The Palestinians have agency the same way a juvenile delinquent has agency...if you need something attacked, destroyed, sabotaged or blown up, they're the people to call. But if you need compromise, long-term thinking, tolerance, and a desire for peaceful coexistence, you're expecting from them something that they can never achieve, as they don't know how and have little interest in learning.
The closest analogue I can think of to the Palestinians are the North Koreans: a nation and people formed after a bloody post-WW2 conflict, sealed off from the rest of the world, controlled and conditioned by evil leaders who see their people as disposable props and cattle, fed a steady diet of ideological insanity from cradle to grave, who are essentially zombies programmed by their rulers to erase their own individuality and pledge their lives and the lives of their children to the deranged Cause.
The Palestinians will never de-radicalize because the Palestinians are the literal and symbolic incarnation of the Muslim world's refusal to accept the existence of the Jewish state and their desire to see it destroyed, no matter how many deaths or decades this takes. They are a knife stabbed into Israel's back, with the goal being their eventually bleeding out.
But I applaud the writer for trying and don't want to be the skunk at his party. I am willing to offer my own compromise solution where both sides agree to a ceasefire and a withdrawal from Gaza—as long as Peter Beinart and his family move to the neighborhood closest to the border. He expects Israelis to risk their lives for his career and for his absurd ideas about the Palestinian lamb lying down with the Israeli lion. But he needs to take his theories out of NYC classrooms and see for himself what the real-world result would be—you gotta have some skin in the game!
Beinart and his ilk of "As a Jews", who've yet to meet a Jew hater that they won't defend and support, should just get it over already and convert to dhimmitude. This way they'll at last be released from the burden of Jewishness and all the guilt and anxiety they feel about being associated with the oppressive Zionist entity.
It'll be great for their careers too, like the prof at the end of Houellebecq's "Submission".
"they don't know how and have little interest in learning"
That about sums up the Palestinians. One writer on X called them "the most stupid people on the planet". I'm sure there are others, but he has a point.
They have been very poorly served by some of the all-time worst political leadership. First there was Hitler's Mufti, who cared about nothing more than the extermination of Jews (sounds familiar!), then the kleptocratic terrorist Arafat, who could have had a state but preferred intifada, and of course the insane savages of Hamas; then there were the other Arab leaders, from Nasser to Assad to Saddam and Quadafi etc, who used the Palestinians like condoms in a brothel, mostly to keep their people hating Jews instead of them; then lastly come the UN/NGO bureaucrats who've been eating off the Palestinians for almost 80 years, who treat them like crippled children and who run the schools that teach their kids about the glories of martyrdom, all of which helps scratch their white-savior itch.
The Palestinians are a completely instrumentalized and weaponized people, they exist to serve the needs of others, which now includes the need of Leftist professors who've never left campus or taken a punch but who want to enjoy some radical violence in the name of "liberation"—from a safe distance, of course.
The next time anyone in a position of serious leadership acts for the benefit of the Palestinian people and their safety and prosperity will be the first.
I think you're conflating Hamas with an entire population and just like living under a totalitarian regime in NK doesn't mean they are all exactly like their leadership either.
I just went to a book tour chat with Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib last week. He is from Gaza. It is his belief that the Palestinians in the diaspora become radicalized, but that every day Palestinians are effectively held hostage by Hamas.
There's a young woman (early 20s) that I follow on social media who was able to get out of Gaza. She's not any kind of intellectual let alone a heavyweight, but it is her position that 'every day Gazans just want peace'.
Obviously there are arguments to pushback against her and Alkhatib from Oct 7 and reports from hostages.
But you're basically denying agency by framing it as pure destruction. Claiming an entire ethnicity does not know how to compromise is essentialism in its most classic definition. It ignores localized peacekeeping, business partnerships, political nuance, and turns everything into something kind of cartoonish.
I hate when people do this to Israelis and don't like it any better when applied to Palestinians.
And maybe the worst part of it is, there is no room in your thesis for anything other than more years of war.
I'm not sure that describing Palestinian history as expressed by their leaders is "denying agency", if anything it's the opposite, repeating their clearly stated goals.
