As Palestinian officials nervously await the Trump administration’s peace plan, one fundamental reality shapes their long and bitter contest with Israel.
Diplomatically, militarily and economically, Israel has never been stronger than it is today. By contrast, the Palestinian cause has never been in worse shape. Neither Hamas, which alternates between firing rockets and begging Israel to admit to Gaza the supplies it needs to stay in power, nor the Palestinian Authority, which is compromised by corruption and divided by factionalism, can find a viable policy to defeat the Israelis or to make peace with them.
One result is that Palestinians, especially young people, are increasingly giving up on having a state of their own. Instead they favour a “one-state solution” — a single, binational state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Yet in meetings with senior Palestinian Authority officials and political observers, it becomes clear that this is more a cry of despair than a serious political program. A Palestinian return to the policy of rejecting the two-state solution may spur American campus activists to new denunciations of “Israeli apartheid”, but it won’t help the Palestinian cause in the real world.
The argument for one state is straightforward. Israel is de facto in control of the West Bank and to a lesser extent the Gaza Strip; liberal principles say people should have a say in the government that rules them. Some Palestinians claim the situation is comparable to the South African system of “Bantustans”, in which white South Africans created artificial “homelands” for the different tribes of black South Africans and used them as alibis to deny blacks citizenship rights in South Africa proper. The West Bank and Gaza are, some Palestinians argue, Bantustans for Palestinians.
Thus the solution, with no Palestinian statehood in sight, is to give Palestinians full voting and citizenship rights in the state that matters most in the neighbourhood: Israel.
Read the article by Walter Russell Mead in The Australian (from The Wall Street Journal).