A throwaway line in an innocuous statement issued by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, to mark a year since the October 7 massacre, shows his detachment from reality – a detachment that appeared in some other statements issued yesterday from leaders around the world.
Guterres, whose name in Israel will always be ignominiously associated with contextualizing the massacre by telling the UN Security Council last October that “it is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” decried Hamas’s atrocity.
Then he said, “Hamas must allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit those hostages.”
The reason that line is so jarring is that it is so pro forma, so disingenuous. As if Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, sitting in a hole in Gaza, is going to read Guterres’ statement and say, “Gosh darn it, he’s right, it’s time to let the Red Cross visit the hostages.”
The very call by the UN’s secretary-general bestows a veneer of legitimacy on Hamas. As if Hamas, who murdered, raped, pillaged, and then took hostages – including babes in arms and octogenarians – is now, a year on, going to allow Red Cross visits. As if Sinwar has a shred of humanity.
Hamas has not only pointedly refused to allow any Red Cross visits, it also cynically broke a promise to allow medicine that was sent months ago to be administered to the hostages who needed it. This terrorist group is no more going to allow Red Cross visits than snow is going to fall in the Sinai’s desert.
Where has Guterres been?
Then why say it if one knows it is not going to happen? To tick a box, to fulfill a formal obligation, to signal some virtue: “See? I called on Hamas to allow Red Cross visits.”
Where have you been until now, Guterres? Why have you not used the power of your pulpit to press this issue day and night? For that matter, why haven’t you made sure that the UN General Assembly condemns Hamas’s atrocities?
Another line that crept unassumingly into the various statements from world leaders called for a greater push now for a two-state solution.
“The EU has been working closely with its Arab partners on ways to push and implement the two-state solution,” Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy czar, said.
Rather than pushing a two-state mirage – again, just ticking boxes that people feel they must reflexively check – Borrell and his EU colleagues would be better off talking about how the EU can help disarm terrorists in Gaza and the West Bank and what role it can play in a deradicalization process inside those territories.
Israel is not going to agree to any two-state solution with a population that has shown time and time again that every Israeli territorial withdrawal is only a platform for more rigorous attacks against the Jewish state.
The Palestinians, for all intents and purposes, had a mini-state in Gaza. They opted in the 19 years since Israel withdrew from Gaza – when they could decide what to do with that prime piece of Mediterranean real estate – not to work for their own betterment, but rather to build a fortress from which to rain death and destruction upon Israel.
To think that now Israelis, with October 7 a fresh reality, are going to agree to replicate that model elsewhere from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea is a notion that is detached from reality.
US President Joe Biden, in his statement to mark the day, seemed to recognize this and was wise enough not to raise the issue of a Palestinian state in a statement commemorating those murdered and kidnapped on October 7 by Palestinian terrorists.
Instead, Biden sufficed to repeat a mantra of his administration: “Israelis and Palestinians alike deserve to live in security, dignity, and peace.”
Though his support for a two-state solution is well known, the president – unlike Borrell – had the common sense not to connect this concept with the Hamas attack so as to not make it seem as though Hamas should be rewarded for its actions by now establishing a Palestinian State.
Biden also surely understands that the chances of this happening now are about as good as the chances of the Red Cross being able to visit Hamas-held hostages.