Wednesday’s speech by Secretary of State John Kerry invites many questions. Here are nine:

(1) Between them, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq — Israel’s closest neighbors — have a total land area of 1,495,000 square miles. Israel is composed of slightly over 8,000 square miles. Is there not room for a tiny Jewish state in that vast region?

(2) Kerry said, “If the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic. It cannot be both.” Why? Is his assumption that the growing number of Arabs in Israel will vitiate its Jewishness? Does he not believe that Israel has the right to control its borders? The implications of his statement are disturbing. More than disturbing; they imply Israel’s isolation in an Arab sea, an isolation made more fragile by the unremitting hostility of Palestinian leaders whose ultimate goal is the elimination of a Jewish state, even a Jewish presence, in what they regard as their lands.

(3) Why do we refer to a “Palestinian people?” Repeatedly, politicians of both parties have for years referred to non-Jewish persons living in and around Israel by this term. Yet this phrase is non-descriptive. There are Arab and substantially Islamic populations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as Arabs who live in Israel proper. However, contrary to the implication of the term “Palestinian people,” there is no distinct Palestinian ethnicity, no Palestinian language, and no Palestinian culture. There have been Arabs living in what is now the State of Israel for generations, most surely, but they are not a distinct ethnic group — like the Jews of Israel. 

(4) Why do we need a “two-state solution?” Why do the Arabs living in Israel, Gaza, and the area west of the Jordan River not simply move into one of the several neighboring Arab states? Could those who cannot abide the reality of Israel’s existence not be given fair, even generous financial incentives, resettlement funds, and money for establishing businesses, etc., and removed to areas where their Arab-ness is affirmed and Israel is allowed simply to live in peace? 

(5) Why does the world not condemn the ruthless attacks of the radical Palestinian Arabs on Israel? Where was the U.N. in 2014, when in July and August the groups Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and others launched more than 4,500 missiles into Israel? Instead, American universities unctuously “divest” themselves financially from Israel, the “oppressor” state. How noble.

(6) Why has the world been virtually mute as Hamas has continued to threaten mass killings of Israelis through its expensive and sophisticated tunnel networks? “The labyrinth of tunnels is quite extensive, with many fully lined with concrete walls and ceilings and wired for electrical use,” reports the Anti-Defamation League. “The Israeli Defense Force estimates that each costs approximately $3 million to construct, requiring the equivalent of 350 truckloads of building supplies … that otherwise could be used to build homes, schools and other structures throughout Gaza. Inside, Israel has found weapons, handcuffs, sedation syringes and IDF uniforms, all of which suggest that Hamas was planning to use the tunnels to launch a mass-scale operation to infiltrate Israel, and kill and abduct many Israeli civilians and soldiers.”

(7) Why does the United Nations do, apparently, nothing about the financial corruption of the Palestinian Authority, documented copiously? “Palestinian economic analysts estimate that the PA has received a total of $25 billion in financial aid from the U.S. and other countries during the past two decades,” reports Khaled Abu Toameh of the Gatestone Institute. Where has this money gone? Why are so many Palestinians still dependent on food assistance? Why do so few have regular electricity? And on it goes.

(8) Why does the Palestinian Authority spend hundreds of millions of dollars funding Palestinian Arab terrorists (an estimated $75 million in 2014 alone). Bonus points: Who said, in late 2015, “Every drop of blood that has been spilled in Jerusalem is holy blood as long as it was for Allah?” Hint: he isn’t Israeli.

(9) What happened to Yasser Arafat’s fortune, one he accrued largely through pilfering the foreign aid he received for the people he professed to care about so very deeply?

In 2005, David Samuels wrote in The Atlantic:

The amounts of money stolen from the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people through the corrupt practices of Arafat’s inner circle are so staggeringly large that they may exceed one half of the total of $7 billion in foreign aid contributed to the Palestinian Authority. The biggest thief was Arafat himself. The International Monetary Fund has conservatively estimated that from 1995 to 2000 Arafat diverted $900 million from Palestinian Authority coffers, an amount that did not include the money that he and his family siphoned off through such secondary means as no-bid contracts, kickbacks, and rake-offs.

Eight years later, Frederic Forsyth asked in The Guardian, “So exactly how did Yasser Arafat get so rich?” By now, he noted, had the money received from foreign aid been used wisely, Gaza “today could be a mini-Monaco. It could have a deepwater freight port, a flourishing fishing port and a leisure harbour crammed with the yachts of wealthy visitors. It could have resort hotels on the sea and farms, ranches and orchards in the hinterland producing nutritious food.” Instead, he says, the money has been used to fuel terrorism and line the pockets of the PLO headmen and their peers in the Palestinian Authority’s government. 

What says the United Nations, that stalwart champion of the rights of all men, of this repulsive breach of trust and human decency? You guessed it — nothing.