Why I Don't Expect the Palestinians Will *Ever* Make Peace with Israel and Thus Gain Statehood
What is in the interest of "the People" does not always coincide with the interests of "the leadership."
Click here to check out the first 30 Installments - Volume I - in this series on Antisemitism and Culture. Among the most important pieces from this first wave:
What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites
4 Stupid Reasons People Don't Take Antisemitism as Seriously as They Should
Is Qatar the Most Terrible State in the Middle East? Or Is Iran Worse?
7 Reasons This Christian Hippie Became a Zealot Against Jew Hatred
Why This Bible Thumper Is Going to Keep Using Plenty of Profanity
How Multi-Faith Mysticism & Maimonides Can Bring Peace to Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Everyone
This is the third installment in Volume II, intended as another 30 installments exploring the many manifestations of Jew Hatred and the issues surrounding it in America and globally. See the previous installments in this collection below.
Martin Luther King, Jr: An American Hero and Courageous Zionist Voice
Talking to These Students Gave Me Hope in this Dark, Dark World of War and Hate
These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.
Over at The Algemeiner today my colleague Andrew J. Bernard offered a thoughtful report on the state to Saudi Arabia-Israel relations, noting that the desert monarchy was insisting Israel grant the Palestinians a state before they would normlize relations with the Jewish State: Saudi Foreign Minister: Normalization with Israel Requires Giving the Palestinians a State:
Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud said in an interview with Bloomberg Thursday said that normalization between Israel and the kingdom would only come as a result of Palestinian statehood.
“Our approach to Israel, to Israel/Palestine has been consistent,” Faisal said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We have said consistently that we believe normalization with Israel is something that is very much in the interest of the region. […] However, true normalization and true stability will only come through giving the Palestinians hope, through giving Palestinians dignity and that requires giving the Palestinians a state.”
n 2002, Saudi Arabia introduced the “Arab Peace Initiative,” an offer to fully normalize relations between Israel and the Arab states in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders and the establishment of a Palestinian state. The 2020 Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, and that were later joined by Morocco, offered hope that Israel might establish ties with Arab countries without resolving the Palestinian conflict.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news to the Saudis, please don’t shoot the messenger, oh land of monarchy: but that just isn’t going to happen. The Palestinian leadership is simply not interested in ending the conflict, and from what I can tell neither are most of the people themselves. The Palestinians - both leadership and broader people - are more interested in trying to destroy Israel altogether than they are making authentic peace with Israel and establishing peaceful economic and cultural relations. They prefer the status quo of war to the radical transformation that peace would offer.
(And don’t even get me started on the pre-1967 borders canard, by the way. In Israel they call those “suicide borders” for a reason - they’re not defensible. Withdrawing to them would just be Israel sliding its neck into the Palestinians’ noose.)
Why is that? Two fairly simple reasons really.
The first is one which my late mentor Barry Rubin who I wrote about here explained to me:
When we were colleagues at PJ Media, Barry our amazingly brilliant Middle East Editor, explained it to me like this. Why is it that year after year Palestinian leadership has rejected every peace deal Israel has put on the table, even though Israel has bent over backwards to trade land for peace, offering the Palestinians nearly everything they’re demanding time and time again? It doesn’t make sense - sure it is in the interest of the Palestinian people to want peace instead of war, is it not?
Oh, of course it’s in the interest of the Palestinian people but it is not at all in the interest of the Palestinian leadership to make peace with Israel. Why? Barry explained it to me in frank, realist, and somewhat dark terms: any Palestinian leader who tries to make authentic peace with Israel is immediately putting his life in jeopardy. He becomes an assassination target. Any such leader will immediately become on the kill list of a more radical Palestinian faction which wants to continue the war. So out of simple self-preservation, it makes the most sense for Palestinian leaders to simply perpetuate the status quo.
There’s a secondary component to this point as well: as long as the Palestinians continue to perpetuate the crisis, the foreign aid gravy train can continue to perpetuate itself into their pockets. Mahmoud Abbas, current dictator of the PLO, has a net worth of $100 million dollars. When Yasir Arafat died he was worth billions, stashed all over the world. Hamas’ leaders live a life of luxury.
Why make peace with Israel when war maintains the leadership’s life and one of comfort and obscene wealth?
I have yet to figure out any sort of practical answer to this paradoxical conundrum. I find it more likely that Saudi Arabia will simply eventually realize that the Palestinians are entirely the ones at fault for perpetuating the conflict, grow sick of their intransigence, and eventually just make peace with Israel only if and when the situation with Iran gets much more worse and such an alliance becomes unavoidable.
What do you think? Am I being too pessimistic?