"Nothing Said About The Settlements"

On MSNBC, Democratic Party-affiliated talking heads Ed Shultz and Al Sharpton tried to deflect criticisms of the party for its initial failure to indulge empty rhetoric on recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel followed by a reversal of that position by an unusual and controversial voice vote. But weekend anchor and progressive pundit Chris Hayes spoke up in favor of the initial platform, absent the language on Jerusalem, and noted some of the other omissions from the platform. ThinkProgress has the video and transcript:

Can we just say, I’ll just say for myself, it’s a substantively terrible decision. It’s bad policy alright. It’s a craven capitulation and it’s a craven capitulation that empowers the worst elements in the people that are working on this issue. If you read this platform, there is not a single condition put on Israel, in the Israel-Palestine section, there’s conditions put on the Palestinians that they must renounce — they must accept Israel’s right to exist, etc. There’s nothing said about the settlements.

And if the American government policy is actually that Jerusalem is the capital and the American government wants move the embassy to Jerusalem, there have been plenty of opportunities for both Republicans and Democrats to do that and they have not done it because it’s a terrible idea from the perspective of actually getting a lasting peace between these two people.

This tracks with what Peter Beinart wrote in these pages, that "in a second term, the two state solution will be an afterthought." Nonetheless, it's nice to hear about not the absense of Jerusalem from the platform, but the absense of the peace procress—on prime time cable news, no less.

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Ali Gharib

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