You go to one meeting of Christians United for Israel and that will allay many of your fears. They’re forty to fifty million people – the largest pro-Israel minority on the planet with a very deep affection and affinity way beyond support for another country or a democracy. It’s a substantially important constituency that I think outweighs young people, who vote in smaller numbers and don’t go to the polls on the basis of Israel.
With young people it’s a reflection of ignorance. Older people know just from absorption of their history about Palestinian terror. The good thing is that young people get older and then their views tend to reflect those of the general population. It is disturbing, but I don’t think it will affect Israel’s support in Congress overall, if you add together the enthusiasm of those Christians who are for Israel.
Mahmoud Abbas is pursuing plans to appeal to the international community to set a deadline for Israel to withdraw from lands captured in 1967. How seriously do you think Abbas should be taken as he attempts to reassert his relevance in the context of growing Palestinian support for Hamas?
I’ve never had illusions about Fatah or the PA. In 1993 I was on the White House lawn when they signed Oslo. And everyone lost their head. People were weeping for joy. And I’ve never been so terribly dismayed. I knew this was a fraud from the beginning. And it ended with the second intifada; a thousand Israeli dead.
The fact is that Fatah will never sign a final agreement. And that is the test. Sure, they’ll sign interim agreements. They give away things that are worthless for tangible control of territory, huge amounts of economic support, legitimacy. In the absence of reaching an agreement, however, we’re never going to have peace but a continuing low-level conflict with eruptions in Gaza and elsewhere.
Fatah is pressured now to go to the UN, to the ICC. They’ll try to condemn Israel and get Europe to boycott and push economic sanctions. I have no illusions that Abbas is a man who sincerely wants to end the conflict. He doesn’t. So you have to live with it. Since we’re not going to get a full peace, you choose relative peace over hard warfare for as long as you can. You always may end up with a major war ten, twenty, thirty years from now. But you worry about that then…
There is talk of America combating the threat of ISIS by working with Shiite powers, especially Iran. Do you think this would serve to embolden Iran as it seeks to capitalize on its nuclear ambitions?
It would be a terrible mistake to think this is an opening for an alliance or even a rapprochement with Iran. In the scale of things Iran is a far greater threat. ISIS is a pretend state. It could become one if it’s not stopped but Iran is a major state on the threshold of nuclear weapons, which will be a geopolitical game changer for generations if it goes nuclear. And nothing is worth giving that up, not even a temporary alliance to defeat ISIS.
To deal with ISIS you have to deal with the Kurds, the Iraqi military to the extent that you trust it, and what’s left of the Free Syria army. Maybe the Turks, the Saudis. But you can’t do it with Iran.
Do you think the ISIS executions of journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff have alerted the American public to the real and growing threat of Islamic terrorism to the U.S.?
