Let the Palestinians Have Their State

Its time for Israel to disengage from the disastrous and murderous Palestinian
Authority, no matter how high the cost
By Liel Leibovitz

Middle East
LET THE PALESTINIANS HAVE THEIR STATE
Its time for Israel to disengage from the disastrous and murderous Palestinian
Authority, no matter how high the cost
By Liel Leibovitz
October 9, 2015
You can call the recent onslaught of Palestinian violence against Israelissix
attacks on Wednesday and eight on Thursday, adding to the wave of bloodshed
earlier this weekwhatever youd like. You can call it a new Intifada or the same
old holy war; it hardly matters. What is obvious is that the situation demands
resolution.
Where to begin? Not, sadly, with yet another round of negotiations. Even those
who are, for some reason, still inclined to trust the despotic, corrupt,
obfuscating and deeply illegitimate regime of Mahmoud Abbas would
begrudgingly admit that bilateral talks can only work when theres someone at
hand to guarantee any agreement. The theater of carrots and sticks used to be
an American production, which is why the Oslo Accords, having begun in secret in
a chilly European capital, could only be made official with a handshake on the
sunny White House lawn. But now that President Barack Obama has handed off
regional hegemony to Iran and handed over Syria to Russia, no one in his or her
right mind would pay a nickel for American guarantees. Vladimir Putin
seems more trustworthy, in a horrible way, but with no strategic assets to be
gainedthe recent oil strike in the Golan notwithstandingPutin has no
conceivable interest in stepping in. The EU? The UN? Please.
Which leaves us with the players on the ground. The Palestinian Authority,
despite being the recipient of many Marshall Plans worth of foreign aid, is a
limping kleptocracy that is widely hated by the people it rules and is incapable
even of holding a presidential election, a feat last achieved in 2005. Palestinian
officialdom may fan and even fund sporadic violent attacks against Israelis, but
try imagining anyone truly wanting to die for the PA. Hamas, on the other hand,
has no shortage of homocidal maniacs it was its men who murdered Eitam and
Naama Henkin in front of their childrenand no shortage of incentives with
which to recruit more. There is also the prospect of Iranian patronage, now that

Tehran stands to receive $100 billion in sanctions money from Obama in return
for signing on for a strict regime of nuclear self-inspection. But Hamas cant get
too cozy with Iran, or else it will risk alienating its Sunni patrons in the Gulf,
who see Tehran as a mortal enemy, and are currently fighting Iran and Russia in
Syria. In turn, the Iranians need to worry about the Russians, whose help they
need in order to keep Assad in power. The Russians need to worry about the
Iranians, while the Islamic State worries everyone. In a climate of such wild
uncertainly, the only one thing that is assured is more and even uglier violence.
The Israelis have their own mind-bending dissonances to contend with. Some
still believe that the conflict is primarily about the settlements, or the
Occupation, or any number of mantras that have been mumbled in the cafes and
public parks of Tel Aviv since the late 1970s. Yet even the most devoted
mantra-chanters realize that if the Palestinians have any real historical
grievance, it began not in 1967 but in 1948 or, even, in 1882, with the first wave
of Zionist immigration. If you truly believe the Zionists to be colonialist
occupiersand the secular Palestinian leadership clearly does, just as Hamas
does, and just as some Europeans gladly and hypocritically dowhy is northern
Tel Aviv, erected on the ruins of Sheikh Munis, any different from Ariel or
Efrat, or any other Jewish community in the West Bank? It isnt.
Most Israelis grasp this point instinctively, which is why they have refrained,
since the outbreak of the second intifada, from giving their support to political
parties that so much as hint that Israels primal sin began when Jews returned
to Hebron. Most Israelis also understand that the Despair Defensearguing
that Palestinians are driven to violence because they can no longer see any
possibility of peaceful coexistence, which is all Israels fault, because the
Israelis are so relentlessly cruel and oppressive, and uproot so many centuriesold olive treesis pure hokum. This argument may still be peddled by highranking Israeli doves and Palestinian propagandists alike, but it has relatively
little to do with Israeli behavior in the West Bank: the despair that most
ordinary Palestinians feel ought to be, and often is, directed toward Abbas and
the others who purloined their future. Had the billions the PA received in
foreign aid been directed toward schools, jobs, and the other staples of a
healthy society, Palestinians might be easily able to imagine a robust future for
themselves, regardless of whether Jewish bee-keepers and Torah scholars
chose to also live in the West Bank, and spend their money there.
These realizations lead to a strange sense of clarity. If you believe that Israel
ought to remain a democratic Jewish homeland and not some fantastical onestate monstrosity or the newest province of the Islamic State, you realize that
this seemingly complex conflict has only two simple, practical solutions.