And I know "essentialism" is a modern taboo, yet all people and peoples project some essence, especially famous modern tribes—I'm Italian and we ARE loud and talk with our hands and have Sunday dinner with our mamas, these things do point to something real, after all.
And while this essence can't possibly be entirely accurate (of course there are millions of Americans who are quiet, polite and frugal but tell that to Europeans, especially when they see us pouring out of summer tour buses), it does work as a universal shorthand and signalling, for better or worse.
I'm sure your friends are lovely people who prefer not to live in rubble but the facts are the facts: there has never been a Palestinian peace movement nor a Palestinian leader committed to peaceful coexistence, and there still hasn't been a Palestinian leader who accepts the right of Israel to exist. As the Palestinians are a people specifically crafted as anti-Israel and as dedicated to destroying and supplanting it, this is why they're most famous for hijackings, suicide bombings, and various terrorist attacks. And as for the ability to compromise, Arafat and Abbas were offered full statehood repeatedly, in 1993, 2000/2001, and 2008, yet could not bring themselves to accept never mind compromise.
Once again, history speaks clearly here.
Nuance and political partnerships are comically irrelevant here, the equivalent to pointing out your great skin while you're dying of cancer. All these same beliefs about Palestinians wanting peace were held, sadly, by people like Vivian Silver and her friends in the Be'eri kibbutz, who devoted their lives to aiding Gazans, but who were all brutally murdered on 10/7 with the aid of the people they'd helped, who provided Hamas with maps to help find and kill them. Or Aviv Kutz, 54, who lived in Kfar Aza, near the Gaza border. For years, he had organised an annual festival where Israelis flew homemade kites bearing messages of friendship towards the Strip. After October 7, he was found dead in bed, embracing his murdered wife and three children. His peace kite was found nearby.
And as for my thesis and if it has room for "anything other than more years of war", I have one simple requirement for any thesis: facing reality, clearly, squarely and honestly. Telling Israel that they have a legitimate partner for peace is just preferring fanciful illusion over established facts and history and is like telling Charlie Brown to go kick that football again, this time it's sure to work out.
I know it's painful for people to contemplate the Palestinian predicament and their status as eternal refugees living in a perpetual war zone, but all this is the very clear and predictable result of the choices of their political leaders, as much as my ability to type this without worrying about the govt arresting me is the result of our First Amendment.
What has always ailed the Palestinians is a deranged and crippling addiction to Jew hate, and you don't expect an addict to get a job and a home BEFORE they kick their addiction. The same applies here.
And they hate Israel for no reason of course. You guys just act like this feeling of hatred towards Israel just came from nowehrre and has nothing to do with what Israel actually did. Oh, so surprised they hate a movement created that circumvented their self determination rights and then created a dtate by removing 80% of the residents of the region ti create their state and exclude them based on religion. You can't talk about intolerance and no interest in peaceful coexistence in defense of a state created with explicit disinterest in coexistence and forceful seperation in rejection of cooexistence.
Palestinians have been offered a state and full self-determination repeatedly, but turned down every offer sans counteroffer. They have to accept some responsibility for their plight. Their leadership has said clearly and repeatedly that they have no interest in their own state, but only want to supplant the hated Zionist entity.
—removing 80% of the residents of the region ti [sic] create their state?
I'm not sure of your point here, and I'm not sure where and when 80% of any population was moved, but the Arabs were offered their own state (along with the states Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, created at the same time) but chose war repeatedly (also, the Arabs who remained in Israel are full citizens are the only Arabs with full civil rights in the entire ME).
It's bizarre how people treat this one tribe and this one patch of land as sacred indigenous ground where its Ottoman residents must own and live in it for eternity. In the first half of the 20th century, when multiple empires collapsed and two world wars tore up the globe, tens of millions of people were displaced and moved (the list is endless). Every other group re-settled and got on with their lives, except this one group of Arabs, who were made into a fully instrumentalized and weaponized populace, all as part of an endless jihad to erase Israel.
—exclude them based on religion
No one was excluded based on religion. These are two separate peoples fighting over the same scrap of land. Also, Arabs have full religious rights in Israel, while there's maybe a handful of synagogues standing in the Arab world. And in case you don't know, more Jews were displaced and chased out of the ME post-WW2 than Arabs were chased from Palestine, often running for their lives. This could have been a simple swap of people, similar to how Turks and Greeks were swapped post-WW1. It's not the Israelis here who are religiously intolerant.
