Why a workable Palestinian state is impossible
- The two-state solution is long dead but Western liberals keep citing it to ease a bad conscience
One for you and one for me. What can be simpler and more equitable? Unfortunately, we are not in kindergarten; we live in a world of merciless power politics. In Palestine, Israel has long enjoyed preponderant power, thanks mostly to the almost unconditional backing of the United States. It makes no sense to ask a pre-eminent power to share land equitably and settle differences once and for all with a people who have been completely marginalised as if they were an equal partner.
In real-life politics, when it comes to equity or inequity, justice or injustice, it’s decided by the distribution of power, not morality. The reality of power is completely reflected on the map today in Palestine. If you really want to understand the Palestine question, study the map in detail, how the ownership and occupation of territories have changed over the decades, but especially after 1967 – and ignore most commentaries in the news media, both social and legacy, including those from yours truly. (Sorry, man, I have to make a living!)
Any state offered to the Palestinians would be completely broken up as to be impossible to form a coherent economic and social entity, the basis on which people can conduct regular business, build essential infrastructure, develop an economy – and generally have a viable future for their children.
The breaking up of the West Bank by security roadblocks and expanding illegal “facts on the ground” Jewish settlements, which are almost always irreversible, and the complete blockade of Gaza, now being razed to the ground – these have all been, and are being, carried out with full US and Western complicity.
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The alternative, which is even more likely, is that there will never be a Palestinian state. Even though such a “state” is currently recognised, de jure, by a majority of the 190-plus member states of the United Nations, the West, led by the US, does not recognise it. Some commentators have argued Taiwan has more reality as a state than Palestine, even though only about a dozen states recognise the Chinese island.
But doesn’t Israel want an enduring peace and live like a normal state? An answer to that may also explain why Benjamin Netanyahu – who is widely unpopular, even hated among the Israeli electorate – manages to become the country’s longest serving prime minister, longer than even the nation’s founder David Ben Gurion.
Netanyahu has sold the illusion that Israel could have stability that resembled peace without a Palestinian state ever. But this statement may actually have reversed the real, though often unspoken, priority of Netanyahu and his fellow Likudniks: peace or no peace, there will not be a Palestinian state. The Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians may have scattered, once and for all, Netanyahu’s political salesmanship, but his underlying Likud anti-Palestinian goal remains intact and is not affected one iota; if anything, the rest of Israel now has no choice but to go along with it.
And the Likudniks are right. Genuine Palestinian statehood is a lost cause; they have made sure of that. Still the idea of it is worth being kept up by most outside parties concerned. Why?
With US backing, Israel has managed to become the biggest military power of the Middle East. Imagine Israel’s true hegemonic potential if it manages either to settle with the Palestinians or neutralise their “threat” once and for all, and redirect its internal security resources for regional “security”. That would be a nightmare for every Arab state and Iran in the region. So while they may not want a fully fledged Palestinian state, which could well ally with perhaps the even more dangerous Shia-axis in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, Arab leaders want to make sure the Palestinian struggle is kept alive to absorb Israel’s expansionist energy by confining it to Palestine.
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And the US? From the second half of the last century, the Middle East meant oil and the petrodollar. That financial and geopolitical architecture is still a major pillar of US global dominance. Now, imagine a Middle East without Israel. Though no major Arab state still entertains that possibility, think of what that regional map would look like; and that may help explain some current puzzling political phenomena. Such a region would be completely Arabic and Iranian/Persian. What a nightmare that would be for the US!
A powerful Israel, backed by the US, keeps the region in check in a similar way that China props up a nuclear-armed North Korea to make sure the Korean peninsula will not be unified and be allied with the US, extending all the way up to the Chinese border. It’s the same calculus that Washington will never accept Chinese unification with Taiwan, with all the potential Chinese hegemony that it could entail in the Asia-Pacific. It’s all about the balance of power.
The problem is that once the vassal, or client state, realises its central importance to the security calculus of its master, it stops taking orders, and turns that relationship on its head. The “master” then finds its leverages to be liabilities. That’s why North Korea has become a free agent while Beijing has no choice but to support it, however frustrating. That’s why, besides ideological affinity, what Israel says goes so long as the US is concerned.
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Unfortunately for the US and the West, standing by Israel means all their talk about international norms and the laws of war against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and “genocide” in Xinjiang have been exposed as nothing but hot air with their cavalier disregard for Palestinian lives in Gaza.
My heart aches for the Palestinians, but my head says they have lost all a long time ago.
