Vice presidential hopeful Josh Shapiro spent last week tempering his Jewishness, walking back support for Israel to pacify the pro-Hamas wing of the Democratic Party. At this pace, the Pennsylvania governor is mere days from warning us that the future doesn’t belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.
Hey, Michigan isn’t going to win itself.
You can really learn a lot about a politician by watching who they choose to appease. The problem is that Shapiro, who is reportedly on the top of Kamala Harris’s veep list, has a record of supporting a liberal democratic ally in the Middle East rather than nihilistic theocrats — a problem for any Democratic Party hopeful these days.
Indeed, Shapiro’s opponents have uncovered a 30-year-old opinion piece headlined “Peace not possible,” written by the future governor of Pennsylvania when he was a 20-year-old student at the University of Rochester. None of us should have to answer for the things we believed at 20. The young Shapiro, though, happened to be correct.
In the column, Shapiro argues that no deal can stop the Israel-Palestinian conflict. “Palestinians will not coexist peacefully,” he observed. “They do not have the capabilities to establish their own homeland and make it successful even with the aid of Israel and the United States. They are too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.”
Shapiro’s view, which I’m told is “controversial,” has been rigorously and unfailingly confirmed over the past 30 years. It was as objectively true back in 1950s, before any “occupied territories” existed, as it was in 1990s, and as it is today.
Shapiro wrote his column — for which he’s now apologized — in 1993, during the first Intifada. This round of violence was sparked by the disastrous Oslo process — the “starkest strategic blunder in its history,” the historian Efraim Karsh bluntly put it — which rewarded the PLO for 30+ years of unremitting terrorism against Jewish people.
And no matter how badly every iteration of Oslo failed, no matter how devastating the results were for both Israelis and Palestinians, the “two-state solution” has atrophied into the favored panacea of the foreign policy establishment. The young Shapiro predicted it.
By the late 1990s, Bill Clinton would push Israel into offering virtually everything Palestinians demanded, including a new state. Yasser Arafat still rejected a deal. You can’t spend decades building a violent movement predicated on fanaticism, hate, revisionist history, and the promise of ruling from the river to sea and then simply stop.
Palestinians, incidentally, were negotiating with the Israeli left, not Likud or the boogeyman, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Clinton would later reveal that the final stage negotiations had not broken down over the land or Jerusalem — as most outlets had reported — but the Palestinian demand for a “right of return,” an unserious and insane proposition that would entail giving Israeli citizenship to all the offspring of the alleged first-generation of Palestinian refugees (likely around 6 million.)
Before there were any “open-air prisons” or “occupied territories,” there was terrorism and massacres of Jews. And, still, when offered a state in 1948, with the promise of self-determination, the Palestinians rejected it and attempted to annihilate the region’s Jews. The Palestinian refugee situation is of their own making.
Moreover, even if the Palestinian story weren’t largely a mythology, the right of return would mean the immediate destruction of Israel. There are around two million Arabs living in Israel, one of the most diverse nations in the world. Another 5 or 6 million would mean the end of the Middle East’s only democracy. There isn’t a single majority Arab democracy in the world. Why would Israel’s fate be any different?
Gaza is another example of Shapiro’s thesis coming true. In 2005, Palestinian were given autonomy over the Gaza Strip. The only way to make it happen was for the Israeli government to forcibly remove thousands of Israelis from their homes. Without military protection, Jews would be murdered.
American Jews bought the Palestinians advanced farm equipment and greenhouses which were immediate destroyed by mobs.
Israel was rewarded for handing Gaza to the Palestinians with endless terror for nearly two decades. When the world sends Gazans concrete, Hamas builds tunnels and military bases under hospitals and schools. When the world sends them necessities, Hamas smuggles in explosives and weapons from Iran. When Israel stops shipments, Palestinians tear down streetlight poles and digs up water pipes to make casements for rockets.
And after Hamas murdered, sexually tortured, and kidnapped over 1300 Israelis on Oct. 7, the American left again demanded that Palestinians be rewarded with a state. Instead of reiterating that there can be no peace with Palestinians until there is massive cultural reformation, Shapiro would rather sell out to the progressive mob.
Guess what? They’re never going to be placated.
