In a blind support for Israel, Mike Pompeo said this Thursday that Israel has never been an occupying nation and has biblical rights to stay in Palestine for good.
US former secretary of state Mike Pompeo made controversial comments this Thursday by siding more openly than ever with Israel and questioning the very existence of Palestinian lands.
In an interview with the One Decision podcast on this Thursday night, Trump’s secretary of state stood up for Israel and its decades-long occupation of the Palestinian lands by claiming that the Israeli nation has a divine right to stay in the territories, and that the bible says the Jewish state is not an occupying nation.
“[Israel] is not an occupying nation. As an evangelical Christian, I am convinced by my reading of the Bible that 3,000 years on now, in spite of the denial of so many, [this land] is the rightful homeland of the Jewish people,” Pompeo said.
This former US statesman also defended the previous administration’s pro-Israeli policies during the four-year term Donald Trump was in office. He noted that aside from his religious beliefs and what the bible says, his country’s strategic interests as well as his personal view of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, whom Pompeo described as a “known terrorist” were among the reasons he supports Israel.
The Trump administration’s top diplomat also criticized the two-state solution.
Referring to the occupied West Bank by its Israeli name of Judea and Samaria, Pompeo declined to support a two-state solution of an independent Palestine alongside Israel.
“I’m for an outcome that guarantees Israeli security and makes the lives better for everyone in the region, not the two-state solution or the like,” he said.
In 1974, a UN resolution on the “Peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine” called for “two States, Israel and Palestine … side by side within secure and recognized borders” together with “a just resolution of the refugee question in conformity with UN resolution 194”
No surprise when it comes from Pompeo!
Pompeo’s controversial words this Thursday should not surprise anyone because he has a record of supporting Israel in the weirdest ways.
Back in 2019, Pompeo suggested in a televised interview that God may have sent President Donald Trump to Earth to protect Israel. “President Trump right now has been sort of raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace, and as a Christian, I certainly believe that’s possible,” Pompeo said.
But Pompeo’s support for Israel is beyond words. During the former administration and as secretary of state, it was he who changed a number of longstanding US policies regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict. For example, Pompeo was the main figure behind overturning legal advice from 1978 that declared Israel’s settlements in the West Bank “inconsistent with international law”.
This is while even most US partners, including the UK, for example, believe Israel’s presence in Palestinian lands is a flagrant breach of the Geneva conventions and is therefore illegal.
Pompeo was also a key member of the Trump administration team for the negotiation and finalization of the Abraham Accords, a deal for normalizing relations between Israel and Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Sudan.
Last but not least, Pompeo also had an instrumental role in the administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital back in 2019 and moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to there.