—a state created with explicit disinterest in coexistence
This is preposterous. Israel has offered peace plans repeatedly and made peace with Egypt and Jordan all in the name of coexistence. When has any Arab state had any interest in coexistence with Israel or any Jews? When did they offer peace?
—forceful seperation [sic] in rejection of coexistence.
Who wouldn't want forceful separation from Hamas, who has Israel's genocide writtten into its charter? Against Palestinians who've spent decades launching various terrorist attacks, suicide bombings, and then the 10/7 massacre? Please tell me about Hamas' commitment to peaceful coexistence.
Like many of Israel's opponents, you seem to want it to surrender to its enemies who've been promising to drive them into the sea for 80 years. But your history is all wrong and you seem to be working backwards, blaming Israel first then providing reasons. But blaming them for lack of peace is historically illiterate—both Arafat and Abbas were offered full statehood with almost all of Gaza and the WB, and they turned it down.
Arabs have been stewing in anti-Jewish hate for a century now and this is where all the hatred has led them. If they really have any interest in self-determination, they should accept Israel's existence, sue for peace, and build their own society from there.
Stop talking in cliche points, absolutely intellectually bankrupt.
"Offered a state", haa yes, that is after the fact. The current Israel greenline borders removed 80% of the residents in 1948. This is such a clearlya bullshit idea "we gave your kin or people with similar language as you a state in another part of the region is why 80% of you in this place gets to lose your rights to your hones" that is not how self determination works. You can't go to Nigeria in 1950, say "you can establish a state in the North, while African Americans will establish a state in the south and expext them to just take it, people are individuals for fucksake, they don't lose their rights because they are part of a group. Israels existence is anti self determination, if self determination was applied, no such thing as Israel would exist . You keep accusing Palestinians of wanting to drive Israelis out, but the side tagt has done the most comprehensive drive out was actually Israel(it onky stooped short of 100% of the land and 100% arab expelled because of international pressure that stopped its land grab in 1948)
Enough with the bullshit about Israel enemies, it went to a region forcibly declared a state and expelled and crushed the will of the majority and is surprised it is hated.
You obviously consider the creation and existence of Israel illegitimate and believe there's some way to do-over 1949 or 1967 and appeal to some cosmic or global judge who will send all the Jews elsewhere so the Arabs can have 100% control of the Middle East instead of only 95%. But this doesn't mean you get to rewrite history and replace it with hysteria.
These endless revisiting of historical claims is just a pointless rhetorical game and a political fantasy of people who want to destroy Israel, which Israelis understandably oppose.
How many decades will the Palestinians nurse their grievance? I know people who still have the keys to the parents' homes who were chased from both Cuba and Russia after 20th-century revolutions—and yet this one group of Arabs have divine right to eternal jihad because they were displaced Ottomans over a century ago? This eternal jihad/tantrum has led to their current situation, with Gaza in rubble and the WB not much better. Isn't it time to grow up and take responsibility?
—You keep accusing Palestinians of wanting to drive Israelis out...lol
Have you read the Hamas charter? Heard of Amin al-Husseini (aka Hitler's Mufti)? That guy was such a deranged Jew hater even the Nazis told him to calm down!
Here's Arafat:
"We will continue to make war on Israel by ourselves until we get Palestine back. The end of Israel is the goal of our struggle, and it allows for neither compromise nor mediation....We don’t want peace. We want war, victory. Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else. What you call peace is peace for Israel and the imperialists. For us it is injustice and shame. We will fight until victory. Decades if necessary, generations."
Did Israelis hallucinate this!?
—forcibly declared a state
The state was declared by the UN with the help of the British, who had full territorial control at the time. Israel agreed to every peace and partition plan, which would have given Arabs almost the entire area:
—and expelled and crushed the will of the majority...
Which majority? If I got a majority of people to say that you needed to move and/or die would you submit? Yes, Arabs hate Jews and want Israel gone and have for a century, and this is where we still stand.
