John Brennan Doubles Down on Failure

Speaking of hurt feelings, place the name of John Brennan high on the list. The former director of the CIA, a pillar of the Obama presidency, has been fulminating out loud about the need for Palestinian statehood. By the by, he is strongly opposed to the Trump Middle East policy, what with its overt bias toward Israel.

Brennan’s interventions come at an interesting time. Palestinian terrorists understand full well something that escapes the ken of American Jews. Namely, with Joe Biden they have a friend in the White House. They know that pro-Palestinian activists have important roles in the Biden National Security Council and the State Department. So, why not launch more attacks on Israel, from Gaza and even in Jerusalem. No time like the present to revert to terrorism in order to advance the Palestinian cause.

Of course, the Trump administration broke with decades of received wisdom about the Middle East. Lo and behold, it worked. At least, it has worked until now, until the Biden administration sets out to undo it.

From John Kerry to John Brennan on up, Democratic politicos insisted that if Trump moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Arabs would take to the streets in furor and rage. They were wrong, and they do not have the strength of character to admit to it.

In a long and excellent article Lee Smith explains the disgrace that has befallen John Brennan:

But the so-called Arab street didn’t erupt when Trump moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Islamists didn’t topple the regimes in Cairo and Amman when the U.S. recognized Israel’s sovereignty in the Golan Heights. Saudi Arabia, the custodian of the two holy shrines in Mecca and Medina, gave all but explicit approval when the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel.

The indignity of it all. So, Brennan has taken to the pages of the New York Times to militate for the Palestinian cause:

That left Brennan with egg on his face. Now out of government, Brennan believes that despite “dealing with a dizzying array of domestic and international problems,” the Biden administration should prioritize “the Palestinian quest for statehood.” Why? To put an end to Israel’s “oppressive security practices,” Brennan wrote on Tuesday for The New York Times. But the case he makes for bumping Palestinian nationalism to the top of the White House’s to-do list is not strategic or rational. It’s sentimental, with a dollop of antisemitism on top—just like his decades of poor intelligence assessments.

“I always found it difficult to fathom how a nation of people deeply scarred by a history replete with prejudice, religious persecution, & unspeakable violence perpetrated against them would not be the empathetic champions of those whose rights & freedoms are still abridged,” Brennan tweeted Tuesday, promoting his Times op-ed.

And of course, being an anti-Semite did not disqualify Brennan from being director of CIA. But, as happened with Kerry, his views are redolent of anti-Semitism. Who knows better-- Israeli Jews or American liberals-- if the former, it’s quite a humiliation for the latter.

You will note the charge-- Israelis lack empathy. One is seriously appalled by the promiscuous use of the concept of empathy here. One is fast becoming seriously appalled at any use of the concept of empathy-- exception made for the nursery, when dealing with beings who cannot speak.

The Israelis should yield to Palestinian terrorism because it would show how much empathy they have. Of course, no one asks whether the Palestinians should feel any empathy for the Jews that they are trying to kill. The Palestinians have cast themselves as victims, so they can do whatever they want. 

Smith continues:

Really? It is quite easy, in fact, to imagine the responses of Israeli families—tens of thousands of whom have seen loved ones injured and killed in Palestinian terror attacks—to Brennan’s disappointment in them (though it is hard to imagine printable ones). Even more striking than the barely veiled antisemitism in the ex-CIA chief’s public pronouncements is his unctuous hypocrisy.

Anti-Israeli bias drips from John Brennan. Smith shows that Palestinian leaders bear responsibility for their people’s misery. Brennan ignores it. And Smith also remarks that the Biden administration, in order to foment anti-Israeli violence, is now funding the Palestinian Authority’s program to pay people for committing acts of violence against Israelis:

But in blaming the Israeli government for its own security concerns and the sorry status of the two-state solution, Brennan failed to mention that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas chose to sit out U.S.-sponsored peace talks in 2020, when the Trump administration promised an eventual Palestinian state as well as $50 billion in immediate international investment. The “moderate” Abbas has similarly rejected every offer made by Israel or any third party for the past 15 years. Even more strangely for a former spy chief, Brennan takes it as a good sign that the Biden administration has restarted funding for “development programs” that the Palestinian leadership in fact uses to pay terrorists who kill Israelis, a form of aid the Trump White House had previously cut off.

It's a sobering reflection that American Jews who voted for Biden were voting to pay off people who kill Israelis. Let that one sink in for a moment. Besides, at least they did not vote for a man who Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu called a great friend of Israel and a great friend of the Jewish people-- that would have been Donald Trump.

Being as the Palestinians are oppressed they bear no responsibility for their conditions. The amoral calculus is perfectly consistent with woke American ideology:

Brennan is right that the daily circumstances of ordinary Palestinians are tragic. Most simply want to lead dignified lives, enriching and enjoying their families and communities. The fact that many can’t, however, is not the fault of Jerusalem or Washington, nor even primarily of the Arab regimes, which for so many years used the Palestinians as pawns to advance their own domestic and international interests. With the Abraham Accords, a coalition of prominent Arab states publicly and unreservedly gave up on the rejectionism that still drives the sclerotic ruling cadre in Ramallah, and embraced Israel’s dynamic economy, society, and military as models and partners. Shimon Peres’ dream of real peace finally started to materialize under Netanyahu and Trump, two men he abhorred. But it came true nonetheless.

The problem is that John Brennan and John Kerry and their ilk have been consistently wrong about Israel and about the Middle East. That it took a real estate developer from New York City to show them another way, a way that worked, is too much for their fragile egos to bear:

Now it is clear for all to see that the decades Brennan and his colleagues spent working on the Middle East were wasted on wrongheaded myths and sentiment. They had access to endless acres of the most highly classified intelligence assembled by the most powerful country in the world, but somehow, they misread it. They were wrong about the peace process, wrong about Israel and the Palestinians, wrong about the politics of the Middle East. What they spent their careers passing off to policymakers weren’t precious secrets that explained the laws of political gravity, but poetry in translation.