Democratic leader: Kerry’s speech ’emboldens extremists on both sides’

New York Senator Chuck Schumer, the incoming Democratic leader, said Wednesday that US Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech earlier in the day laying out principles for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, may inadvertently serve to strengthen extremists on both sides.

The Senate minority leader, who vocally opposed Washington’s Security Council abstention on Friday allowing an anti-settlements resolution to pass, said in a statement Wednesday that he feared that Kerry, “in his speech and action at the [United Nations], has emboldened extremists on both sides.”

In a speech that lasted well over an hour, Kerry on Wednesday described settlements as a central obstacle to achieving an agreement between the sides and declared that Israeli actions in the West Bank were putting the two-state solution, which he said was the sole path to peace, “in serious jeopardy.”

Kerry argued that settlement construction in the West Bank was being “strategically placed in locations that make two states impossible” and said the “the status quo is leading toward one state, or perpetual occupation.”

Settlement expansion, he declared, “has nothing to do with Israel’s security.”

“If the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic, it cannot be both, and it won’t ever really be at peace,” he warned.

“We all understand that Israel faces very serious threats in a very tough neighborhood,” Kerry said. “Israelis are rightfully concerned about making sure that there is not a new terrorist haven right next door to them, often referencing what’s happened with Gaza [when Israel dismantled all settlements and withdrew from the territory in 2005 and was met with often daily rocket attacks shortly after], and we understand that and we believe there are ways to meet those needs of security.”

Schumer said in response that Kerry may have not understood or internalized those series of events enough, charging that “while Secretary Kerry mentioned Gaza in his speech, he seems to have forgotten the history of the settlements in Gaza, where the Israeli government forced settlers to withdraw from all settlements and the Palestinians responded by sending rockets into Israel. This is something that people of all political stripes in Israel vividly remember.”

Israel withdrew militarily from the Gaza Strip in 2005, dismantling all settlements in the territory. Rocket attacks on Israeli communities in the south picked up frequency shortly after the terror group Hamas overthrew Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah in a violent coup in 2007.

Earlier Wednesday, before Kerry’s speech, another senior Democrat urged the top US diplomat not to deliver the address, saying that it would contradict longstanding US policy to outline the parameters of an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

The House Democratic Whip, Steny H. Hoyer (Maryland), who is the second ranking elected official in the House Democratic Caucus, said the Obama administration must “not to set forth a formula, which will inevitably disadvantage Israel in any negotiation. The United States must now take steps to signal unequivocally to the entire world that we will continue to stand by our ally Israel as it seeks to build a future of peace and safety as a Jewish state and an equal member of the family of nations.”

The only support Kerry seems to have received from a Democratic leader was from California Senator Dianne Feinstein, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who also backed the US abstention at the Security Council.

“Bold speech by Secretary Kerry,” she wrote on Twitter on Wednesday. “Security for Israel can only be achieved through peace. A two-state solution offers the only path forward.”

Israel has reacted furiously, both tothe speech and the Security Council Resolution on Friday, repeatedly castigating the Obama administration and acuusing it of abandoning and ambushing the Jewish state while colluding with the Palestinians to move the resolution forward at the UN.

Branding Kerry’s speech “a big disappointment” on Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized the secretary for “attacking the only democracy in the Middle East,” while numerous other conflicts raged across the region.

The prime minister said Kerry drew a “false moral equivalence” between construction in Jerusalem and Palestinian terrorism, and accused him of only “paying lip service” in his condemnation of terrorism. He noted that the controversial UN resolution, while condemning “incitement,” did not even attribute that incitement to the Palestinians. References to suicide bombers and millions of Israelis forced into bomb shelters by rocket attacks should not be “throwaway lines” in an address like this, he said..

“Israelis do not need to be lectured about the importance of peace by world leaders,” Netanyahu said. “No one wants peace more than the people of Israel.”

Netanyahu said he looks forward to working with the incoming administration of Donald Trump to “repeal” the UN resolution.