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Israel's New Government Prompts Hysterical Reaction

(Commentary) Elliott Abrams - What explains the hysterical reaction to the victory of Israel's new coalition government in the elections held there in November 2022? This led President Isaac Herzog to tell them to cool it. Herzog, himself the leader of the opposition to Netanyahu from 2013 to 2018, said, "Israeli democracy is long-standing and stable. The world of values of Israeli society is not easy to challenge." Most Israelis have accepted that the old thinking about the "two-state solution" is dead. It was ended by decades of Palestinian refusal to make peace with Israel - after Arafat's refusal to accept Ehud Barak's peace offer in 2000, Abbas' refusal to accept the even more generous offer from Ehud Olmert in 2008, and Abbas' refusal even to give an answer to President Obama's peace proposals. It was also ended by the intifadas - by Palestinian terrorism. No one has a serious answer to the question of how Hamas and other terrorists would be kept from power in the West Bank if the IDF withdrew in favor of "Palestinian statehood." Until that question can be answered, a sovereign Palestinian state is an unacceptable danger to Israel - and to Jordan as well. The Jewish state that actually exists still struggles each day against enemies who seek every day to kill Jews. As Israel's president reminded Israelis recently: "We have only one State of Israel." To slander and disparage it, to speak wildly and carelessly when every word spoken may become a weapon in the hands of Israel's enemies, is a sin. The writer, former Senior Director on the U.S. National Security Council for the Near East, is chairman of the Tikvah Fund and a board member of the Jewish People Policy Institute and the Israel Democracy Institute.
2023-01-26 00:00:00
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