Everyone is now in a flutter about this monumental non-crisis about whether or not the Palestinians, or particularly the Palestinian Authority, will go to the UN and ask the UN to call them a state. But it’s not clear to me on what basis the Palestinians can be asked not to do this. The Palestinians want a state. The vast swathe of political and international opinion says they should have one, though the devil is very much in the details. So why can’t they try to get one? Frankly, it’s never been really clear to me why the Palestinians haven’t already declared one, though arguably they did a long time ago.
The standard rejoinder is that statehood should be decided at the negotiating table. And ideally, that’s true. But the current Israeli government wants negotiations that are pretty clearly not negotiations at all. They’re on the basis of things the Palestinians can’t really agree to — on-going settlement. And it’s pretty clear to everyone that the Netanyahu government — at the very least this Netanyahu government (I’ll leave out there the very hopeful and extremely hypothetical idea that Netanyahu might think differently if he were in a different coalition) — is pursuing a policy of not resolving the Israel-Palestinian dispute, not on any terms the Palestinians can ever agree to. The Netanyahu governments policy is openness to perpetual talking — not negotiations toward a plausible settlement.
The calculus was different twenty years ago. (Yes, it really was twenty years ago.) But now things are very different. And can anyone claim with any seriousness that this is going to sour the trust between the two parties? That’s too silly for words.
Others say that this is a bad move because it will raise false expectations among the Palestinians. And that’s sort of true, inasmuch as the whole thing is basically a big statehood nothingburger. But it’s hard to credibly argue that a largely atmospheric gambit to push things forward is worse than perpetual stasis forever.
Normally, in a case like this, when you’ve got an intractable situation and the two sides are far from any point of agreement, the weaker party will simply resort to asymmetric violence, often terrorist violence. The Palestinians have certainly done that in the past. But now they’re not. Yes, Hamas continues to engage in episodic violence. But they’re actually against the PA’s whole idea of declaring a state on the 1967 borders because they think that concedes their right to all of historic Palestine. So this Israeli government has no interest in real negotiation; violence is off the table; what on Earth else are the folks at the PA supposed to do? The current situation seems to play a cycle of “Please?” “No.” “Please?” “No?” “Please?” “No” perpetually into the future.
There’s always been this refrain, sometimes seriously, sometimes with a lot of hypocrisy: why don’t the Palestinians ever come up with their own Martin Luther King or Gandhi? Well, what is this? This is non-violent agitation for a state and an end of the occupation.
I’m a Zionist. I deeply believe in a two-state solution, with the ’67 borders as the starting point for the discussions. I believe that for many reasons. But the most important of those is that I believe it is the best and only viable path forward for Zionism and the State of Israel. But the ‘negotiations’ have gotten to the point where I simply can’t see any room for complaint about what the Palestinians are proposing to do. Sure, it’s sort of a distraction. But a distraction from what? In other words, I’m not for or really against what the Palestinians are trying to do. But opposing it just casts in painfully sharp relief the intrinsic ridiculousness the current version of ‘negotiations’ has become.
Late Update: Listening to President Obama’s speech going on as I write I find myself thinking, Yep, yep and yep. Agreeing with every point. But not seeing where it at all contradicts anything I wrote above.
