Israel’s Critics Want an Israeli Victory without the War Part

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, March 21, 2024

 

The thuddingly unimaginative strategy for the post-war Palestinian territories to which the Biden White House remains committed looks something like this:

 

Israel concludes its war in Gaza in victory, successfully neutralizing Hamas as a political and military entity — somehow, despite the hectoring of its fair-weather friends in the administration who insist that victory should follow even if Hamas’s remaining brigades secure a sanctuary in Rafah. That victory creates conditions on the ground that countries such as Egypt must accept, even if the exposure of its support for Hama’s rearmament leaves Cairo with a little egg on its face. At that point, Israel is pressured to give up its opposition to a “revamped and revitalized” Palestinian Authority taking control in both Gaza and the West Bank. With the PA in nominal control of the territories, the international community bands together to recognize the existence of a Palestinian state. Voilà! Peace in our time.

 

This project, to which the administration appears wholly committed, advances no American national-security interests. Even the so-called “Arab Street,” which Western intellectuals still believe can never acknowledge Israel’s existence absent its mollification, has been shown by the Abraham Accords to be more pliable if the regimes that govern those streets have the right incentives. All this approach seeks to do is soothe the frayed nerves of the Democratic Party’s Israel skeptics — a noisy contingent that has little regard for U.S. geostrategic interests if that means abandoning their preferred fantasy.

 

This week, an open letter addressed to Joe Biden and signed by 19 Senate Democrats demanded the president condition his administration’s support for Israel’s war aims on the Jewish state’s acquiescence to Palestinian nationhood. “We call on you to publicly outline a path for the United States to recognize a nonmilitarized Palestinian state,” the letter read. It adds calls for “a bold, public framework” outlining the conditions necessary for the U.S. to recognize a “Palestinian state, which includes the West Bank and Gaza, to be governed by a revitalized and reformed Palestinian Authority.” They might as well have demanded George R. R. Martin at long last complete the Winds of Winter manuscript he’s spent the last decade or so composing — it would be an easier task to complete and no less fictional.

 

What are the mechanisms these Democrats envision to enforce the “nonmilitarized” aspects of the compact they describe? How would they cajole tacit supporters of Palestinian militancy inside the American security architecture to case their efforts on their behalf? What about states and non-state actors outside that architecture, like Iran? What multinational undertaking polices this arrangement if not the Israel Defense Forces? The United Nations? An expeditionary force of Arab state peacekeepers? Forget convincing Israel that such an imminently corruptible enterprise would be acceptable — how do you convince the American people that this flight of fancy is in their interests?

 

And all of it is predicated on the notion that the Palestinian Authority will magically “revitalize” itself — an outcome that depends on its advocates eliding how we get from point A to point B. The most recent polling of West Bank residents from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research indicates that the areas under Palestinian Authority control aren’t especially amendable to “revitalization.”

 

Today, support among West Bank residents for the atrocities Hamas committed on October 7 has declined by eleven points from December. Today, only seven in ten West Bank Palestinians support that terrorist massacre. Vastly more West Bankers (64 percent) than Gazans (52 percent) would prefer to see Hamas emerge from the war in control of the Gaza Strip. The number of West Bank Palestinians who want to see the Palestinian Authority in power in Gaza, with or without Mahmoud Abbas as its titular president, is in the single digits. Two-thirds of West Bank residents prefer the “return of Hamas” to the “return of the PA.”

 

With whom are Biden administration officials supposed to negotiate a Palestinian state into existence? The very idea of such an entity — one that would, from the outset, align itself with America’s geopolitical adversaries such as Russia and China — requires that its advocates subordinate the Palestinians with whom we are confronted to a fantastical reimagining of that polity. The Palestinian Authority doesn’t have that luxury, which goes some way to explain why the party in control of the PA, Fatah, has flatly rejected entreaties to reassume authority over a territory from which it was violently ejected in 2006.

 

These irresolvable obstacles before a Palestinian state are never addressed by its advocates. What U.S. interest is advanced by this project? How can we help engineer a political consensus between these two non-contiguous territories (which are distinct national entities in all but name) that would be acceptable to Israel? What are the mechanisms that ensure Palestinian terrorism becomes a thing of the past? There is no answer to these questions that does not begin from the premise that Hamas has been resoundingly defeated and scattered to the winds, never to reconstitute itself.

 

Those who believe a Palestinian State will ease their troubled consciences are witness to something they have not seen in their lifetimes: a war that is being fought to a decisive conclusion. What Israel’s critics truly want is only achievable in the wake of unambiguous Israeli victory. They would rather skip past the hard parts and enjoy only the fruits of Israeli success. Who wouldn’t? But that is a fantasy and a blinkered one at that. It would be laughable if the Biden White House didn’t seem to take the musings of its tormentors on the anti-Israel left so seriously.