The Only Thing Kerry Didn't Say Was 'Apartheid'

"Kerry's was a fiery critique, ... marked by the allegation that the settlement movement is driving the agenda of the Israeli government, and that Netanyahu has been allowing some of the most extreme voices to draw Israel closer to the Zionist nightmare of a single bi-national state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Just about the only charge Kerry didn't lob, this time, was apartheid.

But the secretary and his president long ago lost much of the Israeli public, even many of the settlement critics, by underestimating the depth of Palestinian opposition to the very fact of the Jewish state's existence. The president and his secretary have underestimated, too, the consequent scarring - physical and psychological - that the Israeli public has accumulated over decades of war, terrorism, and demonization as the Palestinians and those who championed their cause have sought Israel's obliteration

Kerry mouthed words on Wednesday about the Arab world in the late 1940s rejecting the revival of the Jewish state, and going to war against it. He said out loud that Israel had to fight for its survival again in 1967. He mentioned terrorism and incitement. But the Obama administration never truly internalized the impact of these endless decades fighting off attempted destruction. And Kerry has self-evidently never been willing to internalize that in the vicious Middle East of the past few years, talking up the possibility of relinquishing control over adjacent West Bank history - with its recent history of suicide bomb factories, with Hamas angling to take control, with a hostile Iran emboldened to the east by the Obama Administration's own nuclear deal - is just that for most Israelis: talk.

We left south Lebanon. Hezbollah took over. We left Gaza. Now it's ruled by Hamas.

When the secretary expresses his 'total confidence' that Israel's security requirements in the West Bank can be met via sophisticated multi-layered border defenses and such, he quite simply loses Israel..."