David Harsanyi of the Federalist chastises Pennsylvania’s governor for recent comments.
Vice presidential hopeful Josh Shapiro spent last week tempering his Jewishness, walking back support for Israel to pacify the pro-Hamas wing of the Democratic Party. At this pace, the Pennsylvania governor is mere days from warning us that the future doesn’t belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.
Hey, Michigan isn’t going to win itself.
You can really learn a lot about a politician by watching who they choose to appease. The problem is that Shapiro … has a record of supporting a liberal democratic ally in the Middle East rather than nihilistic theocrats — a problem for any Democratic Party hopeful these days.
Indeed, Shapiro’s opponents have uncovered a 30-year-old opinion piece headlined “Peace not possible,” written by the future governor of Pennsylvania when he was a 20-year-old student at the University of Rochester. None of us should have to answer for the things we believed at 20. The young Shapiro, though, happened to be correct.
In the column, Shapiro argues that no deal can stop the Israel-Palestinian conflict. “Palestinians will not coexist peacefully,” he observed. “They do not have the capabilities to establish their own homeland and make it successful even with the aid of Israel and the United States. They are too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.”
Shapiro’s view, which I’m told is “controversial,” has been rigorously and unfailingly confirmed over the past 30 years. It was as objectively true back in 1950s, before any “occupied territories” existed, as it was in 1990s, and as it is today.
Shapiro wrote his column — for which he’s now apologized — in 1993, during the first Intifada. This round of violence was sparked by the disastrous Oslo process — the “starkest strategic blunder in its history,” the historian Efraim Karsh bluntly put it — which rewarded the PLO for 30+ years of unremitting terrorism against Jewish people.