Feel free to join the eternal anti-Jewish jihad, but it's been a total failure, Israel will not be erased, and maybe it's time to accept reality and plot a new path forward.
I doubt they have the intelligence or the agency. They are too used to being pawns and sucking on the teat of foreign aid. Winding up UNRWA would be the first step, but they will never have a state.
I understand the objection, but the same was true of the Arab world at large for many decades. Yet Israel has now made peace with multiple Arab nations that eventually accepted reality. So the proof of concept is there. The key is to get the region’s pragmatic Arabs more deeply involved in pushing the Palestinians in the same direction.
They may be “at peace “ but that is different than loved. Peace with Egypt and Jordan is practical. And that’s fine. Love not required. If I feel that I can’t defeat you and a relationship with you can be beneficial then ok. The Egyptians buy Israeli gas because they need it. Not because they like Israel. As to the Palestinians good luck with that. Hamas longed backed by Qatar are still embedded in Gaza, Hezbollah aligned and agent of Iran will never make peace with Israel. Lebanon is barely a sovereign nation due to Iran. Same with Iraq. UAE jumped into Abraham Accords. Not sure they would do it today but they are hanging in there and are doing bilateral business with Israel. The settler movement and anti Palestinian violence is not helpful nor morally justified
Excellent analysis and proposal. I don't know if I agree with all details, but there needs to be more discussions of various plans to get away from permanent war and occupation. I hope that US and European universities and think tanks would come up with proposals developed jointly by Arab and Israeli scholars, and force these proposals to front pages of every newspaper in the world. The politics everywhere have ossified, yet revolutionary tactics would only make things worse. So, hopefully a strong and concerted push to convince the public (Israeli, Arab, American, and European) that the status quo is unsustainable and new peace negotiations are needed, will succeed this time. Maybe now is darkness before new dawn.
1. Why would Jordan potentially destabilize itself? This seems like a big risk to the current regime there, adding a large number of potentially hostile, radical Islamists.
2. The current Western support for "from the river to the sea" is probably just feeding the dreams of the most intransigent palestinians and making them less inclined to compromise.
1. In this scenario, the Palestinian leadership would actively seek a stabilizing Jordanian role, which would mitigate the risk of another Black September. That being said, yes, there would still be a large number of potentially hostile, radical Islamists even if a critical mass of Palestinians chose pragmatism. But let's not forget that Jordan itself previously annexed the West Bank and only officially relinquished its claim in 1988. The upsides for Jordan include the reclamation of territory it once held, access to the Mediterranean via Gaza (plus an offshore natural gas field), and significant investment/support from both the West and Gulf Arab states.
2. Yes, and I'm arguing that they should take the opposite approach. The current Western popularity of "From the river to the sea" is unsustainable and impractical. Better to leverage it for attainable ends.
"In this scenario, the Palestinian leadership would actively seek a stabilizing Jordanian role, which would mitigate the risk of another Black September. "
It might have the opposite effect: a destabilizing effect. Having disengaged in 1988, leaving Israel to hold the baby, I can't see Jordan reversing that strategic victory by getting involved with a potentially destabilizing population of 'Palestinians' who are currently Israel's problem.
You're assuming that the status quo will hold indefinitely, and that trouble in the West Bank wouldn't spill over the Jordan River regardless. Jordan's stability would also be threatened by a West Bank uprising that draws in its own Palestinian population, an attempted transfer of West Bank Palestinians to Jordan, or the creation of a failed Palestinian state next door. Through confederation, Jordan would gain institutional leverage over its own greatest security risk.
Straw man: no status quo holds indefinitely. Jordan would have an interest in maintaining the status quo, rather than giving an opportunity for East and West Bank Palestinians to form a homogenous group. I doubt Jordan would want to resume responsibilities it abandoned in 1988 even if full sovereignty were offered.
"King Hussein’s waiving of Jordan’s claim on the West Bank was never ratified by the country’s parliament and was seen by many, including former Crown Prince Hassan bin Talal, as unconstitutional. In 2012, he said that since no two-state solution was still possible, the Palestinian Authority should let Jordan recover its control of the territory. The call for Jordan’s return to the West Bank was also supported by former royal adviser Adnan Abu-Odeh and two former Jordanian prime ministers, Abdel Salaam Majali and Taher al-Masri. In 2008, Mr. Majali announced a confederation plan, spurred by his fear that Israeli disengagement would provoke a massive migration or forced transfer of Palestinians into Jordan. Jordan also has every reason to fear a Hamas takeover of the West Bank if Israel departs."
