Kerry: I Don’t Know the Endgame for Israel

Expressing renewed exasperation over the United States’ inability to forge a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians, Secretary of State John Kerry says he has no idea how the more than 60-year-old conflict will come to an end. But what’s potentially worse, he says, is that the Israelis don’t know either, even though they have the most incentive to find a solution.

 

“What is it going to be like, is the question. Will it be a democracy? Will it be a Jewish state? Or will it be a unitary state with two systems … I don’t know. I have no answer to that. But the problem is, neither do they.”

 

“Neither do the people who are supposed to be providing answers to this,” he told writer David Remnick in a 10,000-word profile, published in the Dec. 21 edition of The New Yorker magazine and released Monday.

 

In recent weeks, as the White House all but rules out a final push for a two-state solution by the end of Obama’s presidency, Kerry has struck an increasingly pessimistic note about the prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

 

In a speech at the Brookings Institution earlier this month, Kerry said the distrust between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has never been more profound. “President Abbas feels great despair, more than I have ever heard him,” he said.

 

Read More: Kerry: I Don’t Know the Endgame for Israel — But Neither Do the Israelis | Foreign Policy