AIPAC's embrace of two states a major blunder

AIPAC Executive Director Howard Kohr did Israel no favors when he publicly called for a two-state “solution” at the recent AIPAC policy conference in Washington. The current U.S. and Israeli governments have offered little support for this idea, and if anything, they’re moving further away from it. And AIPAC doesn’t have a history of staking out independent positions separate from those of the U.S. and Israel. So who was Kohr trying to please by his pronouncement? Evidently, his intent was to widen AIPAC’s appeal and increase its support among left-wing “progressives.” If so, he didn’t succeed and he cost AIPAC much of its credibility.

 

The two-state solution itself is a delusional fantasy promoted by people who refuse to accept reality. So long as the Palestinian Arabs continue to inculcate in their children an attitude of perpetual fury against Israel, and teach them to seek suicide martyrdom as their highest possible goal, there can never be a peaceful solution to the conflict, and Israel’s only options will remain victory or defeat. Any hint of weakness, such as willingness to surrender land for a peace that will never be delivered, simply emboldens Israel’s enemies and increases their intransigence. 

 

Kohr apparently thinks that the steady rise of left-wing hostility to Israel’s policies can be countered by sacrificing AIPAC’s principles and shifting its position on a question of fundamental importance. But it doesn’t help at all. It just makes AIPAC look unprincipled and opportunistic. What Israel needs from its supporters is a firm, consistent and unyielding adherence to core principles. Any progressive support for Israel is generally conditioned on its being a liberal secular democracy that supports all of the popular liberal causes, and in which religion is relegated to the margins and plays little or no role in policymaking. But Israel cannot succeed by spurning its religious heritage or replacing it with left-wing social theories that have failed everywhere they’ve been tried. 

 

People who deny outright the central tenets of Judaism, including God, the Torah and the Covenant, people who tell Israel in a seemingly friendly tone that its wisest course of action is to retreat from land it already controls and surrender that land to its mortal enemies, can never be relied on to be dependable allies of the Jewish nation, and it’s a major mistake to undermine one’s own positions in order to court them.