Pompeo says Israel has biblical claim to Palestine and is ‘not an occupying nation’
Trump’s secretary of state makes comments on podcast to defend former administration siding more openly with Israel
Mike Pompeo, the former US secretary of state, has defended Israel’s decades-long control of the Palestinian territories by claiming that the Jewish state has a biblical claim to the land and is therefore not occupying it.
Pompeo told the One Decision podcast that his religious beliefs, US strategic interests and his view of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, as a “known terrorist” underpinned his support as the Trump administration’s top diplomat for the shift in US policy away from mediating a two-state solution and toward more openly siding with Israel.
“[Israel] is not an occupying nation. As an evangelical Christian, I am convinced by my reading of the Bible that 3,000 years on now, in spite of the denial of so many, [this land] is the rightful homeland of the Jewish people,” he said.
Pompeo, who referred to the occupied West Bank by its Israeli name of Judea and Samaria, declined to support a two-state solution of an independent Palestine alongside Israel – an increasingly diminishing prospect after years of failed negotiations and the rise to power of politicians in Israel who advocate annexing the occupied territories.
“I’m for an outcome that guarantees Israeli security and makes the lives better for everyone in the region,” he said.
Pompeo, who once suggested that God sent Trump to save Israel, was speaking ahead of publication of a book, Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love, that has fuelled speculation he is laying the groundwork for a presidential run.
As secretary of state he reversed a number of longstanding US policies, including overturning legal advice from 1978 that declared Israel’s settlements in the West Bank “inconsistent with international law”. Most western governments, such as the UK, say the settlements and Israel’s annexation of occupied East Jerusalem are a breach of the Geneva conventions and are therefore illegal.
Pompeo was Trump’s CIA director before his appointment as secretary of state in 2018. He played an instrumental role in an administration that recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the US embassy to that city from Tel Aviv. The move was widely criticised, including by Washington’s allies, as pre-empting a final agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.
Pompeo said it is in the US’s interests to back Israel whatever its policies, and he blamed the Palestinians for the failure of peace negotiations.
“What’s in America’s best interest? Is it to sit and wait for Abu Mazen [Abbas], a known terrorist who’s killed lots and lots of people, including Americans … to draw a line on a map? That’s what the state department would do,” he said.
“The previous secretary of state ran back and forth from Tel Aviv to Ramallah and tried to draw lines on a map. We said: ‘That’s not in America’s best interest. Let’s go create peace,’ and we did.”
Pompeo was part of the Trump administration team that negotiated the Abraham accords normalisation agreements between Israel and several formerly hostile countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Sudan. At the time he said the accords were part of the administration’s efforts to ensure that “that this Jewish state remains”.
“I am confident that the Lord is at work here,” he said.
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My Comments :
1. The world according to evangelical christians like Pompeo, are posing a major thread to the safety of the entire world population, for they - once in a position of political power - are (forcibly by their convictions) inclined to design major (also foureign) policies, that are exclusively in favour of certain religious persuations and therefore against the welbeing of all of us, that do not belong to those special religious interest groups.
2. Calling Abbas (and the like) a terrorist - while the Palestinians like Abbas, never did anything else but defending their legitimate territorial rights against major and longterm cruel western colonialism, with the very means that have been applied by authentic terrorists like Begin or Shamir, be it that the latter ones did indeed represented the invaders, and have to be called terrorists - and calling christian and jewish-zionist claims to Palestine a devine right (if not plight) to persue, does mean the world is in the hands of highly dangerous reli-fanatics, who in reality do resemble people, who in fact do suffer from serious deranged mental delussion (meant here, in the sense of a highly serious mental disorder).
3. Do furthermore see this highly distorted vision of the world in the light of the recent explosive publications of the existence of concerted jewish-zionist efforts (by means of so-called commercial offshoots from certain safety services) to manipulate major international newsoutlets and national political processes all over the world, in order to - not simply make financial profit, but to - further the special interests of their distorted religious beliefs and ditto convictions.
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