[I couldn’t decide between John and Sidney Wang…]

Advocating or worse, insisting upon impossible, impractical “ideal” solutions to ethics problems isn’t just foolish and useless, it is unethical. EA has discussed the phenomenon, which fits into the broad and nauseating category of the “‘Imagine’ Fallacy,” frequently here. Calls for racial “reparations,”to ban fossil fuels to end wars, hunger, racism and the need for police are all in there, making gullible people more stupid still, animating naively idealistic students, and causing trouble.

The most recent and significant outbreak was unveiled this week at the ‘We Are the Woke’—-the World Economic Forum—conference of socialists, world government fans and progressives in Davos last week. Biden Secretary of State Blinken embarrassed himself with his formula for Middle East peace: a Palestinian state. Blinken actually told the assembled that Israel could only attain “genuine security” if it the Palestinians to have a neighboring, self-governing state, because having Gaza next door has turned out so well for the Israelis. “To make this possible, Israel must be a partner to Palestinian leaders who are willing to lead their people in living side by side in peace with Israel and as neighbors. And Israel must stop taking steps that undercut Palestinians’ ability to govern themselves effectively,” Blinken said, repeating what he has blathered in Israel.

Never mind that doing this now, as a response to the war started by the Hamas terror attacks, would reward terrorism, ensuring even more of it. Never mind that the Palestinians have been refusing to compromise on any two statearrangement that includes an Israel since 1947. Never mind that Islam commands that the faithful must “drive out those who drove you out” (2:191) and holds that any land that has ever been ruled under Islam at any time belonged to the Muslims must never be ruled by anyone else.

Naturally, as any idiot could have predicted, Hamas instantly spit on Blinken’s proposal. Its representative said, implicitly thanking America’s campus anti-Semites,

“I believe that the dream and the hope for Palestine from the River to the Sea and from the north to the south has been renewed. This has also become a slogan chanted in the U.S. and in Western capital cities, by the American and Western public. Palestine is free from the River to the Sea–that’s the slogan of the American students and the [students] in European capital cities. The Palestinian consensus–or almost a consensus–is that we will not give up on our right to Palestinian in its entirety, from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea and from Rosh Hanikra to Eilat or the Gulf of Aqaba.”

This is not a new or surprising position, not at all.

Meanwhile, Israel is no more sanguine about Blinken’s fantasy than Hamas. A statement released by his office read: “In his conversation with President Biden, Prime Minister Netanyahu reiterated his policy that after Hamas is destroyed Israel must retain security control over Gaza to ensure that Gaza will no longer pose a threat to Israel, a requirement that contradicts the demand for Palestinian sovereignty.” Later, on “X”, he wrote that Israel must retain “security control over the entire area west of [River] Jordan,” an area which also includes the Israeli-occupied West Bank territory. Israel’s president Isaac Herzog, more moderate than its PM, also was unreceptive to Blinken’s grandstanding. ”If you ask an average Israeli now about his or her mental state, nobody in his right mind is willing now to think about what will be the solution of the peace agreements,” he said in an interview at Davos, “because everybody wants to know: Can we be promised real safety in the future?…[E]very Israeli wants to know that he will not be attacked in the same way from north or south or east,” Herzog said. “Israel lost trust in the peace processes because they see that terror is glorified by our neighbors.”

Ya think?

“Pie in the sky” proposals like Blinken’s are just lazy and cynical virtue-signaling, another nauseating example of the dishonest “Do something!” reflex that the Left now uses for every difficult problem, all eternal conflicts, and every instance of ethics zugzwang. It isn’t serious, it isn’t responsible, and it encourages protests, demonstrations and violence from those who are immune to reality.