Like cheap donuts the low quality of President Bush’s new Middle East proposal only becomes completely clear after the first couple bites.
The highlight, the shot in the arm, of this exercise is supposed to be the US endorsement of a Palestinian state, or rather a provisional state. But isn’t that what the Palestinians already have? Or thought they had? What is the Palestinian Authority after all but a provisional state? What they get is a change in vocabulary.
The rub to the proposal is that the Palestinians can have their state – or rather their provisional state – only if they get rid of their current leadership. So they can rule themselves if they choose leaders acceptable to the United States and/or the Israelis. Not to be knee-jerk about this, but isn’t that almost the definition of colonialism, the antithesis of what it means to have your own state? The essence of sovereignty or statehood is that you pick your own leaders. (Grotius defined sovereignty as “that power whose acts are not subject to the control of another, so that they may be made void by the act of any other human will.”) The whole thing makes no sense.
Geopolitics and diplomacy isn’t about ‘fair.’ Israel is more powerful than the Palestinians. And the United States is infinitely more powerful than the both of them. So maybe the Palestinians just get what we tell them they can have. But that’s the law of power and violence. And that law more or less gives the Palestinians free rein to continue their own campaign of unbridled violence. The White House apparently thinks this is deft geopolitical jujitsu: making the door to statehood open wide for the Palestinians, but making it one Arafat can’t pass through. Actually, the whole thing makes no sense. It’s illogical – which doesn’t in itself make for bad policy in this world – but it’s bad policy too. You can’t say it’s a recipe for bloodshed. They’ve got that taken care of. But it is a recipe for more foolishness and wasted time.
