Reuel Marc Gerecht
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu certainly wants to believe that the Israeli Defense Forces’ ongoing assault on Gaza City, the last unchallenged redoubt of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, will finally destroy the jihadist outfit, solve the hostage crisis, and allow the IDF to return most of its young men and women to Israel: all with minimal Israeli efforts over the longer term. The odds of this happening are poor.
The Israelis are trapped in Gaza. No matter who the Israeli prime minister, no one is going to save Jerusalem from being responsible for the Palestinians. Neither Americans nor Europeans nor, as former Secretary of State Tony Blinken recently dreamed in The Wall Street Journal, Gulf Arabs, are coming to rescue Israelis from garrisoning and feeding the Strip.
All the European self-flagellation about unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state, and the Democratic Party’s canonical embrace of the two-state solution, spring from a conviction that Israel can’t be a liberal, democratic society and the Palestinians won’t stop killing Israelis, and vice versa, until Palestinians have a country of their own. This conviction persists even though the possibility of a Palestinian homeland in the West Bank and Gaza died when Yasser Arafat, in response to Bill Clinton’s and Ehud Barak’s arduous and pretty generous diplomacy, unleashed the Second Intifada in 2000.
Its suicide bombers destroyed Israeli hopefulness and the Labor Party; it also fueled Israeli territorial ambitions — a deeper defense through settlements — and Right-wing Jewish revanchism about a Biblical homeland including so-called Judea and Samaria. Two-state dreaming in the West persists even though it does an enormous disservice to Palestinians, who have to live with far stronger Israelis, who can, if they choose, seize yet more land on the West Bank.
There is no historical reason to believe that the premise about a Palestinian homeland delivering “justice and peace”, as French President Emanuel Macron recently put it, is likely to be true. Both European and Middle Eastern history strongly suggest that nationalism and, even more so, nation-state creation, often intensifies a willingness to kill neighbors and minorities precisely because such a state has the capacity to do so.
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