Zionism and Israel took center stage in Washington, D.C., with the start of a new Trump administration.
The Senate continues to hold confirmation hearings on President Donald Trump’s nominees for cabinet-level positions and ambassadors. Among them were two positions that heavily deal with the U.S.-Israel relationship: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s hearing for secretary of state and New York Rep. Elise Stefanik’s (both Republicans) hearing to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. One of the senators who questioned them was Chris Van Hollen, the senior senator from Maryland. The questions he asked reflected a dated understanding of Zionism and Israel.
On the day the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was announced, during Rubio’s hearing, Van Hollen began: “I’m very pleased to see the announcement today of the ceasefire and the return of hostages, let us pray that it holds and that it is implemented. But, of course, as we discussed yesterday, the question is what happens next. We all agree that Hamas can have no role in the governance of Gaza or any other place. We also know that for all its flaws and faults, the Palestinian Authority has recognized Israel’s right to exist for the last 30 years, since the Oslo Accords.”
The senator refers to a concession that the PLO, then a 30-year-old terrorist organization claiming that it had reformed and was interested in peace, made to Israel in 1993 as part of the Oslo Accords recognizing Israel’s right to exist. Some people thought this concession showed that the Palestinians were recognizing the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their historic homeland. As the years went on, it became clear that the Palestinian recognition of Israel’s right to exist meant only that a country named “Israel” could exist, not that the Jewish people had a right to a homeland.
In the words of former left-wing Knesset member Einat Wilf, “Israel is expected to recognize the Palestinian right to self-determination, but somehow it’s a crazy idea that Palestinians will recognize the Jewish right to self-determination.”
Van Hollen is using an incorrect assumption about the Palestinians to credit them for a concession they never made.
In his remarks about the Palestinian Authority and its security apparatus, Van Hollen said: “Their security forces are trained by U.S. forces. They today, are fighting Palestinian militants in certain parts of the West Bank.”
This statement makes it seem as if the P.A. is one of the world’s great terrorist-fighting establishments. The senator neglects to mention, as Al Jazeera and other regional media outlets regularly report, that the P.A. regularly battles rival terror groups like Hamas, yet still incentivizes terror attacks through its “pay for slay” program, as well as names schools and city centers after the murderers of Jews.
Van Hollen also criticized Israel for withholding funds from the P.A.—funds the senator said “belong” to the P.A. He should know that just as the American government refuses to support the P.A.’s funding of terrorists, so, too, the Israeli government refuses to pass funds to the group when used to incentivize terror.
It was Congress that voted for the Taylor Force Act, adopted in 2018, that prohibits the U.S. government from providing funds to the P.A. as long as it financially supports terrorism. Van Hollen voted against the act when it was first presented to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but he ultimately supported the amended version approved by Congress. There is no justifiable reason that he would hold America to one standard and Israel to another.
That’s not all. Instead of holding the P.A. responsible for its rampant corruption, its refusal to hold democratic elections and its general ineffectiveness at governing, Van Hollen blamed Israeli building in the heartland of its homeland for P.A. incompetence. This excuse has been debunked so many times even the Palestinians have stopped using it.
It was excuses like this one that caused Stefanik and others to respond: “I believe the Palestinian people deserve so much better than the failures that they’ve had from terrorist leadership.”
It is time that the archaic and mistaken views that Van Hollen and others continue to spread about Zionism and Israel are updated and corrected.