Israel and the Palestinians: Ending the Stalemate

President Bush’s June 24, 2002, speech was the strongest U.S. statement of support for Palestinian statehood until that date. Notably, the address came at the height of the Palestinian war against Israel and in the aftermath of Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield, in which Israel reasserted its military control over Judea and Samaria. That operation produced massive documentary evidence that Arafat and his associates were directly involved in directing the violence against Israel. And yet, the President’s speech ignored the distinct possibility that the Palestinians would not select new leaders and reject the path of terror and jihad. It included no hint of what the U.S. would do should the President’s call for democratization and liberalization of Palestinian society go unheeded.

In Israel, official support for Palestinian statehood rose in the  months before Arafat died in November 2004, when Hamas was beginning to eclipse the Fatah movement in popularity among Palestinian society.²⁰ It was at this juncture that the Sharon government announced its decision to unilaterally withdraw all Israeli civilians and military personnel from Gaza.

Both Israeli and U.S. support for Palestinian statehood became effectively unconditional after Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006 and then ejected Fatah forces from power in Gaza in June 2007. So counterintuitively, the U.S. and Israel have become most supportive of Palestinian sovereignty as Palestinian society has become more extreme. Viewing this cycle, one might be led to the conclusion that Israeli and American policy is the equivalent of closing the barn door after the horses have escaped. But this interpretation assumes a basic Palestinian interest in statehood. And the Palestinian Arab desire for a state is far from clear.

Since the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, far clearer than the Palestinian Arab desire for statehood has been the Palestinian Arab  rejection of Jewish statehood. Championing Palestinian Arab statehood has never been the explicit policy of either the Palestinians or the rest of the Arab world. Rather, rejecting the right of the Jewish nation to sovereignty in the land of Israel has been the consistent policy of the Palestinian Arab leadership as well as the general Arab leadership since 1917, and most pronouncedly since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

Given the Palestinian Arabs’ historic refusal to accept partition and in light of the radicalization of Palestinian society since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, the reasonableness of viewing the Palestinian conflict with Israel as separate from the larger Arab world’s rejection of Israel’s right to exist is called into question. And this raises the prospect that Israel’s decision in 1993, supported by the U.S., to recognize the PLO and adopt the European-Russian-UN view that the root of the conflict is the expansion of Israel rather than its very existence, was wrong and should be reversed.