The article also notes that King Abdullah himself has left the door open to a confederation with the Palestinians “once a Palestinian state is created.” My proposal is simply to rearrange the sequence, because a viable Palestinian state is unlikely to be created in the first place without Jordanian involvement.
Palestinian nationalism is a nationalism without a nation. Intransigent opposition to Israel is the sole source of Palestinian identity because Palestinian Arabs lack any distinctive language, religion, or culture. Since that makes it hard for them to build a country of their own, a confederation as proposed by Ben Koan could be a logical long-term solution.
No. Palestinian nationalism is a nationalism without a state. 'Nation' in this sense is simply an ethnic group with political aspirations. There are hundreds, if not thousands of such stateless nations around the world.
Your point about the Palestinians negative identity is sound. The political consciousness that defines the nation is the destruction of Israel. That isn't going to change and is no basis for a peaceful state. The only solution is the dismantling of 'Palestine' and replacing it with something else. Dan Scheuftan's emirate proposal is the best suggestion so far.
The Palestinian Arabs are part of a larger nation; they are not a distinct ethnic group. A good analogy might be the Kosovar Albanians. They succeeded in splitting off from Serbia and setting up their own rump state, but they are really Albanians, not "Kosovarians."
Nationalism and ethnicity are distinct concepts. Nation is an artificial construct effected by self-identification. By your argument, Australians and Canadians, being Anglo-Saxons would not be a separate nation. Austrians, being German ethnic, would not be a nation, most South Americans, being Spanish would not be nations.
The Pallies, being ethnically Arab, have a shared consciousness built on self-inflicted failure (The Nakba), the legal fallacy of 'occupation', the sui generis status of being 'permantent refugees', based on the fallacious right of return to their great grandparents' houses and the collective desire to destroy Israel. Even though their identity is built on bullshit, it's still a sufficiently shared consciousness to make them a nation.
True, a shared history also helps shape a nation. Palestinian national identity, such as it is, is based on the history of struggle with Zionists and Israel. But somehow the pro-Pals who make this argument generally fail to recognize a Jewish Israeli nationhood based on the history of struggle with "Palestine"!
I'm rather fond of this idea, but when I was in Jordan 30 years ago, a young man confided in me that ethnic Jordanians secretly hate their ethnic Palestinian fellow citizens, because the PLO tried to assassinate King Hussein. That distrust would have to be overcome.
30 years ago black September was 36 years in the past and now it’s 66 years. So I think it’s less of an issue. The real issue is Palestinian nationalism is far more well developed now than 30 years ago.
On that note, that's why I favor a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation (with Hashemite leadership but Palestinian buy-in and representation) vs a straight-up Jordanian annexation.
In the absence of any Palestinian peace movement, it seems to me that the very first step would be a public declaration (in Arabic and, if we ever get that far, Farsi and Turkish) accepting the “two states for two peoples” principle, thereby signaling that the Muslim world accepts the concept of Jewish sovereignty in a portion of their ancestral homeland.
Absent that, I see no prospect of any real move toward peace. No competent international military contingent is prepared to risk casualties. In the run up to the Six Day War, the UN peacekeepers in Sinai simply abandoned their post at Egypt’s request. And who can forget the UN troops who simply fled to Israel rather than face down Syrian armed factions.
Also, for now there is a close to zero chance of Jordan accepting Palestinians as citizens. Among other reasons, the Bedouins would read it as a direct threat to their power and the bulk of the population - even if they have no memory of Black September - nevertheless see the ‘48 and ‘67 Arabs of Palestine as humiliated losers to the despised Jews.
Finally, there is the theological overlay to be addressed because everyone is best protected if there is a warm peace. Now the religious doctrine is, in a word, Jews are going against Islam by refusing to submit with matters made infinitely worse because Israel unlike its neighbors is also prospering. These facts undermine Islam’s promise to its adherents that they are on the winning side.
