Okay, now so what he did was is he reaffirmed what he had said in Israel, any country has the right to do that. And said at the same time, please understand, you have in foreign policy for the United States of America one president at any given moment. So he made three points. That’s the second. And the third point was that having said all of that, from the moment that I become president on January 20th, I have a team in place that will pursue peace in the Middle East.
Now as I said earlier, I think that it is a sort of a dream, especially a dream that liberals have. Conservatives have, I think, a more realistic vision of the human capacity for delusion and evil than do liberals. I think that that is part of the makeup of the two groups. Sometimes it’s nice to have dreamy-eyed idealists, and sometimes it’s better to have realists about the human condition. I am on the realist side. Does that mean that dreamers can never do good? No, it doesn’t. And if he can somehow find peace where everyone before him since 1948 has failed, then more power to him.
I myself am not sanguine on this matter. I see no reason to believe that Hamas will change its mind. If Hamas, for Hams to say we recognize the right of the Jews to its own state, to their own state, in Israel, is to cease being Hamas. Then why do you have to have Hamas? And why not have the Palestinian Authority or for that matter, the king of Morocco as your leader? Hamas’ distinctive definition is destroy Israel, as is Hezbollah, as is Iran’s. The day that they say okay, you know, we changed our minds, Barack Obama has convinced us that there’s really nothing we can do, and I’m not, by the way, folks, I’m not mocking Barack Obama here at all. And I salute him for the one president policy and for his, at least in foreign affairs, and for the way he has comported himself in that regard, and for the comments that I’ve just played for you with George Stephanopoulos. But please understand that he does have this belief that with the right people in place, we can achieve peace if we just talk to these people, if we just talk to him.
Look, there is, in my view, a naïveté that is at the core of everybody left of center. A non-naïve liberal is now a conservative. So there is a certain naïveté about human evil that is part and parcel of all of those left of center. Nah, you know, their belief is that come on, if you really handled it in some better way, these people would see the light. But they don’t want to see the light. They want to see the dark. A group for whom the motto is we love life more than Jews and Americans love…we love death, excuse me. We love death more than Jews or Americans love life, what are they going to do? See the light of the beauty of living? There is no interest on the part of Hamas to develop Gaza. There is none whatsoever. There is, the Islamists don’t make anything. They destroy. The greatest possible good for Hamas is not a functioning, civil society in Gaza. It is the death of Israel. But this is something that everyone, and I don’t know of an exception left of center does not understand. If they understood it, then at least on foreign policy they would no longer be left of center. So Barack Obama will have to learn, and if I am wrong, I will be the happiest guy around. I would love to see peace in the Middle East.