Slo-mo train wreck
I’ve been hesitating to comment on the “Middle East peace process,” but I guess there comes a point at which you can’t ignore it any longer. When even President Obama has turned gloomy, you’ve got to wonder whether the time has come. So here goes:
Leverage in negotiations comes from having “BATNA”: a best alternative to a negotiated solution. The Israelis have one: they just keep on building settlements in the West Bank. The Ramallah Palestinians don’t really have one: Mahmoud Abbas doesn’t want to go back to the Intifada, and there is really nothing he can do to block the settlements. Hamas is trying out a new BATNA, as its last one (rockets into Israeli population centers) did not work so well. It is lying (relatively) low, figuring time is on its side.
The Israelis have got a BATNA, but what Netanyahu lacks is the ability to deliver Israel to a negotiated solution. His government is fractious, and he sees no need to take the political risks a negotiated solution would necessarily entail. Of course Mahmoud Abbas has a similar problem, only his government is just plain broken, since he doesn’t control what Hamas does or does not do. So neither side can deliver its own people to a negotiated peace.
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.
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A friend asks, why shouldn’t the Palestinians make their BATNA a declaration of Palestinian statehood? The short answer is that the Americans are twisting their arms not to do that. The longer answer is that they already did it, in 1988, and nominally more than 90 countries have recognized Palestine as a state (more than have recognized Kosovo). But it doesn’t do much good to declare, or even be recognized, if you cannot in fact exercise sovereignty over a clearly defined territory. Coordinated with the U.S. and the European Union, the proposition might make some sense, especially if it included clearly defined boundaries. But without that, it will make trouble without resolving anything.
–Daniel Serwer
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