Israelis are nearly unanimous in their determination to destroy Hamas — a dramatic shift in attitudes since the October 7 terror attack, when Israelis were largely prepared to ignore Hamas as long as it did not attack them. The mass murder of 1,200 people, along with the abduction of 253 more, mostly civilians, changed attitudes in Israel across the political spectrum.
Many left-wing Israelis who once considered themselves “more Palestinian than the Palestinians”
now
see all Palestinians as a potential threat.
According to
Gallup
, nearly two-thirds of Israelis now oppose a Palestinian state, given what Hamas did to them, and to Gaza — and given the pro-terror sympathies of the corrupt Palestinian Authority, which governs most Palestinians in the West Bank.
That is a radical reversal from the position of most Israelis just a decade ago, when “twice as many Israeli adults supported an independent Palestinian state (61%) as opposed one (30%).” Hamas’s rocket and terror attacks are responsible for the change.
Blinken and President Joe Biden are
committed
to the old, failed model of Middle East peacemaking, in which the Palestinian issue must precede all others. President Donald Trump rejected that idea — and the result was the historic Abraham Accords.
Now, Biden and Blinken are trying to make new peace agreements — such as a Saudi-Israeli peace deal — contingent on the creation of a Palestinian state. And Blinken is
casting
Israelis as if they are not ready for peace, in contrast to the Arab world.
That is a total inversion of the truth, according to opinion polls, which suggest that the vast
majority
of Palestinians support Hamas’s terror attack of October 7. Arab public opinion is similar, though the Abraham Accords have remained intact so far.
NBC News also reports that Blinken is pushing a deal in which Saudi Arabia would agree to normalized relations with Israel in return for a Palestinian state. Ironically, Saudi Arabia was on the
verge
of a deal without a Palestinian state before October 7.
It was the Biden administration, according to one report, that actually stalled that deal by insisting on additional concessions to the Palestinians — concessions that the Saudis did not demand and for which the Palestinians did not agree to any compromises.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of
Breitbart News Sunday
on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the 2021 e-book, “
The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it)
,” now updated with a new foreword. He is also the author of the recent e-book,
Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election
. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at
@joelpollak
.