moving them somewhere else. I wonder if King Abdullah of Jordan is paying attention, because what Huckabee is asserting as policy, as he sucks up to the 2012 crowd, is not only ridiculous, but dangerous. See Spencer Ackerman.
More about Huckabee’s visit:
Huckabee is being hosted by the Jerusalem Reclamation Project, a pro-settler group seeking to bolster the Jewish presence in traditionally Arab east Jerusalem, where Palestinians hope will serve as their future capital. Their activities, some of them funded by American millionaire Irving Moskowitz, are aimed at blocking the division of the city as part of any future peace deal.
Huckabee’s trip coming amidst a relentless assualt on Pres. Obama’s Middle East policy, the latest salvo landing on the op-ed pages of the New York Times this past Sunday: The Two-State Solution Doesn’t Solve Anything, written by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, the latter an assistant to Arab-Israeli affairs during Clinton’s second term.
It’s easy to wince at these stands. They run against the grain of a peace process whose central premise is that ending the occupation and establishing a viable Palestinian state will bring this matter to a close. But to recall the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian clash is not to invent a new battle line. It is to resurrect an old one that did not disappear simply because powerful parties acted for some time as if it had ceased to exist.
… .. For years, virtually all attention has been focused on the question of a future Palestinian state, its borders and powers. As Israelis make plain by talking about the imperative of a Jewish state, and as Palestinians highlight when they evoke the refugees’ rights, the heart of the matter is not necessarily how to define a state of Palestine. It is, as in a sense it always has been, how to define the state of Israel.
Say what?
Also not sure how revisiting history will help, but it sure will make Huckabee-Cantor lobby happy, as it would plunge us all backwards, paralyzing progress, which has been slow going even for Obama’s team.
Stephen M. Walt talked with the authors, who first of all state that the Times headline was ill-advised. But the part in bold was a stunner to me, as it was to Walt.
But returning to Huckabee, beyond ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, I’d like him to tell us what equilibrium would look like without a two-state solution agreement.
Stephen Walt wrote about this months ago.
But these little Middle East excursions by Republicans, along with their shrill rhetoric, should put any “water’s edge” foreign policy talk to rest forever. Because the right has no trouble in taking on the President on foreign soil when what they should do is keep their mouths shut.
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