The Napoleonic-era French diplomat Talleyrand famously offered a rather harsh assessment of the Bourbons after they regained power decades after the French Revolution that overthrew them: “They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” The same might be said for a coterie of American diplomats who, decades after the failure of the Oslo Accords peace process of the 1990s, have failed to learn the lessons of Oslo’s failure. Worse still, many Western news outlets repeat their claims — many of which have been disproven by both history and experience — as gospel truth.
In last Sunday’s edition of The Washington Post, Aaron David Miller and Daniel Kurtzer, both former U.S. State Department officials, lambasted the Trump administration’s recent announcement that it would not consider Israeli construction in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), or “settlements,” to be “illegal.” The decision, Miller and Kurtzer claim, has “compromised, if not killed” the possibility for any U.S.-brokered “peace deal” between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
(Read the rest of this Nov. 27, 2019 op-ed at The Daily Wire)