A new crisis threatened to undercut American efforts to revive the flat-lining peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians this evening, in the wake of comments made by Secretary of State John Kerry yesterday. In a closed door meeting reported by Josh Rogin of The Daily Beast, Kerry told members of the Trilaterial Commission that he worried that Israel could become “an apartheid state” if no two-state solution were found soon.
The comments come in the wake of recent weeks’ collapse of negotiations after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reneged on commitments to the West and Israel, first by unilaterally signing 15 international conventions ordinarily reserved to states (of which the PA is in violation of at least 11), and then by reaching a deal with the terror group Hamas over unification–a move that constitutes a material breach of the Oslo Accords and could well run afoul of U.S. laws governing PA funding. Previously the White House had called the PA moves “unhelpful.”
In a New York Times column in 2011, Richard Goldstone–a South African judge who headed up the Goldstone Commission that investigated IDF behavior in the 2009 Operation Cast Lead–rejected all use of the term “apartheid” to describe Israeli policies:
One particularly pernicious and enduring canard that is surfacing again is that Israel pursues ‘apartheid’ policies. It is an unfair and inaccurate slander against Israel, calculated to retard rather than advance peace negotiations.
And in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic in 2008, President Obama similarly rejected use of the term:
There’s no doubt that Israel and the Palestinians have tough issues to work out to get to the goal of two states living side by side in peace and security, but injecting a term like apartheid into the discussion doesn’t advance that goal. It’s emotionally loaded, historically inaccurate, and it’s not what I believe.
By late Monday, the comments–which seem to implicitly blame Israel for the collapse in talks–had drawn harsh criticism from across Washington. AIPAC called the comments “deeply troubling… offensive and inappropriate,” while the National Jewish Democratic Council expressed its “deep disappointment” and demanded that Kerry apologize. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) went as far as calling for Kerry’s resignation. Cruz told the Senate floor:
I was convinced that as Secretary of State John Kerry would place what he considered to be the wishes of the international community above the national security interests of the United States. I fear with these most-recent ill-chosen remarks, Secretary Kerry has proven those concerns well founded.
This is not the first time in recent weeks that Kerry has implied that Israel carried the majority of the blame for the failure of talks. Earlier in April he intimated that they may have collapsed as a result of Jerusalem’s decision to approve housing units in Jerusalem–forcing State Department officials to scramble to alter coverage of the remarks.