In his latest October surprise, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney used a major foreign address Monday to declare he would provide renewed leadership for the Middle East process. But if that wasn't surprise enough, his new-found support for a Palestinian state was truly jaw-dropping. After all, throughout the 2012 campaign Romney hasn't just repeatedly rejected the notion of two-state solution in the Middle East, but mocked the very notion that peace between Israel and the Palestinians is possible at all.
Speaking at the Virginia Military Institute, would-be President Romney asserted his commitment to be Middle East peacemaker-in-chief (around the 19:15 mark):

"Finally, I will recommit America to the goal of a democratic, prosperous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with the Jewish state of Israel. On this vital issue, the President has failed, and what should be a negotiation process has devolved into a series of heated disputes at the United Nations. In this old conflict, as in every challenge we face in the Middle East, only a new President will bring the chance to begin anew."

If those words Romney spoke to the American public seem incongruous coming from his mouth, that's because he said the exact opposite in private. During his now-infamous May closed door fundraiser, Governor Romney declared that as President he would not give peace a chance:

"I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say, "There's just no way." And so what you do is you say, "You move things along the best way you can." You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem. We live with it in China and Taiwan. All right, we have a potentially volatile situation but we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it. We don't go to war to try and resolve it imminently."

As it turns out, Romney hasn't been shy about brushing the two-state solution in public, either.
As he first suggested earlier this year, Governor Romney has little use for the policy expressed by Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama to realize two states, Israel and Palestine, "living side by side" in peace and security. Instead, Palestinian ambitions for a nation of their own should be determined by Bibi Netanyahu alone. As Romney put it in a January 26 Republican debate:

There are some people who say, should we have a two-state solution? And the Israelis would be happy to have a two-state solution. It's the Palestinians who don't want a two-state solution. They want to eliminate the state of Israel.
And I believe America must say -- and the best way to have peace in the Middle East is not for us to vacillate and to appease, but is to say, we stand with our friend Israel. We are committed to a Jewish state in Israel. We will not have an inch of difference between ourselves and our ally, Israel.

Or to be more accurate, not a single inch of difference between President Romney and his good friend and former Boston Consulting Group colleague, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Thanks in large part to Bibi's intransigence and acceptance of low levels of violence into the inndefinite future, Romney has good reason to believe that "the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish." Benjamin Netanyahu's premiership makes peace in the Middle East virtually impossible. Netanyahu, after all, opposed the 1993 Oslo Accords, which he said were "against my principles and my conscience" and were based upon "an enormous lie." Bibi also fought against the Ehud Barak's proposals to Yassir Arafat during the Clinton administration and refused to support the 2008 offer his predecessor Ehud Olmert made to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Even Netanyahu's much-hyped 2009 Bar-Ilan speech represented little movement forward towards a two-state solution he has long opposed:

Mr. Netanyahu made no mention of existing frameworks for negotiations, like the American-backed 2003 peace plan known as the road map.
He did not address the geographical area a Palestinian state might cover, and he said that the Palestinian refugee problem must be resolved outside Israel's borders, negating the Palestinian demand for a right of return for refugees of the 1948 war and for their millions of descendants.
He insisted that Jerusalem remain united as the Israeli capital. The Palestinians demand the eastern part of the city as a future capital.

As Bibi's late father Benzion described it, "He doesn't support [a Palestinian state]. He supports the sorts of conditions they [the Palestinians] will never accept."
Of course, Mitt Romney was just fine with them. At least he was, until today.