The year 2018 marks a forgotten anniversary. Eighty years ago, the first “peace process” between Arabs and Jews came to naught: the partition of Palestine. The Jews would get a modest plot stretching along the Mediterranean from Tel Aviv to the Galilee. The Arabs would get a much larger chunk, linked to what today is Jordan. This had been the recommendation of the British Peel Commission in 1937. The Jewish leadership, though bitterly divided, was ready to accept one-quarter of the loaf. The Arabs rejected partition unanimously. In March 1938, the British buried the Peel Plan.
Fast forward to the present. Last December, Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as capital of Israel. Yet nobody seemed to notice that he did not hand over all of Jerusalem to Israel, insisting: “We are not taking a position of any final status issues, including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem.” That was “up to the parties involved.” So, go for it and start talking, he signaled to the Palestinian Authority.
Predictably, the United States was roundly condemned in the UN General Assembly. Just as predictably, the Palestinians were emboldened to revive their classic game, which has failed them regularly in the past. In so many words, the message has always read: “We will not deal directly with Israel; we want the world to force the Zionists to hand us our state on a silver platter.”
In Al-Monitor, a website covering Middle Eastern affairs, the Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab reported (December 29) that Palestinian leaders are going for the international option once more. The aim is to look for new great-power godfathers. Referring to the Trump move, PLO ExCom member Asaad Abdel Rahman announced: “We are now relatively free of the United States’ imposed conditions that have shackled our ability to approach international organizations”—for instance, by dragging Israelis before the International Criminal Court.
Another ExCom member wants to end the Oslo Process. In favor of what or whom? Nabil Shaath, a chief negotiator in the peace talks, was dispatched to Russia and China. Maybe they could replace the United States. He returned with the good news, as he saw it: Beijing and Moscow “enthusiastically support our efforts to create a new mechanism . . . that includes Europeans, Russians, and Chinese.” So, good-bye, America, and say “hello” to old Palestinian dreams.
The Arabs (there were no Palestinians then) rejected international sponsorship in 1937–38. On to Berlin in 1941, where the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem sought to enlist Hitler’s help against the Zionist usurpers “by the same method that the question is now being settled in the Axis countries,” as he so delicately put it.
The Arab and the Palestinian leadership defied the UN resolution of 1947 that took another stab at partition, relying instead on war to destroy Israel at birth. After the Six-Day War, when Israel offered to return conquered territories, the Arab world flung down the three no’s of Khartoum: no peace, no recognition, no negotiations.
In 2000, at Camp David, Bill Clinton actually did hold out the silver platter to Yassir Arafat. He refused, launching the second Intifada instead in hopes that it would bring Israel to its knees—which it did not, in spite of 1,000 dead. Clinton blew up at Arafat: He has “been here 14 days and said no to everything.”
In 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made the most generous offer ever to Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas: a territory equivalent to 100 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, with land swaps making up for what Israel would retain beyond the “Green Line” (6.3 percent). Jerusalem would be shared. Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s secretary of state, recalls: “In the end, the Palestinian walked away from the negotiations.”
Trying his hand as all U.S. Presidents had done before him, Barack Obama did not even get the Palestinians to talk to the Israelis directly. American diplomats had to shuttle back and forth between the rooms, declaiming from notes on their yellow pads. So good luck to Mr. Shaath, who wants to bring in Europe, Russia, and China.
This seasoned negotiator surely knows two Big Things: a state can only be had from Israel, and it must embody a painful, dream-destroying compromise thrashed out by the two antagonists. Whence a harsh conclusion follows: If one party says no for 80 years, it isn’t interested. It is all or nothing, and “all” implies not only Hebron, but also Haifa. The Palestinians’ fondest dream is the “right of return” to Israel proper, and Abbas cannot bring himself to accept Israel as a “Jewish state.”
Not that the Israelis are innocent babes. They keep building settlements, signaling that they are digging in for the long haul. They make life miserable for the locals and throttle economic activity. But Shaath also knows that Israel’s army, the IDF, and its security services protect the lives of Abbas and his Fatah faithful against all comers from Hamas on down. It is no accident that the PA President has not stood for elections since 2009.
The lopsided UN vote on Jerusalem has not increased Palestinian realism. Symbolic victories are nothing to be sneezed at, but symbols do not buy land. In this case, the triumph at the United Nations must have blinded the Fatah leadership to an ever harsher strategic environment, which renders the silver platter gambit more barren by the day. How so?
During the UN partition vote in 1947, the Arab world acted as one. In the decades to follow, it stuck to refusal, convincing the rest of the world that Israel-Palestine was the root of all Mideast troubles, and Israel the culprit. Yet today, Israel is not the outcast, but a key player in a realigned regional system.
Israel has peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt that have held during its wars against the PLO and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Jerusalem enjoys a tacit alliance with Riyadh and the “Gulfies.” Putin’s Russia coordinates with the IDF in Syria. China and India buy arms from Israel. They will not trade high-tech Herzliya for the backwater of Ramallah.
The critical change is this: The Mideast stage has expanded from the Levant to Ankara in the west and Afghanistan in the East. Angling for hegemony, Iran is now the deadly enemy of the Sunni Arabs. In this new Great Game, Israel-Palestine has receded toward the wings. The “core conflict” is not at the center, but a nuisance, and the key Arab players will not soon sacrifice their Israeli ties on the altar of Palestinian self-deception.
The Palestinians should have their own state, but they will have to do better than in Gaza. This author went to Gaza with Yassir Arafat in 1994 after the fabled handshake with Yitzhak Rabin in the White House Rose Garden. He assumed that this coastal strip would gestate into a Palestinian proto-state, blessed with democracy and the rule of law. Today, Gaza is a corrupt Hamas fiefdom, a threat to itself and the neighborhood—a failed state.
No wonder Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has shrugged off the UN vote. He has the strategic upper hand that adds to his complacency. Why deal with people who want to haul Israeli officials into the International Criminal Court?
For sure, he should and must treat with the Palestinians if they stop misreading the “correlation of forces,” as the Soviets used to call it. Would that the post-Abbas leadership might exchange self-deception for sobriety. Eventually, realism will set in, as it has to between two peoples irrevocably chained to each other. Alas, the mismeasure of reality has been the hallmark of Palestinian policy for 80 years. In the Hobbesian world of the Middle East, there are no silver platters.