Do the Palestinians Really Want a State?

[Mosby]

The statelessness of Palestinian Arabs has been a principal feature of world politics for more than half a century. It is the signature issue of our time. The inability of Israelis and Palestinians to reach an accord of mutual recognition and land-for-peace has helped infect the globe with violence and radicalism—and has long been a bane of American foreign policy. While the problems of the Middle East cannot be substantially blamed on the injustice done to Palestinians, that injustice has nonetheless played a role in weakening America’s position in the region.

Obviously, part of the problem has been Israeli intransigence. Despite seeming to submit to territorial concessions, one Israeli government after another has quietly continued to bolster illegal settlements in the occupied territories. The new Israeli government may be the worst yet: Its foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, is so extreme in his anti-Arab views that he makes the right-wing Likud prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, appear like the centrist he isn’t. The prospects for peace under this government are fundamentally bleak.

snip

But there is a deeper structural and philosophical reason why the Palestinians remain stateless—a reason more profound than the political narrative would indicate. It is best explained by associate Johns Hopkins professor Jakub Grygiel, in his brilliant essay, “The Power of Statelessness: the Withering Appeal of Governing” (Policy Review April/May 2009). In it, Grygiel does not discuss the Palestinians in particular, but rather the attitude of stateless people in general.

snip

Grygiel raises a challenging proposition. If his theory is correct, then the Palestinians may never have a state, because at a deep psychological level, enough of them—or at least the groups that speak in their name—may not really want one. 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 license.

snip

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200904u/palestinian-statelessness

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Of course the Palestinians don't want a state.

They have no particular desire to be left alone to watch their children have normal lives. It's too much fun watching their houses be bulldozed, picking up stray bits of kiddie flesh on the streets, lobbing missiles at Israel and contemplating suicide bombings.

Jeez.

[aquart]

2. You have to be careful about that.

What he's describing really seems to be the leadership's syndrome. Statelessness is a great fundraiser. Official states have auditors. I don't really doubt that the rank and file want and believe in a nation of their own.

My small quibble is that nation appears to be Israel.

[MADem]

3. Succinctly stated.

:thumbsup:

[Donnachaidh]

5. you mean the parts of Gaza STOLEN from the Palestinians?

You know, the bits and pieces bombed and bulldozed over the years for illegal settlements that *suddenly* became part of Israel?

:sarcasm: :eyes:

[cali]

11. you need a basic understanding of the geography involved

if you're going to discuss I/P. And it's clear from your comment, that you don't.

[damntexdem]

7. It should have been Isreal -- but now that dream is dead.

After 60 years, it's just too late. Israel IS and has long been a state.

So, compromise WILL be necessary to establish a Palestinian state. But the major opponents of compromise have been Israeli governments and the settlers they have consistently supported.

[Ken Burch]

15. So he's essentially applying the "poverty pimp" smear used against social service professionals

to the Palestinian leadership.

Great.

[Sezu]

23. Your quibble is the elephant in the room

Of course, most here don't wanna talk about THAT, believing somehow that their Western attitudes have some meaning in that neighbourhood.

[Smith_3]

4. And the African-Americans never wanted to be freed from slavery...

...because it would have meant being responsible for their own lives. And that is why they all became thugsters and welfare queens.

:sarcasm:

[Ken Burch]

18. And the Irish never wanted independence because then they'd have nothing to sing about!

n/t.

[damntexdem]

6. And by this theory, no stateless people would ever have a state.

That must be why the U.S., India, and much of Africa are still British colonies. ;-)

[Mosby]

9. It's a recent trend and doesn't preclude state seeking groups

From the Grygiel essay:

Most political groups in modern history have wanted to build and control a state. Whether movements of self-determination in the 19th century, of decolonization in the post–World War II decades, or political parties advocating separatism in several Western states in the 1990s (e.g., Italy and Quebec) — all aimed at one thing: to have a separate state that they could call their own. The means they employed to achieve this end ranged from terrorism and guerilla warfare to political pressure and electoral campaigns, but the ultimate goal was the same — creation of its own state.

