Bill Burns, chief of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and who visited Israel and the West Bank in January, warned last week that escalating tensions between Israelis and Palestinians could lead to an outbreak of familiar violence.
In an address at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, Burns – who met with Israeli Prime Minister Binyomin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas during his Middle East visit – said the conversations he had with those leaders “left me worried.”
“I was a diplomat during the second Intifada (Palestinian uprising) and, like my colleagues in the intelligence community, I am concerned,” he said. “We see today an unpleasant reminder of some of the realities we have already seen.
The First Palestinian Intifada in 1987, a sustained series of protests and violent riots carried out by Palestinians, led to nearly 2,000 casualties. Thirteen years later, the Second Intifada, a major Palestinian uprising against Israel, lasted for over four years and resulted in over 4,300 casualties on both sides.
“Part of the responsibility of the CIA is to work as closely as possible with the Israeli and Palestinian security services to prevent an outbreak of violence, as we have seen in recent weeks. This will be a great challenge.”
Dozens of Palestinian terrorists have already been killed in Israeli military raids in the West Bank this year, while seven civilians were murdered by a Palestinian gunman in east Jerusalem last month.
“The biggest lesson I learned from my years in the Middle East is humility,” Burns continued. “Too often we thought we could change a region of the world that we did not always understand well. Looking toward 2023, the Middle East will come back and be a complex challenge for American politics.” –i24 News
Who cares what this deep state democrat swamp creature has to say?! Let him and his corrupt friends in the FBI worry about escalating murders in South Chicago! Let him worry about the terrible white supremacy problem here in the United States. It’s none of his damn business what is going on in Israel.
If Arabs can’t get along with their host, they should go back home to Jordan.