No Solution

Reihan considers a two state solution:

I really wish that something like John Bolton’s fanciful scenario could work, i.e., hand over an impoverished Gaza with its poisonous political culture to an Egypt that has more than enough on its plate, and hand some slice of the West Bank to a Jordanian state that warily eyes its restive Palestinian majority, all while Israel’s increasingly radicalized Arab minority (many of them self-identified “Israeli Palestinians”) look on. But it clearly won’t.

The effort to unmake the Palestinian national movement to turn the Palestinian Question into a discrete series of more manageable regional questions seems to have failed. Maybe Israel will keep trying until it works, or until Palestinian partners emerge who can make it work. I don’t know. All I know is that the two-state scenarios that I hear about most strike me as equally implausible. The Palestinian national movement thinks in terms of historical Palestine, which suggests that even the Palestinian state envisioned by the Arab Peace Initiative would be seen as woefully inadequate, not to mention unviable, by most Palestinians. One can see why it would appeal to at least some of the Arab states, of course. Would it win over Palestinian public opinion? The small upside in a two-state solution for the security picture is that inter-state aggression is assigned a different kind of weight. Israel might actually find it easier to defend itself against attacks emanating from a Palestinian state than from the ambiguous entities that exist now. Of course, I’m not even sure about that. After all, the occupation of Gaza had drawn to a close.