According to the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR), whose executive director called the orgy of bloodshed to which Jews in the vicinity of the Gaza Strip were consigned on October 7 an act of “self-defense,” Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro must apologize.
“We are deeply disturbed by the racist, anti-Palestinian views that Governor Shapiro expressed” in a 1993 opinion piece he wrote as an undergraduate, a statement attributed to CAIR’s Philadelphia chapter read. In that op-ed, as reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Shapiro maintained that “peace is not possible” in the Middle East because the ingredients for a durable peace were not present. He alleged that the Palestinian leadership at the time was not amenable to terms that would yield a sustainable new status quo, and the Palestinians themselves were “too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.”
On Friday, reporters asked Shapiro to clarify those remarks. But contrary to some of the initial reactions to his response, the Keystone State governor did not apologize for them. “Something I wrote when I was 20?” he replied when pressed to explain his youthful outlook. “I was 20,” he clarified. That could be taken as an expression of, if not remorse, perhaps modest embarrassment (which is the proper posture from anyone who has ever been confronted with their own work at such an unseasoned age). Nevertheless, what followed from Shapiro was a only perfunctory statement of fealty to the theoretical value of a “two-state solution,” which will only come when both sides of the conflict “understand the power of living peacefully side-by-side and how that will lift up both parties in this or both sides in this conversation.” That is a shibboleth, not sorrow.
If Shapiro was wrong, so, too, was Bill Clinton. “You’re a great man,” Clinton recalled the late Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat telling him near the end of his presidency. “The hell I am,” Clinton recalled himself replying. “I’m a colossal failure, and you made me one.” Indeed, when it comes to the 1993 Oslo Accords, Clinton was right.
When Clinton recounted his regret in the summer of 2001, the fruits of his labors amply justified his frustrations. The first Oslo process, the second Oslo process, and the 2000 Camp David summit had all failed at their stated purpose. The 1990s were typified by spasmodic outbreaks of terroristic violence in the Middle East, culminating in the outset of the second intifada in 2000. All the while, the Palestinian Authority abrogated the terms of the agreements to which it was supposedly party. The sacrifices Israelis made to the peace process led, in Clinton’s estimation, to a domestic political backlash against the peace processors in Israeli politics from which they have, to this day, never recovered.
Contemporaneous critics of the first Oslo process, like Shapiro, correctly identified why it was destined for failure: Neither the Palestinian leadership nor its constituents actually sought peace. That same cultural impediment continues to undermine the prospects for a permanent resolution to the conflict.
Survey data compiled by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research has consistently found that both West Bank Palestinians and Gaza Strip residents (to the degree they can be reliably polled) support Hamas’s 10/7 attacks. Its June poll found Palestinian support for Hamas leaders like Yahya Sinwar increasing since the outset of this war. It found that Hamas is the most popular political party among Palestinian factions, vastly outpacing support for perennial Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, whose support declined to just 12 percent. And as for Shapiro’s genuflection at the altar of the “two-state solution,” nearly two-thirds of Palestinian respondents oppose it. Sixty-three percent favor “armed struggle” against Israel, presumably in perpetuity.
What Shapiro’s youthful musings on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lacked in the sophisticated jargon native to diplomatic talk shops, it made up for in raw insight. For decades, the internationally mediated peace process has saved Palestinian terror networks from experiencing the full weight of the consequences that should accompany its actions. Those decades allowed a cultural rot to flourish in Palestinian society, where the delusion that the state of Israel will inevitably be cast off violently into the sea remains an article of faith. Genuine advocates for peace — we can rule CAIR out of that company — do themselves no favors by pretending that a “battle-minded” culture does not prevail in the Palestinian territories. It did, and it does. The question before policy-makers is how best to mitigate what is now, after 10/7, an intolerable status quo.
The first step is to acknowledge our shared reality, and what should be controversial is the reality — not the recognition of it. Shapiro has nothing to apologize for, and he deserves qualified praise for refusing to grovel.