The Palestinians have faded from view lately. There’s been an
“Arab Spring,” an intensifying Iranian issue, elections in the
U.S., economic travails. True, the
Obama administration and the EU keep forking over funds to the
Palestinian Authority. But the obsession with securing sovereign
statehood for the Palestinians seems to have fallen off lately.
Will it return? That may — or may not — depend in part on who
gets crowned U.S. president in November. For decades both
Republican and Democratic administrations have — like much of the
rest of the world — elevated Palestinian statehood into a supreme
goal. But recent developments suggest that a rethink is
necessary.
There is, to begin with, the “Arab Spring” itself. Not much more
than a year ago, it was still seen in some quarters as a harbinger
of democracy and progress. But by now this “spring” has dissolved
into a spectacle of empowered Islamism, anarchy, and severe
brutality — particularly, at present, in the daily atrocity
stories from Syria.
Against this backdrop, it needs to be asked whether creating
still another Arab state — a Palestinian one — would be either
prudent or moral. Indeed, several of the already-existing Arab
states were 20th-century Western creations. Of these, Iraq, Syria,
and Lebanon, for instance, have been afflicted with internal strife
sometimes escalating to the mass murder of tens of thousands of
people. All the 21 sovereign states of the Arab League are
dictatorships beset with corruption and poverty. Neither the “Arab
Spring” nor the earlier, vaunted democratization project of
President George W. Bush has changed this situation, suggesting how
deep-seated the pathologies are.
The two already-existing Palestinian entities, of course,
exhibit the pathologies. Semisovereign, Hamas-run Gaza is an
Islamist dictatorship that fires rockets into Israel. The West Bank
Palestinian Authority — autonomous under ultimate Israeli security
control — is also a dictatorship, torture
rampant in its prisons, journalists
muzzled. Its corruption is notorious. And like Gaza, the West
Bank PA is an incubator of anti-Israeli incitement and hatred. As for
internal strife, already in 2007 Hamas and Fatah fought a vicious
skirmish in Gaza, throwing each other off tall buildings.
Even apart from the seemingly intractable problem of the
Palestinians’ bifurcation into Hamas-run Gaza and the
Fatah-dominated PA, it is, then, hard to see how conferring full
sovereignty on the Palestinians would promote peace with Israel, or
U.S. and Western interests. Terror and possibly war with Israel,
further destabilizing rather than stabilizing the region, would be
much more probable from any empirical standpoint.
To this the likely objection is that the status quo is
“untenable,” that Israel cannot keep “ruling” (i.e., maintaining
security control over) the West Bank without losing its
Jewish-democratic character.
“Untenable,” however, is a figment of Western and some Israeli
imaginations. It essentially means “morally untenable.” But
creating yet another Arab dictatorship is hardly a moral
requirement. The fact that about four million Palestinians in the
West Bank and Gaza live without the full sovereignty — for what
it’s worth — formally possessed by over 300 million of their Arab
brethren in the Arab dictatorships is not something to toss and
turn at night over.
A variant of the “untenable” claim is the “demographic
argument,” which says the Israeli Jewish population will soon be
swamped by the total Arab-Palestinian population between the Jordan
River and the Mediterranean. That argument, though, is irrelevant
to Gaza now that Israel has left it. And as for the West Bank, the
vast majority of the Palestinians in it live under PA jurisdiction
in all areas of life including educational, religious, legal,
administrative, and even most aspects of internal security.
They are, in short, not part of the Israeli polity and no more
demographically relevant to it than their Gaza counterparts.
Moreover, the
latest data show that even the supposedly higher
Arab-Palestinian fertility rate is declining while the Israeli
Jewish rate is on the upswing.
There are, indeed, downsides for Israel in the current
situation. Gaza with its fast-growing arsenal of rockets and other
weapons is a security problem that may in fact become untenable,
forcing decisive Israeli military action and possible partial or
full reoccupation. And in the West Bank, the high degree of
autonomy Israel grants has meant allowing PA hate education to
continue, carrying the potential for security eruptions as
well.
But these are problems for Israel to handle. For the U.S., there
would be no upside to resuming the pressure on Israel to pursue a
chimerical “peace.” Far too much U.S. and European attention has
already been lavished on the Palestinians compared to other, truly
distressed populations of the world. It’s time to kick the
habit.
