Blinken Says Palestinian State Can Be Demilitarized to Secure Israel

Antony Blinken told a Washington audience that Israel’s security and a realized Palestinian state have to advance together, and that demilitarization is one of the tools available.

“You have a state that’s demilitarized,” the former secretary of state said. “You make sure that groups like Hamas don’t have arms. You make sure that the society itself is de-radicalized and its education and what’s preached in the mosques.”

“None of this is easy,” he added. “A lot of it takes time, but it is infinitely doable if people want to do it.”

Blinken, secretary of state from 2021 to 2025 under President Joe Biden, spoke Sunday at the opening plenary of the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly in Washington. ABC News journalist Juju Chang moderated a discussion with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, their first joint public appearance since both left office.

Secure Israel, Sovereign Palestine

“Israel has to be secure and has to have a sense of actual security if there’s going to be not only the recognition, but the realization of Palestinian state,” Blinken said. “There are many ways to do that.”

He rejected both “from the river to the sea” maximalism and a settlement-driven “greater Israel.” To those who want Israel “to go away,” he said: “Guess what? It’s not.” To those who want Palestinians to disappear through more settlements, he answered: “Guess what? They’re not.”

“There are 7 million Jews. There are 7 million Arabs and Palestinians. No one is going anywhere,” he said. Without accepting that fact, he argued, Israel “will never fundamentally be secure.”

“I believe to the bottom of my heart… that the only way forward… is through a secure Israel and a sovereign Palestine,” Blinken said.

Washington has meanwhile pressed Israel to advance its Gaza peace plan, while Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has backed disarming Hamas and excluding it from governing Gaza.

Gaza and October 7

“We have to be able to acknowledge the rightness of Israel’s imperative to respond after October 7th,” Blinken said. “We also have to be able to acknowledge the horror of the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza in the many days thereafter.”

He said Israelis had “for the most part” done “the bare minimum” for civilians, with “disregard” and “disdain for the well-being of the Palestinian civilians” — still “vastly different… from an intent to do them harm.”

“The target was Hamas, and horrifically, too many people were caught in the middle of that and suffered terribly as a consequence,” he said.

Pompeo said he and Blinken had worked hard “to make sure we didn’t strike hospitals anywhere,” adding that “the bad guys don’t spend a second worrying about how many civilians they kill.”

Iran and the Strait

On Iran, Blinken favored diplomacy over a new military push at the Strait of Hormuz.

“Any resolution, if it’s a diplomatic one… is probably going to have to give the Iranians something,” he said — “sanctions relief, something from the Strait itself,” which he called “preferable to escalating.”

The demilitarization argument lands amid a live fight over Hamas’s pledges to demilitarize Gaza and Israeli resistance to treating those steps as settled.