Top Republican (White Party) Calls Two-State Solution ‘Very Damaging’
/The Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), today called the premise of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict “deeply disturbing,” showing himself and his allies to be extremely out of the mainstream.
The vast majority of the questions that came up throughout the first round of questioning Chuck Hagel in his bid for Secretary of Defense related to Hagel’s stances on Israel and Iran, and his past statements on those issues. Many of those questions involved deliberate distortions of Hagel’s record. Inhofe started off the second round of questioning during the hearing with more of the same, but with the added twist of spurning the past decade of U.S. policy in solving the conflict.
“You made a statement that I strongly disagree with. You said that President Obama has been ‘the strongest Israel supporter since 1948′,” Inhofe said in the lead-off, continuing to criticize Obama for promoting the two-state solution:
INHOFE: But when you see statements coming out of the administration like “the United States believes that negotiations should result in two states with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt,” and they’ve come out with statements saying they believe that the borders with Israel and Palestine should be based on a 1967 border lines, these are statements that I think are very damaging. I can assure you that the leadership in Israel feels those statements are damaging.
