Charles Krauthammer - Opinions and Ideas - Israel

Israel

Krauthammer strongly opposed the Oslo accords, predicting that Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat would use the foothold it gave him in the West Bank and Gaza to continue the war against Israel which he had ostensibly renounced in the Israel – PLO Letters of Recognition. In a July 2006 essay in Time, Krauthammer asserted that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was fundamentally defined by the Palestinians' unwillingness to accept compromise.

During the Israel–Lebanon war in 2006, Krauthammer wrote a column, "Let Israel Win the War," saying: "What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?" He later criticized the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's conduct, arguing that he "has provided unsteady and uncertain leadership. Foolishly relying on air power alone, he denied his generals the ground offensive they wanted, only to reverse himself later."

Krauthammer supports a two-state solution to the conflict. Unlike many conservatives, he supported Israel's Gaza withdrawal as a step toward rationalizing the frontiers between Israel and a future Palestinian state. He believes a security barrier between the two states' final borders will be an important element of any lasting peace.

When Richard Goldstone retracted the claim in the U.N. report on the 2008 Gaza war that Israel intentionally killed Palestinian civilians, including children, Krauthammer strongly criticized Goldstone, saying that "this weasel-y excuse-laden retraction is too little and too late" and "the original report blood libel ranking with the libels of the 19th century in which Jews were accused of ritually slaughtering children ... should spend the rest of his life undoing the damage".