In the spring of ’77, President Jimmy Carter visited the town of Clinton, MA, and called for a ‘Palestinian’ state. Why did Carter choose a town of 15,000 at a town hall where most of the attendees were asking him questions about the economy to announce what would become the single longest running nation-building project in American history?
No one knows.
But almost 50 years, 7 presidents and countless billions of dollars later, there’s still no ‘Palestinian’ state. And we are still nation-building that terror state in the name of peace.
Even as America struggled through a recession, Carter traveled around insisting on the urgent need of “the Palestinians to have a homeland”. The ‘Palestinians’ repaid him by hijacking a German plane that included American passengers and holding them hostage in Somalia.
After futilely pleading with Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad to come to America, Carter finally met him in Switzerland, praised him as a “moderate leader” who had demonstrated “good will” and called for a “resolution of the Palestine problem and a homeland for the Palestinians.”
Carter nodded along while Assad made multiple antisemitic statements and then acknowledged that when it came to the ‘Palestinian’ issue, “I have not studied it.”
America was dragged into 48 years of disastrous ‘Palestinian’ nation building because Carter decided to call for a ‘Palestinian’ state, by his admission, without having studied the issue.
Why did Carter call for a ‘Palestinian’ state if he hadn’t even studied the issue? A year earlier, the Soviet Union and its Muslim and Communist allies, primarily Syria, had launched a major propaganda push that climaxed in a UN resolution (preceded by a bomb being planted at the UN) calling for a ‘two-state solution’ that was vetoed by the Ford administration.
Carter, knowing nothing, but eager to distinguish his foreign policy from Ford, played up to Syria and called for a ‘Palestinian’ homeland. Even though Carter knew nothing going in, he made that failed ‘nation building’ project into his defining legacy, until he eventually embraced Hamas.
(After being forced to leave office, Carter’s ties to the Pakistani BCCI bank which was also accused of aiding ‘Palestinian’ terrorism may have played a role in his growing radicalism.)
But bad ideas, no matter how poorly thought out, never go away, they just get passed around like a leaking ball from party to party.
In his second year in office, President Ronald Reagan delivered a baffling TV address announcing the ‘Reagan peace plan’ and claiming that “the military losses of the PLO have not diminished the yearning of the Palestinian people for a just solution of their claims”.
A few days later, Reagan awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Philip Habib, a Kissinger crony, the son of Lebanese immigrants who negotiated the PLO ‘ceasefire’ that resulted in a disastrous peacekeeping mission that would cost the lives of 220 Marines.
Habib had served as a useful catspaw for King Fahd of Saudi Arabia who used him to sideline American diplomats even as the Saudis allowed him to play ‘mediator’. Much like Qatar and Hamas today, the Saudis used the PLO to gain leverage over America and Israel.
Both Israel and the PLO rejected Reagan’s peace plan, and more hawkish members of the Reagan administration opposed it, but Carter and Ford praised it in a joint op-ed. The two former presidents had become ‘friends’ after visiting Egypt and urged Reagan “to commit every political resource” to the “tiring, bewildering, and even politically dangerous” task.
Wisely, Reagan did not listen to them and stake all his political resources to create a terror state. His vice president, George H.W. Bush, however proved less wise. And in his final year in office, with Reagan fading and some staffers actively undermining him, his secretary of state announced the Shultz Initiative. “The whole history of the Middle East shows that violence — terrorism, war — just has not worked,” he claimed. “It is negotiations that work.”
The history of his proposal would prove just the opposite.
After the Saudis and other Arab Muslim states dragged the United States into the Gulf War, the first Bush administration followed up with the Madrid Conference, which for the first time had the PLO running the ‘Palestinian’ side of the negotiations.
That led to the Oslo Accords under Bill Clinton and the creation of an ‘autonomous’ territory that, much like in the original Reagan proposal, wasn’t supposed to be a state, but would be anyway.
Contrary to Secretary of State Shultz’s claims, terrorism had worked quite well. And it worked so well that Yasser Arafat and the PLO saw no reason to stop. It worked so well that Hamas realized that if it killed enough people, it would overtake the PLO and dominate it.
