KNOWLES: Israel, Palestine, And The Definition of Insanity

Years of relative peace in the Middle East went up in flames this week when Hamas, the Islamic terror group elected to represent Palestinian Arabs in 2006, fired rockets into Tel Aviv. Israel retaliated by killing two Hamas intelligence leaders. The violence does not show any signs of stopping. And to think, things had been going so well.

On August 13 of last year, Israel and the United Arab Emirates signed onto the Abraham Accords, the first public normalization of relations between an Arab state and Israel since statements made by Jordan in 1994 and Egypt in 1979. The Trump administration negotiated the deal, which was signed on the South Lawn of the White House. Bahrain signed onto the agreement less than a month later.

President Trump managed to double the number of Arab states that recognized Israel by pursuing a different strategy than his predecessors. For decades, the foreign policy establishment had considered Palestinian Arabs the key to peace in Israel. As recently as 2016, then-Secretary of State John Kerry insisted, “I can tell you that, reaffirmed within the last week because I’ve talked to the leaders of the Arab community, there will be no advanced and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace. Everybody needs to understand that. That is a hard reality.”

Then along came Donald Trump, who ignored “the Palestinians” and their national pretenses entirely. He dealt directly with the actual nation-states of the region, and the strategy worked. Kerry, it appears, did not understand the art of the deal. And Trump’s divergence from the foreign policy establishment extended beyond Israel to statecraft more broadly. While Kerry and his fellow establishmentarians sought peace by placating our enemies, Trump chose instead to defend our allies and punish our enemies.

In 2016, Kerry responded to the Iranian seizure of two U.S. naval vessels with groveling and pallets of cash for the mullahs. In 2020, President Trump responded to an Iran-backed attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad by killing Iran’s top general, Qasem Soleimani. Despite warnings from the establishment liberals that the assassination of Soleimani would set off World War III, Iran declined to mount any meaningful retaliatory attack. The mullahs had gotten the message, and Trump had achieved peace through strength.

As the novelist Rita Mae Brown observed in a line widely misattributed to Albert Einstein, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” President Biden has decided to return to the old foreign policy that failed for decades in the Middle East. Expect more explosions.

The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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