By Danielle Pletka
Thursday,
February 08, 2024
It is
beyond ironic that the vile attacks of October 7 have revived the notion of a
two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians — an
idea that was, until that moment, politically moribund. Of course, such a
“solution” was far from Hamas’s aim, but it remains the only idea available to
the lazy diplomatic and peace-processing class. The two-state idea serves the
aims of political leaders in the United States and Europe flailing for a
response to the far Left’s anti-Israel-driven outrage over the war in Gaza. It
answers the mail to the demand to “do something.”
But
the one question no one has bothered to ask is, Is it good for the
Palestinians? And the short answer to that question is no.
“Two-state
solution” is part of the lexicon of sloganeering-cum-politics that includes
“black lives matter,” “defund the police,” and “cease-fire now.” And like all
of those reductionist bumper stickers, it crumbles under scrutiny. The
evolution of each of these ideas is predicated on a grain of truth: Of course
black lives matter. There is indeed police brutality. A cease-fire now would
indeed end the fighting in Gaza, albeit briefly. And a two-state solution would
certainly satisfy the symbolic demands for a Palestinian state.
Also
true of these parallel political constructions is that the slogan has precious
little to do with the actual lives it purports to value. The Black Lives Matter
movement, while soothing to upper-class suburban whites focused intently on
their virtue and their Land Rovers, has enriched a few grifters at its heart
and delivered shockingly little to the actual blacks who live in America’s
cities and are disproportionately victims of crime, beset by poor schooling,
drugs, broken families, and more.
Ditto
the mindless effort to slash police budgets in the unreasoned hope that by
destroying the instruments of law enforcement, somehow there would be fewer
incidents of police brutality. Instead, as numerous failed experiments in a
light police footprint have demonstrated, crime has skyrocketed, businesses
have been forced to shut down, and cities like Portland, Ore., San Francisco,
Oakland, and Washington, D.C., have spiraled into dystopia.
Back
to the Palestinians. They are people before they are a nation or a movement.
And like the hapless props for the various other slogans/movements, their fate
is of little genuine interest to their putative champions. To be
pro-“Palestine” has come to mean little more than to be anti-Israel,
shortchanging the very people such a position is intended to support.
A
little history: Arab opposition in 1948 to the United Nations partition plan
for British mandatory Palestine marks the moment the pro-Palestine movement
trumped the welfare of actual Palestinians. Ignominious losses by Arab armies
to the newly born State of Israel resulted not in a smaller Palestinian state
but in no Palestinian state at all. Neither Jordan nor Egypt evinced any
interest in creating a “Palestine” from the land they occupied after losing the
first war waged against Israel.
The
rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and various other
“liberation” movements similarly focused not on the actual lives of
Palestinians but on the “virtue” of killing Israelis and other Jews. Indeed, we
have those movements and later additions like Hamas and Hezbollah to thank for
the identification of the Palestinian cause with terrorism worldwide.
Worse
still, the PLO maintained its death grip on the reins of the Palestinian cause
by insisting that no Palestinian move into permanent housing or demand equal
rights in the Arab lands they occupied, thereby creating permanent stateless
“refugees.” How was this about the betterment of Palestinian lives? Of course,
it wasn’t.
Even
after the 1993 Oslo Accords, which created the Palestinian Authority and
transferred limited autonomy over parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to PLO
chairman Yasser Arafat, the question of Palestinian well-being at the hands of
their own masters never entered the equation. Israeli treatment of Palestinians
has always been front and center — and that is not unreasonable. But Arab and
Palestinian leaders’ treatment of Palestinians has been a matter of supreme
indifference to Western champions of the cause.
Even
the United Nations agency mandated to care for the welfare of the Palestinians,
the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, became a tool of extremists,
focused on teaching radical Islamism and antisemitism. UNRWA employees have
been caught participating in and celebrating the October 7 attacks, a far cry
from their mandate to support the humanitarian needs of Palestinians. Indeed,
UNRWA has for decades relegated its charges to endless refugee status,
discouraging them from naturalizing — if permitted — in the countries where
they live and forcing them to subsist rather than thrive.
In
fact, the Palestinian people have no real champion.
Palestinians
turfed out of Kuwait in the hundreds of thousands in 1991? Whatever.
Palestinians discriminated against in Lebanon, barred from intermarriage with
citizens, forbidden from entering certain professions, and barred from land
ownership? Meh. And in the West Bank and Gaza? Corruption, declining levels of
education, collapsing economic security, Islamist indoctrination, murder,
kidnapping, and crime . . . all at the hands of the PLO in the West Bank and
Hamas in Gaza — from which Israel withdrew in 2005? Blame the Jews.
If,
for once, the Palestinian people themselves were the priority, rather than
their terrorist and criminal leaders, and if, for once, the two-state-solution
movement — which has morphed into Israel-hatred over support for Palestinians —
took a back seat to the well-being of the population, there might actually be a
pathway to a viable Palestinian state. Right now, however, the Palestinian
people are pawns, props in a local, regional, and global game that puts their
real interests last.
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