Pompeo at ZOA gala: “Israel is not an occupier”

At the Zionist Organization of America’s (ZOA) annual gala last month, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized the Biden administration’s Middle East policy and declared that Israel does not occupy any Palestinian land. Pompeo delivered remarks at the virtual event after receiving the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon Adelson Defender of Israel Award.

Pompeo touted the Trump administration’s record on Israel during the speech, citing the Abraham Accords, Golan Heights recognition, and violating the Iran nuclear deal as major accomplishments.

“We were told in the administration, ‘You can’t end the terrible Iran deal because it will make it more likely that there’d be war and that Iran would obtain a nuclear weapon.’ But we ended our participation in that terrible deal,” Pompeo said. “We applied maximum economic pressure to Iran and to its leadership. We brought Iran to its knees. We were told, ‘You can’t move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, there’ll be war.’ Well, we did. And there wasn’t. We were told too, that you can’t secure peace between Arab nations and Israel without buying off Palestinian kleptocrats and starting World War III. Well, we did forge real peace and there was no war. The Abraham Accords rewrote decades of failed shuttle negotiations because we were willing to go against the elites of the foreign policy establishment to secure American freedom and to champion American values.”

He drew a sharp contrast between these policies and Biden’s approach to Israel and referred to the former as “The Pompeo Doctrine.”

“The bottom line is that Israel is not an occupier, and the hundreds of thousands of Jews and Christians who call Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem home have a perfectly legitimate right to live there in safety under Israeli sovereignty,” he told attendees. “But you can see this today, the Biden administration is now preparing to reverse the Pompeo Doctrine to once again suggest somehow that the Jewish state of Israel is an illegal occupier … and to pressure Israel into territorial concessions that threaten the free access and freedom of worship of many faithful pilgrims. We can’t allow that to happen. We can’t allow the current administration to reverse the historic change—the historic progress we brought to the Middle East.”

This wasn’t the only time that Pompeo insisted Israel isn’t an occupier. “But is there really any legal truth to the accusation that Israel is occupying Palestinian land?,” he asked at one point. “You all know, the answer is absolutely not.”

ZOA put out a Breitbart News write-up of the speech out as a press release and titled it, At ZOA Gala Secy Pompeo Gave the Greatest, Most Pro-Israel Speech Ever Delivered by a Public Official. Pompeo shared the press release on Twitter and wrote, “There is no more important task of the Secretary of State than standing for Israel and there is no more important ally to the United States than Israel. There is much more work to do.”

“This is a truly incredible thing to say about the job of the United States Secretary of State,” observed MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.

Pompeo hasn’t announced whether he will run for the Republican presidential nomination next election, but there’s certainly reason to believe he’s interested in the possibility. He’s been speaking at events in key states and launched a political group in the spring of 2021.

Earlier this week Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi called for Pompeo and former president Donald Trump to be prosecuted for the 2020 killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. “The aggressor, murderer and main culprit – the then president of the United States – must be tried and judged under the (Islamic) law of retribution, and God’s ruling must be carried out against him,” said Raisi.