The alternative might be a reinterpretation of doctrine to foreground those sections of the Quran that has Allah promise the Holy Land to the children of Israel. Whether this can be pulled off is an intra-Islamic matter.
The bottom line for me is that any durable resolution is a generational one especially given the horrors of October 7. While one may quibble with the details of your proposals, the foundation for peace is not there.
This just isn't going to happen. The arab world wants nothing to do with the Palestinians. Jordan in particular, because they tried this once already (taking in an absurd amount of Palestinian "refugees") and it resulted in Black September and a coup attempt. Lebanon was Christian before the PLO and Palestinian refugees started a civil war.
The Jordan thing only sounds like a good idea to a western mind that doesn't understand the history of the region.
Jordan is already ~ 60% Palestinian. So, de facto, it already has plenty to do with the Palestinians. Adding the West Bank to Jordan would increase its Palestinian population to ~ 69%. Adding both the West Bank and Gaza would increase it to ~ 73%. This would be a demographic adjustment, not a demographic revolution.
It’s a great plan, but like any other plausible end to this conflict, it requires one or more Arab state to take responsibility for security and defense of Palestine (at least ‘initially’)- see Ram Emmanuel’s 23 state solution. Let’s add a confederation with Druze & other aspirational states in the region, why not?
This is a fantasy. The Palestinians will never go for it. Western attitudes towards Israel will not reset, though they may cease to be the top issue for a while. All the Palestinians have to do is wait for boomers to die off and watch the bipartisan support for Israel rapidly switch polarity. At that point it’s just a matter of time before a Democratic president comes into office and not only cuts aid to Israel, but embargos arms to them, including placing secondary sanctions on friendly nations who sell to Israel. The Iranians have just shown it is now quite easy for an asymmetric adversary to convince insurance companies to turn off civilian shipping, and such an administration will do nothing to prevent the Iranian proxies from imposing an effective embargo on Israel. Without a steady flow of replacement parts the IAF will find it harder and harder to keep flying aggressive missions as this goes on longer and longer. Israel has the will to persist in the face of this kind of treatment, but they will have to resort to less precise munitions without American aid and this will only turn the world harder against them. This is the plan. The left tells you this is the plan every time they accuse Israel of “apartheid” because they’ve run this playbook before. Israel has assets that Rhodesia and South Africa did not have, and I like their chances a lot better, but it’s going to be hard for Israel to make it through the next century without being ethnically cleansed. It needs to make hay while the sun is shining and secure alternative alliances for the coming storm.
"...before a Democratic president comes into office and not only cuts aid to Israel, but embargos arms to them, including placing secondary sanctions on friendly nations who sell to Israel."
I doubt it would come to that. Israel and the US need each other equally. Whatever rhetoric might win elections would face the hard reality of geopolitics when push came to shove.
Israel is a short term tactical asset in a region that is becoming less and less important every year as the energy transition proceeds. It’s not at all clear that Israel is a strategic asset for the US over the long haul given the animosity that supporting them generates towards the US and the way Israeli wars have a way of dragging America in. Even if you consider Israel a strategic asset, the show will go on if America suffers even a significant strategic setback in the Middle East. Metropolitan America will carry on regardless of what happens at the periphery of empire, and for a movement that both hates the American empire as an end in and of itself and has made support for the ethnic cleaning of Israel a litmus test to be a member in good standing, a setback like that will not be much of a deterrent. Leftist Americans are so safe and insulated that they just don’t care about that kind of thing. Scoring points internally is far more important. You might as well say the Ming will never decommission their treasure fleets because then they will ceed the age of exploration to the Europeans. The problem with realist international relations is that it fails to account for countries being retarded for weird internal reasons when this happens all the time.
The idea that Israel and the US need each other equally is laughable. Israel needs the US as a matter of survival. The US doesn’t need Israel at all, and will at worst be embarrassed by a loss of the alliance.
«The idea that Israel and the US need each other equally is laughable. Israel needs the US as a matter of survival. The US doesn’t need Israel at all,»
The USA could do without Israel if there were no oilfields in the vicinity and no vital sea route chokepoints in the vicinity. But there are so it is quite important for the global power of the USA to keep that entire vicinity destabilized, and sacrificing a bunch of religious fanatics for that the task is a fairly cheap strategy.