It is the ultimate goal no longer, and it is likely to be even less so in the future. Many of today’s nonstate groups do not aspire to have a state. In fact, they are considerably more capable of achieving their objectives and maintaining their social cohesion without a state apparatus. The state is a burden for them, while statelessness is not only very feasible but also a source of enormous power. Modern technologies allow these groups to organize themselves, seek financing, and plan and implement actions against their targets — almost always other states — without ever establishing a state of their own. They seek power without the responsibility of governing. The result is the opposite of what we came to know over the past two or three centuries: Instead of groups seeking statehood through a variety of means, they now pursue a range of objectives while actively avoiding statehood. Statelessness is no longer eschewed as a source of weakness but embraced as an asset.1

This does not mean that state-seeking groups have receded into history, though. The eruptions of violence in Yugoslavia and Chechnya in the 1990s, as well as the continuing tension in Kosovo and the Caucasus (not to mention the activities of farc in Colombia, Hamas in the Palestinian Territories, ltte in Sri Lanka), are examples of situations in which one group is vying to establish full state sovereignty in opposition to another group or government. These are macabre and violent celebrations of the idea of the nation-state. But these groups are no longer the only sources of security threats; nor, perhaps, are they the main ones.

snip

And yet today, there seems to be a marked trend away from the state. The state is no longer the be-all and end-all, and many modern groups prefer to disrupt rather than control political and administrative activities. Broadly, four factors or trends are allowing stateless groups to survive and be effective. The first two point to the feasibility of stateless groups; the second two to their desirability.

The state is no longer the only way to organize and manage large groups. New technologies impart cohesion and strength to an increasingly larger number of dispersed individuals.

The proliferation of weapons and dual-use technologies challenges the monopoly of violence of states by allowing individuals or small bands of people to present serious security and strategic challenges.

The presence today of great powers, and especially of the American preponderance of power, with growing military capabilities to destroy other states, serves as a strong incentive to keep a low, stateless profile: To be stateless is to decrease one’s own footprint, to decrease one’s chance of being a target of retaliation, and thereby to increase one’s odds of survival.

Many of the modern groups espouse radical ideas, tinted by religious and/or extremist views, making them less interested in the establishment of states. States require some sort of political compromise and, even if they are managed in an authoritarian or totalitarian style, they rarely can match the expectations of extremists who tend to become disappointed in political solutions.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/41708942.html

[LeftishBrit]

8. I am sure most do

The leadership probably do too; but they want power for themselves even more than they want a state.

Unfortunately, while some Israeli governments have in theory accepted the concept of a Palestinian state, this one doesn't.

Here's to two states! And to the defeat of the hardliners on both sides.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

10. Yes. Next silly objection to peace, please? N.T.

[cali]

12. Sorry, I don't buy this bit of cheap psychology.

And it's horribly condescending.

[bemildred]

13. Eh.

He has some sound points. But he ought not extrapolate from the fact that some "leaders" find the non-state situation to be in their own self-interest to the notion that "the Palestinians" don't really want a state. Charity organizations can be seen to depend on an adequate supply of people to help too, one does not therefore assume they are actively trying to immiserate people. The goal of political struggle is security and the control of your own affairs, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", that can take the form of a "state" or not. Is there anyone that questions the idea that "the Palestinians" want security and control of their own affairs? I doubt that they would care whether it fits that label or not as long as it was real, and I doubt that they would care much for any "state" that did not provide those things.

[Igel]

14. Grygiel's not bad.

Kaplan misapplies him, IMO. What's true of Hezbollah, of a faction in a state or of a group within a geographic space (but not fully occupying it) certainly isn't true of an entire ethnos.

The advantages of having a state still outweigh, for most people, the advantages of not having a state.

