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Huckabee Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinian Territories

Mike Huckabee is a fairly charming guy, but the fact that these kind of sentiments can be uttered by a member of the American political mainstream tells you a lot about why Arabs mistrust America’s approach to the Israeli-Arab conflict. He’s moved on from his general support for settlements to a call to, I guess, deport the entire population of Palestine to someplace else:

Speaking to a small group of foreign reporters in Jerusalem, Huckabee, seen as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, said the international community should consider establishing a Palestinian state some place else.

“The question is should the Palestinians have a place to call their own? Yes, I have no problem with that. Should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That’s what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic.”

In some ways, however, Huckabee is to be congratulated on his frankness. The implication of the policies of the Netanyahu administration, and of U.S.-based Jewish organizations that are pressing Barack Obama to back off America’s opposition to settlements, points exactly in the direction Huckabee is now espousing. Bibi and AIPAC aren’t about to start embracing a binational state, so they’re either talking about creating an apartheid system or else trying to make life sufficiently intolerable for the Palestinians that they all leave. American critics of criticizing Israeli policy don’t like to articulate such ideas because they’re appalling, but this is the road we’re heading down.

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