The countdown for the next bout of the Arab-Israeli conflict has begun with the Palestinian Authority's formal announcement this weekend that Mahmoud Abbas, its "president," will submit his people's declaration of statehood and request for full-fledged membership in the United Nations to secretary general Ban Ki-moon on 20 September.
The request will probably be turned down in the Security Council, where it will most likely encounter an American veto (and possibly other "nays" or, at least, abstentions, by European states), but will win a vast majority in the 193-member General Assembly.
Such a vote will grant powerful moral support to whatever moves on the ground the PA in the West Bank and the Hamas in Gaza contemplate immediately afterwards. These steps will probably include mass marches of West Bankers on Israeli settlements inside the territory and on the border fences that separate the two Palestinian-inhabited territories from pre-1967 Israel. In all likelihood Israeli Arabs will stage mass protests of their own inside Israel in support of their brothers across the Green Line and in celebration of Palestinian "independence." Both types of demonstrations are likely to be accompanied by violence and will most certainly trigger Israeli counterviolence, possibly initiating a full-blown third Intifada.
How the wider Arab world will respond is anyone's guess. But, in Israeli terms, little good can be expected to come of all this. Egypt, with an anti-Semitic Islamist party, the Muslim Brotherhood, on the ascendant (the Hamas is the Brotherhood's Palestinian "sister" organization), will feel obliged to do something (fully open the border with Gaza? Withdraw its ambassador from Tel Aviv? Suspend the 1979 peace treaty with Israel?). Syria, in the throes of internal anti-regime tumult, may regard the events next door as a God-given boon to deflect attention away from the troubles at home and pose a political-military challenge along its border with the occupied Golan Heights. And Lebanon's Islamist Hezbollah militia may break its years-long quiescence (it suffered a sound trouncing, as, to a lesser extent, did Israel, in their 2006 face-off). The Iranians at the least will allow themselves a very broad and public smile as they continue their march toward nuclear weaponry.
Already half a year ago Israel's defense minister, Ehud Barak, described what is likely to unfold as a "political tsunami." And the head of the Opposition, Kadima Party leader Tzipi Livni, this weekend squarely laid the blame for the corner into which Israel has painted itself at Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's feet.
And without doubt she will be at least partly right: Netanyahu has blatantly and foolishly, almost frivolously, failed to play the game. He has failed to halt the settlement expansion in the West Bank and in and around East Jerusalem (last week yet another building project was approved by the Israeli government for East Jerusalem), giving the Palestinians their excuse for avoiding negotiations while angering the West. And Netanyahu has failed to publicly, clearly chart out the main lines of a territorial compromise (necessarily along the lines of the Clinton parameters of December 2000) that could serve as a basis for a two-state solution acceptable to Washington and Europe. Instead, Netanyahu has talked vaguely about his willingness to engage in "painful" concessions for peace, a formula that may sell well on the hill but has had little traction anywhere else.
Netanyahu has been foolish because he actually had, and still has, a very good hand, but he has failed to play it. Abbas has chosen to go to the UN and the court of world public opinion, dominated by Muslim and Third World countries which are either inherently hostile to Israel or ignorant about the ins and outs of the Arab-Israeli conflict, precisely in order to avoid a negotiation that could lead to a two-state agreement. All Netanyahu needed to do was to call the Palestinians' bluff—halt settlements and outline a realistic two-state proposal, based on the 1967 borders with some territorial swaps, and sit back and wait.
Abbas would still have refused to negotiate or tried to wiggle his way out of negotiating—he has no interest in a two-state solution and is unwilling to recognize Israel as a Jewish or legitimate entity (he has been clear on this point, consistently, since assuming office). Or he would have reluctantly entered into negotiations in bad faith and without serious intent. The moment the refugee issue would have been tabled—and Israel could have raised it immediately—Abbas would have blanched. Like all Palestinian (and, indeed, all Arab) leaders before him, he would have insisted on Israeli acceptance of the "Right of Return," and the West, or at least Washington, would have branded him as unreasonable and extremist.
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Abbas, and the rest of the Palestinian Arab leadership, is true to the PLO's Charter that may have been put in "deep freeze" at Israel and the US demand and at the presence of the US President, Mr. Bill Clinton, but its essence has never been changed in the hearts and minds of the Muslim-Arabs - not the Christian-Arabs, not the Druze-Arabs, mind you!! - local and regioanl alike: The demise of the independent nation-state of the Jewish people on any parcel of land between the River and the Sea. The only substantive aspect that has changed over the years has been the tactics employed by Israel's Muslim-Arab neighbors, and the people who carry out those tactics. Thus, until and unless the Muslim-Arabs, local and regional, accept Israel's RIGHT to be - and not only the FACT that it is - to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people in this people's historic homeland of the past 4,000 years, there is no reason to expect a sustainable accommodation of peaceful coexistence between Arab and Jew, between the Muslim-Arab world and the nation-state of the Jewish people. And, such an accommodation is best applied by implementing UN Security Council Resolution, 242, as is.
Benny Morris wrote:"Abbas ... has no interest in a two-state solution..." Mr. Morris ought to be a lawyer with his ability to see "up" is "down" and vice-versa. Here, after all, is the crucial point of his piece: That Abbas/the Palestinians have "no interest in a two-state solution." Except of course it was Mr. Netanyahu who built his entire career absolutely denouncing the idea and who had to be virtually dragged into ever even uttering the phrase, which he then did only relatively recently and only in the vaguest, future-theoretical way.And then there's Mr. Morris' entire piece which is devoted to condemning Mr. Netanyahu's actions *specifically* for *avoiding* steps leading to a two-state solution. And then of course there's Mr. Abbas and the Palestinians doing what? Oh, *going* to the UN so as to *have* their second state declared. (Which Israel is moving heaven and earth to forestall.)But no, according to Mr. Morris, somehow, miraculously, contrary to all of this and more ... his translation is that it's Mr. Netanyahu and Israel that really want a two-state solution, and it's Mr. Abbas and the Palestinians who don't. It's like some magic trick, except with words. And then Mr. Morris says Mr. Abbas "is unwilling to recognize Israel as a Jewish or legitimate entity." In the first place of course Mr. Abbas and the PA *have* agreed to recognize Israel as a state, which the entire world regards as a "legitimate entity." And in the second place it was only *after* they complied with this demand that Mr. Netanyahu then upped the requirement further by saying they must now additionally recognize Israel as "the nation-state of the jewish people." But who in the world would ever agree in any contract to any language as indeterminate and open-ended as this without further definition? Who, after all, in the entire world can confidently say what it even begins to mean? Why, for instance, does it not mean that Israel can immediately commence expelling from its state all its non-jewish residents and even its non-jewish citizens? And, if not, what's to prevent Israel declaring that this is what it means at any time it wants in the future?As all the above shows, and as the Wiki-type leaks of the Palestinian papers further shows beyond question, it is as clear as day who will accept a two-state solution and who won't. And thus people ought to ponder why Mr. Morris would want to obfuscate that simple fact.
There is no need to stave off another Arab State. Only a fully armed, belligerent, terror-belching, rocket launching Arab State spewing death and destruction on the Coastal plain where the majority of Jews live will cause the Jews do do that which Benny Morris referred to many a time: Drive the Arabs east of the Jordan River once and for all. But the price must be paid in blood and destruction first because Jews are incapable of avoiding that preliminary, that has been shown time and again.