On the other hand, Kaplan has a problem: If Palestinians want a state, why not compromise? If they don't compromise, they must not want a state. Surely the penury of the last 9 years outweighs any crappy deal in the offing. His logic's utterly wrong, because he can't see that the problem is two-fold (albeit reducible to a single factor), and the main problem is cultural.

On the one hand, there's a difference in what the borders should be. For some, no Jewish state is permissible; for others, it is. Until they can agree, at least while disagreement is culturally allowed to grow into violence, it's hard to conduct serious negotiations.

The second is how honor and dignity are ranked wrt independence. For some, absolving the existential humiliation that the presence of Jewish state imposes on them (as they see it) must come first. Or the humiliation is less existential--the abuse, perceived and real, heaped upon the Arabs/Palestinians/Muslims/their clan (etc.). Statehood is secondary until that humiliation, that inner anger, is sated. After all, what's the point of living free if you're living in humiliation and shame? For others, the existence of a prosperous Palestinian state would be sufficient to absolve the humiliation--symbolic degradation of the Zionists might be enough.

[Ken Burch]

16. The Anglo-Palestinian writer Karl Sabbagh

said that one thing that would do a lot to help resolve this would be for Palestinians to be given an apology, or a series of apologies(from Israel and from the U.S., mostly)

I suggest that something like these apologies be made:

1)"We apologize for the dispossession of 1948, the event known as "The Nakba". Israel exists and is going to go on existing, but we do apologize for the hardships that were imposed on the Palestinian people in the creation of this state."

2)"We apologize for the continuous demonization of the Palestinian people and the false implication that they are antisemites and the successors in infamy to the Romans, the Inquisition, the Tsars, the Reich and every other manifestation of European antisemitism. We apologize for acting as if it was perfectly alright to just sweep in and act as if two thousand years or more of continuous occupation of Palestine simply didn't matter. We should have negotiated for land, parcel by parcel, in a process in which the Palestinian Arab population was always treated as our equals".

"We admit, in addition to this, that the Palestinians would have resisted with equal ferocity any OTHER group's insistence on moving into and taking over Palestinian land had any other group done so in the same way the Zionist movement did. There needed to be a place of safety for Jews after the horrors of the Shoah, but we acknowledge that this wasn't the way to achieve it/ It was never fair to imply that the Palestinians resisted because they 'hated Jews'".

3)"We apologize for the diversion of the water and the removal of the olive groves from Palestinian land, for the illegal settlements built since 1973 on land the world considered Palestinian, and for the continuous treatment of Palestinian civilians under the authority of the Occupation. We agree that none of these things should ever have been done."

Israel would lose nothing in making any of the above apologies.

[bemildred]

17. I think Gygiel misses the point WRT the non-state "advantage".

The advantages of being "non-state" only exist in the context of powerful opposition to their existence at all. It is only when you are hunted and outgunned that being hard to target becomes enough of an advantage to outweigh the resulting "inefficiencies". These non-state-actors "choose" their structures pragmatically based on an external environment that is imposed on them, and they can be expected to modify accordingly when the external situation changes. They can easily become "legitimate" parties, they can easily become the new ruling elites.

[shira]

19. They don't want a state

They don’t want a state

Researchers increasingly argue that Palestinians uninterested in statehood

Published: 07.08.09, 17:54 / Israel Opinion


Do the Palestinians want a state? This question sounds like a provocative one. Isn’t it patently clear that the Palestinian national movement aspires to realize its goals by establishing a Palestinian state? Isn’t it patently clear that the ethos of political sovereignty has guided the dreams and struggles of the Palestinian people for ages?


Well, no. It’s not patently clear.


More and more Mideast affairs researchers are today willing to respond to the question about whether the Palestinians want a state with a “no.”Some of them offer a hesitant “no,” while others offer a resounding “no.”