And that too is happening.
Half a century after Carter reacted to a UN resolution by calling for a terrorist state, terrorism is worse than ever. The on and off peace negotiations involving the United States that led the world and the region to the current state of disaster have been taking place for 37 years.
And none of it has worked.
The first Bush and Clinton administrations tried legitimizing the PLO. The second Bush administration tried democracy leading to elections that Hamas won followed by the Hamas takeover of Gaza. The Obama administration tried negotiating a ceasefire with Hamas.
11 years later, the Trump administration presided over another ceasefire with Hamas.
After flying to Israel, Vice President J.D. Vance dismissed concerns about Hamas violating the ceasefire and claimed that “the way that we’re going to get to peace is to focus on the future” and achieve a “long-term, durable peace between Israel and Gaza” while Jared Kushner insisted that “everyone believes that it is possible to create something better in Gaza.”
Vance then finished by holding out for a “miracle”.
Searching for miracles or dreams of a beautiful future is how we got into nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for that matter in the West Bank and Gaza, it’s how seven administrations and now an eighth have been suckered into the same failed nation building project in an Islamic terrorist territory that for all the fantasies, dreams and cash has never produced peace.
And never will.
What none of the administrations understood was that the root cause wasn’t territory, it was Jihad. There was never a ‘Palestinian’ people. It was a marketing term invented by the USSR to legitimize the cause of its terrorists. The only cause there is not statehood, but the destruction of Israel in order to establish an Islamic state, not only over Israel, but around the world.
After a generation of fighting these same terrorists, who killed thousands of Americans on September 11, not because of land or statehood, but to create a global Islamic caliphate, our leaders still believe that what the Islamic terrorists want is a negotiated settlement.
Even though Hamas had named its attack ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ after the mosque in Jerusalem, making it abundantly clear that like Al Qaeda’s war on America, motivated by the alleged provocation of American troops too close to the sanctity of Mecca and Medina, this was a religious conflict and not amenable to any negotiations, peace plans or settlements.
Before we made the catastrophic mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq that cost us the lives of some of our best young men, we made that same mistake in the West Bank and Gaza.
And we’re still making it because we refuse to recognize the motivations of the enemy.
Nation building in the Muslim world cannot and will not work, no matter how many experts are put on the job, because the Islamic religion of the terrorists is not, as too many presidents have insisted on believing for 48 years, a mere technicality underneath which they are just like us and want the same things that we do. If that were so, peace would have been here a long time ago.
The issue is that we have very different definitions of such foundational concepts as “peace”, “nation” and “rights”, and in the Islamic lexicon these definitions fundamentally exclude a long term settlement based on any terms other than the submission of non-Muslims to Islam.
And that’s been our problem for the longest time.
George Washington, America’s first president, left with a weak hand by British pressure and Muslim piracy, initiated the ‘Treaty of Peace and Friendship’ signed by Adams which appeased by the Jihadist pirates by claiming that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen.”
The appeasement proved futile. The Muslim regime did not even bother recording this plea for tolerance. And Jefferson refused to continue appeasing pirates. When he asked why the violence continued, Jefferson was told that Islam “was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”
Jefferson went to war. Not to teach them about democracy, or plead for tolerance, or to nation build afterward, but to deal them a blow hard enough that they would stop attacking us.
In the process, Thomas Jefferson made America a force to be reckoned with.
That is the only kind of ‘nation building’ that works. Fools build up nations for our enemies. Wise leaders build up our own nation. The ‘Palestinian’ nation building project is the fool’s errand of the Carter administration, bequeathed like a curse down to 7 administrations, all of which came to believe that the only hope for the future rested in achieving the happiness of our enemies.
In the 60 Minutes interview, Jared Kushner insisted that Israel has “to find a way to help the Palestinian people thrive and do better.” That’s a foolish mission for Israel and more so for us.
As the 50th anniversary of Carter’s disastrous proposal approaches, it’s time for America to stop building nations for terrorists and start trying to build our nation for our own people once again.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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