In what way is it within US interests to keep the region destabilized? We want it stable and producing oil that it sells into the world market. And it’s not as if we would be without allies in the region if Israel were to go away.
«In what way is it within US interests to keep the region destabilized?»
It is not just the USA it is also the EU and the Russian Federation: the Levant is the "near abroad" of 3 big regional powers that need to be contained, and those 3 big regional powers were the origin of vast empires that one after the other attacked Europe and Russia: Iran, Arabia, Turkey. In Europe schools for now still teach about the heroic resistance of the greeks and romans against the invading iranians in the ancient age, as well as the heroic resistance against the invading arabs in the middle ages, and the heroic resistance against the invading turks/tatars in the modern age.
Regardless these 3 regional powers control the straits of the Bosphorus, the Suez canal, the straits of Hormuz, the straits of the Red Sea which makes them a big threat to both the EU and the Russian Federation. Not directly to the USA, but the USA elites prefer that nobody but themselves can block those straits.
«We want it stable and producing oil that it sells into the world market.»
You may want that but the USA elites do not need imports of oil and want USA oil exports to have a high price and less competition from iranian, iraqi, arabian, libyan suppliers. Otherwise why would they repeatedly wreck big oil producers like Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, Iran? Do you really think that they are that serially stupid?
Power come from being able to either take things for oneself or to deny things to others and the global power of the USA is mostly in the ability of the USA Navy to block all main sea trade routes (plus the ability of the USA Treasury to block all main flows of payments and the ability of the USA CIA to "color revolution" a state).
«And it’s not as if we would be without allies in the region if Israel were to go away.»
The USA have no allies except perhaps France (and even more perhaps Morocco), only vassals. In particular most of the elites of Arabia and the Levant are very ready to sell-out to the best offer because they understand well how weak they are and how fragile is their rule and simply want to maximize their loot while they are in power. Israel itself is no ally of the USA, just a tool.
Green energy was 85% of new electric capacity last year. This is all going to play out in a generation or two so there will have been plenty of time for the transition to proceed. It will not be complete by any means, but there will be lower demand for oil and consumers will have a lot more options for ways to stretch things out and care less about what oil producers are up to. It’s crazy to think that fossil fuels will be irrelevant, but it’s equally crazy to not notice that we’ve just crossed and inflection point when it comes to the levelized cost of energy from solar and think about the implications of that in 20-40 years.
Nameplate capacity and 'levelized cost of energy' are two tricks in the green energy scam swag. Therefore, while renewables accounted for over 85% to 92% of new additions globally in recent years, they still account for around 30-40% of total global electricity generation, with fossil fuels continuing to provide the majority of total global megawatt-hours. And that only talks about electricity, which only accounts for 20% of global energy consumption.
No one can predict what will 'play out' in a generation or two. Like your LCOE metric, such predictions rely on magical thinking, like your predictions for geopolitics.
Saying “the derivative may be bigger but the value is smaller” isn’t actually the dunk you think it is when we are talking about the world in a couple of generations. Also keep in mind that we don’t need a total transition for green energy to radically change the geopolitical implications of oil. There are plenty of oil producers outside the Middle East and if there is enough green energy deployed the world may be able to just do without middle eastern oil for extended periods. On top of that, every time there is oil instability, it incentives people to build alternatives, so every time someone uses oil as a geopolitical weapon it becomes less and less effective. That wasn’t true before the cost of green energy fell so much, but now it is. Also, with any luck by the time this all plays out nuclear will be more widely deployed, which is also removing fossil demand.
I'm not actually sure the anti-Israel faction in the West will gain power. In America Palestine is assumed with the DSA wing. They may take over the Democrats, but they will never win nationwide. Moreover, in Europe the rising parties are right wing. They can probably be turned into pro-Israel parties.
Young right wingers do not like Israel. Many of them are antisemites in the traditional sense. Once the boomers die, the Republicans will no longer be reliable allies for Israelies. I don’t think they would ever blockade or embargo Israel because they don’t like the Palestinians either, but they would certainly cut aid and stop providing diplomatic cover. They may resist a Democratic president embargoing Israel but if they do it will be entirely because of negative partisanship, not because they are friends of Israel.
