RUSH: John Kerry, who once served in Vietnam, is the American secretary of state. He’s been shuttling back and forth between the United States and Tel Aviv, and I don’t know if he’s ventured into Gaza — Palestinian territory — or not, but he’s been desperate to get a ceasefire. He has been desperate to get a ceasefire, and the reason he wants a ceasefire… Well, ceasefires are pointless and meaningless.

Look, I’m gonna say some things that I think are slam-dunk true and accurate and no-brainers. It’s just that you will not hear things like that in the Drive-By Media. But I gotta at you, folks. I’m 63. I have been paying attention to this issue since I was a teenager. It doesn’t matter who is the president. It doesn’t matter who’s running the Palestinians. It doesn’t matter who the prime minister of Israel is, really.

This dispute has never changed in terms of the way it is presented in the media, and it’s always presented in the media as though there is a diplomatic solution that can be had, that is there for the taking. And there isn’t. There never will be a diplomatic solution. There will be diplomatic moments. But diplomacy is not going to solve this. The only way…

It’s not just this; it’s any conflict like this that involves military.

One of these two sides is going to have to win, and the other is going to have to lose. And until that happens, there will not be a solution. And yet, every day of my life I have been force-fed the idea, conventional wisdom — doesn’t matter when, every year of my life, every day, every month — I’ve been force-fed news stories wherein the narrative or the template is that a diplomatic solution is at hand, or a diplomatic solution looks grim, or a diplomatic solution is slipping away, or we are on the verge of gaining a diplomat breakthrough.

And it’s none of it true. There is no diplomatic solution! We’ve had some of the best diplomats the world’s produced try to solve this and they have failed. We’ve had some of the worst diplomats the world has produced (one of them serving right now) and they have failed. Because there isn’t a diplomatic solution. All you have to do is read the Hamas charter. The Hamas charter explicitly calls for the elimination of Israel.

There is no way to negotiate that.

There is no middle ground.

It’s like Kerry can say, “Okay, I read your charter, and you want to destroy Israel. How about if you wait 10 years to do it — and then only destroy half of it? I’ll take that to Netanyahu and see what he says.” So Arafat says, “Okay, go ahead, take it,” or whoever. Yeah, take it. So Kerry goes over, “Okay, look, they’re willing to modify their charter and say they won’t destroy you for 10 years, and even then, they’ll only destroy half of you.

Can you agree to that?” And the Israelis sit there… If you think this is ridiculous, it is. This is my point! All of this is ridiculous. It’s stories like this that feed into the idea that there is some giant force or power conspiring to bend and shape events for the benefit of people that are not even involved in the story, because this is just silly the way this episode is continually dealt with. We’ve been dealing with this episode this way — let me just pick a year — since 1950, all right?

So 64-years of trying the identical thing.

It doesn’t matter the president, doesn’t matter the Israeli prime minister. Why, after 10 years, does somebody not get it? Now, I understand that there’s a lot of political power to be gained by talking about how much you hate war, and you’ll do anything to stop war, and you’ll do anything you can to stop civilian casualties. There’s great political gain there, if you can convince people that’s what you’re after, either as a Democrat president or a secretary of state or what have you.

But it’s still all fluff. When one of the combatants has in, essentially, their constitution — they call it a charter, but their constitution — the elimination, eradication, the demolishing, the abolishment of the Jewish state, there is no diplomatic solution to that. And yet every day we get breathless reporters working and reporting on the next proposal as though this might be the magic moment.

And there isn’t a magic moment, because there is not a diplomatic solution. It’s not possible. And especially if you send somebody over there like Kerry, who’s got his own agenda for his own legacy and his own bio and what have you. Ditto Obama. So Kerry wants a ceasefire. What happens in ceasefires is that the bad guys take advantage of the time-out to retool, to regroup, and rearm.

It is a fact that the two parties involved here have a different definition of peace. To Hamas and the Palestinians, peace is a momentary lull in the normal state of affairs, which is war. That is normalcy for them. They raise their children on it. They strap bombs on their children to go blow themselves up in Israel and bus depots and on buses and in schools. War is their way of life.

You may not like hearing it, you may find it difficult or impossible to believe, but don’t doubt me. So any time the United States pushes for a ceasefire, whether they know it or not, they’re aiding Hamas. But I don’t think that’s why they do it, don’t misunderstand. I think they push for a ceasefire because they all want to be seen as brokers of peace.

Somebody… They all got this dream of being the guy who finally brought peace to the Middle East. They all have that much hubris, they all have that kind of ego to think they — with the power of their personality and their ideas (and the fact that they served in Vietnam) — can bring to these negotiations elements that others have never had. Every one of these guys thinks they have the magic bullet, and there isn’t one, if it is involved in diplomacy.

So the latest ceasefire has been achieved by virtue of John Kerry bumbling and stumbling so badly that the Drive-By Media is today and last night circling the wagons in panic to defend him. Even David Ignatius at the Washington Post has a story: “John Kerry’s Big Blunder in Seeking an Israel-Gaza Ceasefire.” But you see (impression), “The blunder’s okay because he has such — such a lofty goal! It’s… it’s… it’s… Everybody wants peace and that’s all Kerry wants and — and it’s okay he made some mistake but he can recover! He can recover from them!”