The first is to agree with Abbas that Oslo is dead, and act swiftly and
mercilessly against the terrorist cells that launch or inspire those who stab,
shoot, and blow up Jews. Israel has undertaken such operations before. Now, it
ought to bulk up its list of targets to include anyone implicated in homicidal
violence, and keep at it until the vile gunmen and martyr-manufacturers and
terrorist paymasters who have robbed so many Israelisand Palestiniansof
life and limb and hope are brought to justice.
Even if such an operation miraculously succeeds with few Israeli casualties,
however, it would still leave Israel intertwined with the Palestinians, which is
very bad news for the Jews. As their leaders proved again and again and again,
the real Palestinian project isnt the establishment of an independent nation
state living side-by-side with Israel in peace. That goal, which American
Presidents liked to celebrate, and Arabs paid occasional lip-service to, couldve
been accomplished dozens of times in the past 21 years. But that wouldve meant
making the kind of painful concessions that every grown-up routinely has to
make, as well as doing boring stuff like building houses and roads and schools,
which in turn might suggest that the half-loaf of Palestine was really the end
of the game.
Instead, the Palestinian leadership has chosen to let its people waste their lives
in squalid camps and prison while squandering the cash and the goodwill it has
received for decades, squirreling away hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen
aid money in foreign bank accounts, and throwing lavish weddings for their
childrenand then using pictures of the suffering they nurture to reinforce the
narrative of Palestinian victimhood and Israeli guilt before an endlessly
indulgent global community that apparently couldnt give one fig about what
actually happens to a single Israeli or a single Palestinian child. The entire
purpose of Palestine as imagined by Arafat and Abbas and the other Brahmins
of Ramallah is to serve as a gangrenous limb that will eventually kill the Israeli
body to which it is attached.
Which brings me to the second practical solution: the unilateral disengagement
plan that Ariel Sharon was working to accomplish before he suffered a massive
brain aneurysm. Look at a map of Judea and Samaria, as Sharon did several
times a day, and youll notice that the lions share of Jewish communities are
neatly aligned in a way that allows them all to remain a part of Israel should
Israel decide to unilaterally annex a thin strip of the West Bank. Annex it, and
annex the Jordan Valley, too, a very thinly unpopulated area that is essential to
maintaining Israels security if the neighboring Kingdom of Jordan falls, or the
Islamic State makes further gains in Iraqboth of which seem at the moment
like better than even bets. Israel could then erect a large walla practice that

has proven successful over the past decade in stopping some of the most
murderous Palestinian terrorists from reaching their targets inside Israel
escort all Palestinian prisoners currently held in Israel to the other side of that
barrier, and wait.
If the Palestinians choose to celebrate their disentanglement from Israel by
building a functioning democratic state with literary festivals, protections for
religious minorities, decent colleges, and well-paved streets, Israel should be
the first to massively support it, financially as well as diplomatically. If they opt
for another Gaza and celebrate the Israeli withdrawal with missiles and terror
tunnels, Israel should forcefully act against such aggressions the same way any
other sane nation would.
Using bulldozers to effect a clear physical separation between Israelis and
Palestinians is no ones fantasy of peaceful co-existence. But it could be a start
and its certainly better than what Israelis and Palestinians have now. The fact
that it doesnt conform to what anyone imagined circa 1993 seems about as
relevant to the situation as the rest of what people imagined back in those
halcyon years right after the Cold War ended: a beneficent Pax Americana, the
end of history, many more Nirvana albums, and other wishes that never came to
pass.
Unilateral separation might also help end the confusion that some people on both
sides of the conflict feel when contemplating their fidelities. Israeli Arabs who
deeply resent living in a Jewish statelike the scum who sipped his soft drink as
innocents were being stabbed in front of his eyes in Jerusalem the other day, or
the shopkeepers who laughed and spat at a wounded Jewish woman seeking
shelter for herself and her toddlercould opt to move to the other side of the
fence, where they can live without a single Jew anywhere in sight. And those
Jews who live in communities that would have to be abandoneda tragedy, to be
sure, but one thats nearly impossible to avoidwould similarly have to decide if
theyd rather remain in Hebron under Palestinian rule or abandon their daily
communion with the ancient stones of the holy city of Abraham and Sarah for
the safety and sustainability of life in a thriving, modern State of Israel.
These are difficult choices. And neither scenario I suggest is without major
risks. But the current situation is risky as well, and it isnt likely to get any
better. Ideally, Israel could opt for option one followed by option two: Fight
terror without compromise, and then disengage from the Palestinians while
retaining as many of the Jewish communities in the West Bank as is humanly
possible. Neither of these solutions would bring anything truly deserving of the
word peacewhich is an untenable goal unless both sides want it and probably
unreachable right now even if they did. But either one would likely make walking

down the street in Ashdod or Jerusalem or Petach Tikva a bit safer than it is
right now, which is the kind of hard-headed practical achievement that Zionism
once celebrated. And in a region where artificial states are collapsing into what
is likely to be a decades-long series of wars fueled by religious hatred and
manias and paid for with a seemingly endless supply of petro-dollars, which are
used to buy still more powerful weapons, the value of small victories should not
be easily dismissed.