Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Palestinians don’t want a state

Miriam Shaviv
May 7, 2009
http://www.thejc.com/articles/palestinians-don%E2%80%99t-want-a-state
Hatred of Israel outweighs the desire to build a functioning,
flourishing nation
Do the Palestinians really want a state? It seems like a rhetorical
question. The Palestinian struggle for self-determination has been a
feature of international politics for decades and a Palestinian state
has been the ultimate goal of negotiations with Israel since the
Madrid Conference in 1991.
Hasn’t it? An article in the April edition of the prestigious Atlantic
Monthly suggests otherwise. In it, Robert Kaplan, a fellow at the
Center for a New American Security, argues that the main reason the
Palestinians don’t have a state is that they know, deep down, they are
better off without one.
The basis for his assertion is another recent piece, by associate
Johns Hopkins professor Jakub Grygiel in Policy Review, about the rise
of stateless groups. Grygiel’s thesis is that, for the past three
centuries, groups needed state power to organise populations,
participate in international relations, defend themselves and gather
resources. Not so today. New technologies allow revolutionary groups
to mobilise large numbers of people and play a strategic role in
international relations; lethal weapons can be attained by small bands
relatively cheaply and easily.
Moreover, having a state can actually be a burden. For example,
because it is vulnerable to physical attack, a state is vulnerable to
political pressure, too. But non-state actors are harder to defeat
militarily because they can disperse so easily, as the US has
discovered with the Taliban and as Israel found with Hizbollah. Then
there is the tedious business of governing, which involves a
willingness to compromise.
For the Palestinians, Kaplan extrapolates, “Statehood would mean
openly compromising with Israel, and, because of the dictates of
geography, living in an intimate political and economic relationship
with it. Better the glory of victimhood, combined with the power of
radical abstractions! As a stateless people, Palestinians can lob
rockets into Israel but not be wholly blamed in the eyes of the
international community. Statehood would, perforce, put an end to such
licence.”
While Kaplan does urge the US to pressure Israel to compromise with
the Palestinians, he concludes that “the US should also brace itself
for an Israeli-Palestinian conflict that may never end, because the
Palestinians may already have what they want”.
Certainly, it is clear that had the Palestinians truly wanted a state,
they could have achieved one during Oslo. In the Camp David Summit in
July 2000, Ehud Barak offered them well over 90 per cent of the West
Bank, and yet Yasir Arafat walked away. Holding out for 100 per cent,
however, is not negotiation; it is grandstanding. Compare the
Palestinians’ attitude with that of the Jews in 1948. The Jewish
state, after partition, was bitty and narrow, an administrative and
defensive nightmare. And yet the Jews grabbed this cobbled-together
mish-mash, so desperate were they for sovereignty. The Palestinians
claimed that the state offered to them was not viable because it was
fragmented. This did not stop the Jews 60 years ago.
But the Palestinians’ intransigence is not just because, in Kaplan’s
terms, they prefer the fantasy world of statelessness to the adult
world of statehood. The real reason the Palestinians do not have a
state is that there is one thing they want even more — the destruction
of Israel. Egged on by their leaders, media and education system, they
work hard at wearing down the Israelis in a war of attrition, and
helping Iran bring its missiles to Israel’s doorstep, while they could
be making their desert bloom.
Perhaps one day their love for themselves will be stronger than their
hatred for Israelis. Until then, don’t expect a Palestinian state.

 wrote:
Nahum è frenetico in 'sti giorni, sarà mica che sulla visita del papa
dei consustanzialmente antisemiti cattolici la pensa come questi qui?
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3712661,00.html
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3711786,00.html
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3711075,00.html