What Sort of Palestinian State?

[Valin]

NRO:

9/3/10

President Obama is the latest in a long line of political personalities to think that establishing a Palestinian state would allow the Middle East to live happily ever after, and he has been pressing for it urgently. Superficially, such a state seems a properly human outcome that would at last allow the Palestinians to take control of their lives, as people ought to. At various points in the past, such a state could very possibly have been negotiated, but each time Israel and the Palestinians had demands that neither was willing to concede to the other.

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The most heartening development in this disheartening situation is that conditions on the ground in the West Bank are improving: With financial and technical assistance from the United States, the European Union, and from the hated Israelis themselves, there has been significant work done to build the machinery of governance. Abbas’s security forces — which operated in Yasser Arafat’s day as independent gangs of hoodlums at war with all and each other — are being transformed into a legitimate police force, with U.S. training conducted in Jordan. The transformation is incomplete, to be sure, which is why the best outcome of these talks —whether they break down, founder, or continue — is one that buys Abbas sufficient time to develop more of an infrastructure of governance, thereby heading off a complete Hamas takeover of the Palestinian proto-state.

Abbas is not popular. He stays in office because he has postponed elections on the West Bank. Both he and the Benjamin Netanyahu government fear that another crisis could place both parts of the state of Palestine in the hands of Hamas. This coincidence of interests has strange consequences. Unable to fully to control his territory, Abbas still has to rely for security on Israeli forces, some of them operating under cover and at night. By the same token, Israel has to rely on Abbas to crack down on Hamas and detain those planning jihad. Needless to say, this unspoken deal is shadowy, fraught with betrayals and double crossings.

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