Say what you will about Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro: his lifelong position on Israel, which he is busy disavowing, largely agrees with the Breitbart News editorial view.
I am no fan of Shapiro: I thought his conduct during the 2020 election, for example, was appalling.
In October of that year, well before Election Day, then-Pennsylvania Attorney General Shapiro declared that Trump would lose the state once the votes were counted, fueling conspiracy theories.
But his views on Israel, as espoused in a 1994 op-ed and reiterated since, are exactly correct: Americans should be skeptical of a “two-state solution” until the Palestinians demonstrate a commitment to peace rather than to terror.
A recent video posted by the pro-Israel group StandWithUs demonstrates the depth of the problem. In “man-on-the-street” interviews, Israelis still express a desire for peace, despite the war, while Palestinians want to destroy Israel.
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Shapiro wrote in 1994 that Palestinians were “too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.” (He was much more dismissive than I was, personally, at the time: I fully supported the Oslo Peace Process.)
Though Shapiro’s views became less strident over the years, he still backed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his contention that there had to be peace in the region before a Palestinian state could be established.
UN Speech by @IsraeliPM Netanyahu is one of the finest, fact-based speeches ever re Mideast peace. Peace must precede Palestinian state #fb
— Josh Shapiro (@JoshShapiroPA) September 23, 2011
Now, of course, Shapiro is changing his tune. He says he supports a two-state solution — even after the horrors of October 7. He is rushing to disavow his former views to salvage his chance to be Kamala Harris’s running mate.
Josh Shapiro desperately trying to un-Jewish himself to make himself sufficiently palatable to the pro-Hamas wing of the Democratic Party. Pathetic. pic.twitter.com/h7XqjsH4uF
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) August 5, 2024
And if elected, there is no doubt he would support her anti-Israel approach, bowing to the party’s radical left base.
But until now, Shapiro’s position on Israel has largely agreed with Breitbart News’ own. That is simply a fact.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
