Israelis are from Chelm

It is going to be really hard to say anything new or interesting about the Palestine Papers released by Al Jazeera. The Guardian gives a clear and concise video account of what it believes it has found in them–and they’ve had more time to read them than anyone else besides AJ.

Matt Duss has an admirable, and admirably short,  piece at the Wonk Room, emphasizing how the leaked papers demonstrate the overbearing strength of the Israelis (supported by the U.S.) and the weakness of the Palestinians, which will now be exacerbated because the publication of the papers will embarrass the Palestinian Authority and empower Hamas.

And Michael Collins Dunn at the Middle East Institute graces us with this bit of good common sense: “I suspect the key is going to be finding out not just what’s in the headlines but what the documents actually say.”

Of course the problem is that by the time serious people figure out what the papers actually say others will have exploited them for journalistic and diplomatic purposes, making what they actually say pretty much irrelevant.

So here is my quick take:  the papers tell us more about the Israelis than about the Palestinians.  They demonstrate what we already knew and commented on, namely that the Israelis have a lot better alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA).  But that is only true in the near term.

In the long term, not only are we all dead, but in the next generation or the one after that there will no longer a Jewish majority in the territory Israel governs, unless a separate Palestinian state is established in the West Bank and Gaza. This is how I put it in November:

Continuing to build Jewish settlements in the West Bank is making it hard to picture a viable two-state solution. Netanyahu says he wants the Arabs to accept Israel as a Jewish state, but his pursuit of his BATNA is putting the country into a demographic trap: the more settlements he builds, the harder it gets to picture a viable Palestinian state, which is an indispensable component of a two-state solution, and the more likely it gets that Israel/Palestine will end up as a single state, which eventually won’t have a Jewish majority.

So Israel and Palestine are careening towards an outcome neither wants, with leadership on the Israeli side that doesn’t want to take the risks required to prevent it and leadership on the Palestinian side that lacks any means to prevent it. Slo-mo train wreck.

So in a way, the papers show an Israeli leadership that, though strong, is not bold and is therefore losing in the longer term a game in which it is dominant in the shorter term. Surely if I knew my Chelm stories well, I’d be able to dredge one up at this point to demonstrate the point through Jewish folklore, in which the residents of Chelm think of themselves as smart but do foolish, self-defeating things. Instead I grabbed this one from Wikipedia:

One Jewish Chelm resident bought a fish on Friday in order to cook it for Sabbath. He put the live fish underneath his coat and the fish slapped his face with his tail. He went to the Chelm court to submit a charge and the court sentenced the fish to death by drowning.

Anyone notice the resemblance to the Israeli negotiators?