Why Kerry Failed in the Middle East

April 29 should have been the last good date for concluding an agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. Twenty-four hours have already gone by since this deadline, and the only agreement that has been signed in the Middle East is between the two Palestinian parties, Fatah and Hamas, aiming to create a unified front against Israel. Not only has the situation not gotten any better, but it has actually gotten worse. While Barack Obama is still in East Asia, John Kerry, his secretary of state and a former presidential candidate in 2004, is left to mediate the failed negotiations. Upon receiving confirmation that the dialogue he had launched himself in Amman in 2013 had failed, the Democratic secretary found nothing better to say than something full of offensive pessimism:

“A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens — or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state.”

Showing the sensitivity of a bull in a china shop, he said this precisely during the commemoration of the Shoah victims. The backlash was immediate: protests from Netanyahu’s government and the Republican Party, as well as an increase Jewish and pro-Israel public opinion in the U.S., which is almost entirely made up of Democratic voters —a disaster on all fronts.

Yesterday, faced with a flurry of criticisms, John Kerry apologized publicly, stating, “If I could rewind the tape, I would have chosen a different word.”

Most likely, Democratic voters in the U.S. will be satisfied with this apology and keep voting for him. But on second glance, this is not an apology because certainly, it’s not just the single word “apartheid,” but also his reasoning [that is problematic]. To sum it up in just a few words, for Kerry, the only problem is Israel. Another gaffe on his part confirms this trend: When the negotiations were still going on, in that moment when he stated that in case of their failure, he would not have been able to fight back an international boycott of Israel. It was a veiled threat, kind of like when a boss “suggests” that you do what he says, or he will not guarantee victim’s safety. And that is how it was understood in Israel.

We can well deduce how American progressives see the crisis in the Middle East from this way of thinking. According to this analysis, coexistence under a democratic Israeli state is impossible. The Jewish state and the Arab-Palestinian state should be separate, not because there exists an ethnic hostility between the two peoples, but because the Israelis, at a certain point in their history — the Six Day War of 1967 — occupied the Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza Strip. For Democrats, this is the origin of the evil. This is the same perception that has characterized some of the talks between Obama and Netanyahu: as in 2011, when President Obama said — just a few hours before his guest arrived in Washington — that to resolve the problem, Israel would have to retreat back to its pre-1967 borders. It’s clear that if the original sin is the 1967 occupation, if the Israeli victory in the Six Day War is the problem, then the solution is the Israeli retreat. According to Kerry, Israel’s failure to retreat would lead to the segregation — apartheid — of the Arabs living in the occupied territories, or to an Arab revenge against Israelis.

The Israelis however see their story from a slightly different perspective. And they are not at all mistaken. First of all, they remember why the Six Day War broke out. Syria, Jordan and Egypt — and other foreign allies, including Iraq — all tried to destroy Israel, to invade it and break it up. Israel had the ability to prevent them and defeat them before it was too late. The Six Day War was neither the first nor last conflict the Jewish state engaged in for its survival. It had already risked extinction between 1947 and 1948, and again upon its invasion in 1973. Only Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons (although never declared) prevented the Arab states from making additional attempts, but not from providing arms and funds to local guerrillas coordinated by armed Palestinian movements. The Islamic jihadi ideology largely displaced the Arab nationalist one, but the aim of destroying Israel remains explicit, written in black and white in the position of both Palestinian movements.

And nothing changed when the leader of Fatah, none other President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority declared that the Shoah is the “the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era.”

His party’s program has not changed. The Palestinian movements have simply accepted the intermediary phase of territorial division: the West Bank and Gaza under an independent authority and the rest with Israel. But the final aim remains a unified Palestine, Arab and Islamic, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean, from Eilat to the border with Lebanon, from Tel Aviv to the border with Jordan.

So, is the problem is the Israeli occupation? Or, rather is it the program of the armed Palestinian movements? And to face up to the latter threat — responsible for thousands of attacks on defenseless civilians — the Israelis have adopted extraordinary security measures, including the construction of a defensive barrier, or “wall.” But we are dealing with security, not segregation. There is no trace of apartheid toward the Arabs living in Israel. There is no discrimination toward the Palestinian Arabs — those living in the territories — who can take advantage of services paid for by Israeli taxpayers. There is now, more than anything, a difficult attempt to divide powers among the territories the Palestinian authority controls, those Jerusalem controls, and those with mixed administrations. But there is no ethnic or religious segregation. Even in the event of the permanent continuation of a status quo without agreed upon borders, there would not be racial segregation: The Israeli parties that would want this do not exert much influence, and the opposition is very strong.

If, on the other hand, it were necessary to achieve unification of the entire country under a Palestinian authority, there would no longer be a place for the Jews. The proof is in the continued attacks on the Israeli settlements — what Kerry considers the biggest obstacle to peace — located on Palestinian land: Jewish islands surrounded by a sea of hostility. It’s in one of these settlements in Hebron that an entire Israeli family was attacked with an assault rifle last April 14 — the father, a policeman, died; his wife and children were seriously wounded. It was the episode that gave rise to the last crisis before the negotiations failed. In contrast, the Arabs living on Israeli land, in the middle of the Jews, are not victims of attacks.

Since last week, Hamas and Fatah are officially allies. Both, as we have seen, share the ultimate objective of dissolving Israel, which really means — in plain English — chasing the Jewish people out of the Middle East. Instead of demonstrating decisive solidarity toward a threatened ally, Kerry thought it was a good idea to accuse it of racism. And the Israelis still have to accept him as a mediator in the negotiations?