Ted Cruz Demands John F. Kerry’s Resignation for Using the Word “Apartheid”
Secretary Kerry should offer President Obama his resignation, and the President should accept it.
— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) April 28, 2014
Sen. Ted Cruz, always first out of the demagogue’s gate, is demanding that Secretary of State John F. Kerry resign following his private remarks to a group of world leaders that if Israel tried to impose a one-state solution on the Palestinian areas, it would risk becoming an “apartheid state.”
“A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens—or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state,” Kerry told the group of senior officials and experts from the U.S., Western Europe, Russia, and Japan. “Once you put that frame in your mind, that reality, which is the bottom line, you understand how imperative it is to get to the two-state solution, which both leaders, even yesterday, said they remain deeply committed to.”
I’m not Kerry’s biggest fan, honestly, but I don’t see anything wrong with what he said. It seems self-evident that the only way to impose a one-state solution on the Palestinians areas would be to institute something like apartheid. Maybe Kerry was unusually blunt, but he was correct; and it seems to me it’s the people who promote the idea of annexing the West Bank who are nuts and should be marginalized — not the people like Kerry who are trying to stop them from pushing things to a horrible place.
Other people who have used the dreaded “A” word to warn about the collapse of a two-state solution: former Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Olmert to Haaretz: Two-state solution, or Israel is done for
“If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished,” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Haaretz Wednesday, the day the Annapolis conference ended in an agreement to try to reach a Mideast peace settlement by the end of 2008.
“The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us,” Olmert said, “because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents.”
Barak: make peace with Palestinians or face apartheid
As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic,” Barak said. “If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”
