Rep. Joe Walsh Suggests Apartheid As Solution To Israel-Palestine Problem

By aaroncynic in News on May 7, 2012 4:40PM

Congressman Joe Walsh (IL-Tea Party) decided to weigh in on the issue of peace in Israel and Palestine by penning an op-ed in the Washington Times last week, essentially calling for apartheid as a solution. According to his piece, a two-state solution is “insane” and will not work. Instead, Walsh says, the only solution is one contiguous Israeli state “from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” Palestinians would then have two options - they could either move to Jordan or stick around and maintain limited voting power.

Walsh argues that his idea is the only way to maintain peace in the area, but in the same paragraph, says the goal of a solution to the situation in Israel and Palestine shouldn’t be “peace at all costs,” but rather a “strong, free and prosperous Israel.” In a damning response in The Atlantic, Robert Wright called Walsh’s words an endorsement for ethnic cleansing of the “soft variety,” in that the idea of a one-state solution means that Palestinians can either live with limited rights or leave.

In addition to endorsing apartheid in the Middle East, Walsh also recently told constituents at a town hall in Wheeling that Obama was elected because he’s African American. Think Progress reports the Congressman told supporters:

[Obama] was a historic figure. He’s our first African-American president. The country voted for him because of that. It made us feel good about [our]self. I’ve said it before, it helped that John McCain was about 142 years old. It helped that the economy was tanking. A lot of these things helped. But he never would have gotten there without his historic nature.

This isn’t the first time Walsh has said Obama was elected because he was black. In May, he told Slate’s David Weigel, “He was black, he was historic. And there's nothing racist about this. It is what it is.”