John Kerry to Deliver Major Address on Israel on Wednesday

Outgoing Secretary of State John Kerry will deliver a speech about Israel and the Middle East peace process on Wednesday from within the State Department.

Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes — President Barack Obama’s alter ego on controversial international issues, from Benghazi to the Iran deal to the Cuba “normalization” — told Israel’s Channel 2 (via CNN) that Kerry “will give a speech in which he lays out a comprehensive vision for how he sees the conflict being resolved.”

The speech comes just days after the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which declares the Israeli presence in the West Bank illegal, and which the Obama administration allowed to pass instead of exercising its veto. Bloomberg News reports that Kerry’s speech may be a prelude to a Jan. 15 conference in Paris, where the international community could seek to announce a “solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which President Obama would try to impose in his last days in office.

In 2002, UN Ambassador Samantha Power advocated imposing a solution on Israelis and Palestinians. She backed away from that position during her confirmation hearings in 2013, but appears to have reverted to what would seem to be her true ideas.

The Times of Israel reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also anticipates that President Obama may use the UN Security Council to impose “principles for a Palestinian state” before he leaves office on January 20 next year.

Last week, Kerry defended the UN vote as necessary “to preserve the possibility of the two state solution, which every U.S. administration for decades has agreed is the only way to achieve a just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.”

There are no signs of what his speech on Wednesday might include. Kerry had earlier attempted, controversially, to achieve peace between the two sides by an arbitrary deadline in the spring 2014; war broke out in Gaza a few months after his failure.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.