In a June 11 New York Review of Books article, written by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, they two prominent experts argue the following: “Unlike Zionism, for whom statehood was the central objective, the Palestinian fight was primarily about other matters…Today, the idea of Palestinian statehood is alive, but mainly outside of Palestine…A small fraction of Palestinians, mainly members of the Palestinian Authority's elite, saw the point of building state institutions, had an interest in doing so, and went to work. For the majority, this kind of project could not have strayed further from their original political concerns…”


The two experts sum up by arguing that the notion of a Palestinian state is perceived as a foreign import, and as a convenient outlet for foreign elements who interfere with the Palestinian people’s independent wishes. They point to the “transformation of the concept of Palestinian statehood from among the more revolutionary to the more conservative.” Moreover, Agha and Malley argue that in the past, when Yasser Arafat seemingly endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state and even threatened to declare its establishment, he did not adopt an unequivocal stance and did not make his intentions clear. Since Arafat’s death, the notion of statehood lost the remaining popular support it enjoyed.


The message conveyed in the article is greatly commensurate with the argument presented in the new book published by Benny Morris, the leading historian of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The book, titled One State, Two States (Yale University Press, 2009,) details the notion of “two states for two people” starting with the early stages of Zionism and until today. The conclusion is as follows: The Palestinians never adopted the notion of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state existing alongside Israel, regardless of its borders; similarly, the Palestinians have rejected the notion of a joint bi-national state.


After analyzing the official documents of Fatah, the PLO, and the Palestinian Authority, as well as statements made by Palestinian leaders, Professor Morris concludes that from the very beginning, the Palestinian national movement views Palestine as an Arab and Muslim state in its entirety.


Arafat was the only prominent Palesitnian leader who appeared to modify his original position and aspire for the “two-state solution.” In his letter to Yitzhak Rabin dated September 9, 1993, Chairman Arafat recognized the State of Israel’s right to exist in peace and security. However, argues Morris, those were empty words, written solely for the pupose of signing the Oslo Accords.

In practice, Arafat’s position on the issue of Palestine’s partition remained vague and kept on oscillating, while he rejected any pratcital partition deal, including the format proposed by former President Clinton at Camp David. This could be interpreted (and this is indeed how Prof. Morris interprets it) as the Palestinians reluctance to realize their soviereignty in any acceptable form. By now, this has been complemented by Hamas’ complete rejection of Israel and of a Jewish presence in Palestine.

The article written by Agha and Malley, associated with the Left, and Morris’ book, on the Right, convey deep pessimism. The Palestinians will not agree to either divide or share the country. They continue to cling to the revolutionary dream of “national liberation,” and until this unrealistic liberation materializes, they prefer to exist as a national rather than political entity; one that has no obligations and is always seen as a victim, in its own eyes and in the eyes of the world.

We, who live here within a troublesome reality absent of solutions, can only hope that the learned experts are wrong.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3743297,00.html

[LeftishBrit]

21. Who is 'They'?

The Palestinians, like most groups, are diverse and heterogeneous in their opinions. Most do want a state, but may have different views as to what sort.

The question is not whether they *want* a state, but whether the leadership will be able to come together sufficiently to negotiate effectively, and willing to make compromises that may be necessary to achieve a state.

It's a similar sort of question to 'Do the Israelis want peace?' With the exception of some extremists, of course they do - but again there's the question of whether they and their leadership will be able and willing to make compromises that may be necessary to achieve peace.

[Vegasaurus]

22. Sure they want a state

But they want it to replace the one currently called ISRAEL,

They are not now, and never have been, interested in a state "next to" Israel.

[Kurska]

20. The question isn't whether or not the Palestinians want a state.

It's if they can stomach having one next to a jewish state.

If Israel wasn't there they would want a right now state, but as is I'm not so sure that their leadership isn't content to just use their statelessness as a weapon.

[Lakrosse]

24. if they wanted a state, they'd have not

turned down the Peel Commission in 1937 or the UN Partition in 1947, or the Clinton-Barak deal in 2000. I'm not gonna judge all Palestinians, but their leadership really enjoys the prominence and power they get from harnessing anti-Semitism and jihadism.