Video flashback: Obama alum John Kerry proved dead wrong by President Trump's Israel peace deals

 

Former Secretary of State John Kerry once declared, "There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world."

That emphatic statement — which the former Obama administration official and now Joe Biden surrogate called a "hard reality" at the time — appears to have been dead wrong.

The proof: Over the course of about a month, President Trump brokered two separate peace deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Israel and Bahrain. On Tuesday, the president even added that "five or six" more Arab countries were ready to follow suit.

Kerry's backward comments came in 2016 while he was speaking at the Brookings Institution's annual Saban Forum.

In a resurfaced clip of the comments, first shared by Institute for Policy & Strategy senior fellow Udi Evental, Kerry can be heard amazingly prophesying the exact opposite of what would come to pass four years later.

"There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world. I want to make that very clear to all of you," Kerry said. "I've heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying, 'Well, the Arab world's in a different place now. We just have to reach out to them and we can work some things with the Arab world, and we'll deal with the Palestinians.' No, no, no, and no."

"I can tell you that, reaffirmed even in the last week, as I have talked to leaders of the Arab community. There will be no advance and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace," he continued. "Everybody needs to understand that. That is a hard reality."

Kerry, who also once wrongly predicted that Trump's decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem would be an unmitigated disaster, was widely panned for the cold take.

"John Kerry with a 2016 Middle East take that aged like milk in a sauna," Tablet Magazine associate editor Noam Blum said in the tweet above.

"Has anyone been more abjectly wrong about something?" National Review contributor Pradheep Shanker asked.

Hudson Institute senior fellow Rebeccah Heinrich wrote: "Exactly backwards. Remarkable."

Ed Morrissey, covering the news at Hot Air, wrote:

It's tough to choose what is the most embarrassing quality of this Kerry declaration from four years ago on the impossibility of what Trump has achieved. Is it his dead certainty of his own position? The way Kerry uses his cheaters to look down on the audience in his faux-professorial manner? The way he condescendingly dismisses politicians in Israel who actually turned out to be right, and to whom Kerry should have listened? It's an abundance of riches, my friends, an abundance of riches in 44 seconds.