Ideally, the Jordanian government would ban Hamas and any irredentist parties. However, you're right that enforcement would be difficult. That's the main reason I think Jordan should only take the West Bank.
On the other hand, Palestinian nationalism (as well as most forms of nationalism) generally rejects the idea that the nation itself can simply be divided between two separate states. It's common to hear Palestinian nationalists insist on the unity of the Palestinian nation.
The charter of Likud says "The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river". The plan has always been a two-state solution one for the palestinian jews west of the Jordan, and one for the palestinian non-jews east of the Jordan (Transjordania) where to exile all those evicted from their land.
Regardless all these proposals are delusions: the elites of both sides seem to have decided that any end to the conflict will mean they will lose power, so the elites of both sides have been committing atrocities against the other side to poison popular sentiment on both sides.
The elites of both sides also tell their subject that they do not need to compromise because eventually their own side will get all of the land: the israeli side because they have nuclear weapons and better organization and unlimited USA funding, and the other side because they think that like in the past 1,400 years some new empire will conquer all of the levant, and then will gift them all the land.
Which means that the conflict will continue to destabilize the region for a long time to the benefit of some great powers (but not of China) and I fell sorry for the ordinary people on both sides who are being used. But I must admit that as weapons of destabilization fanatics like Netanyahu and HAMAS are very effective.
The California natives got citizenship, there is currently no law that gives different groups in California different rights and citizenship status based on identity. India Pakistan both had displacements, both would exist without the displacement easily, they negotiated a right of return in the Dehli Pact.
Greek and Turkey are of course crazy and not a model any part of the world should emulate.
Serbia and Kosovo didn't expel 80% of the residents of anywhere to create their state but they did used to have discriminatory laws and that is bad.
And India Pakistan is not a model to emulate, those two like Greece Turkey essentially work by pointing Nukes at each other.. Israel is not letting a Palestine state be armed, Palestinians are not gonna feel safe being unarmed and at the mercy if Israel forever.
The closest analogue is clearly just Canada, New Zealand, US and their respective natives. Northern ireland and the Brits. The Pogromed German Jews have been given right of return.
And this argument has a particular flaw when it comes to Israel cause Israel is literally contrary evidence of the claim on its own, it's a 2000 yr old recidivism movement.
The Palestinians have agency the same way a juvenile delinquent has agency...if you need something attacked, destroyed, sabotaged or blown up, they're the people to call. But if you need compromise, long-term thinking, tolerance, and a desire for peaceful coexistence, you're expecting from them something that they can never achieve, as they don't know how and have little interest in learning.
The closest analogue I can think of to the Palestinians are the North Koreans: a nation and people formed after a bloody post-WW2 conflict, sealed off from the rest of the world, controlled and conditioned by evil leaders who see their people as disposable props and cattle, fed a steady diet of ideological insanity from cradle to grave, who are essentially zombies programmed by their rulers to erase their own individuality and pledge their lives and the lives of their children to the deranged Cause.
The Palestinians will never de-radicalize because the Palestinians are the literal and symbolic incarnation of the Muslim world's refusal to accept the existence of the Jewish state and their desire to see it destroyed, no matter how many deaths or decades this takes. They are a knife stabbed into Israel's back, with the goal being their eventually bleeding out.
But I applaud the writer for trying and don't want to be the skunk at his party. I am willing to offer my own compromise solution where both sides agree to a ceasefire and a withdrawal from Gaza—as long as Peter Beinart and his family move to the neighborhood closest to the border. He expects Israelis to risk their lives for his career and for his absurd ideas about the Palestinian lamb lying down with the Israeli lion. But he needs to take his theories out of NYC classrooms and see for himself what the real-world result would be—you gotta have some skin in the game!
Thanks!
I'm sure Beinart would be game if BDS activists demanded it. Solidarity and all.
Beinart and his ilk of "As a Jews", who've yet to meet a Jew hater that they won't defend and support, should just get it over already and convert to dhimmitude. This way they'll at last be released from the burden of Jewishness and all the guilt and anxiety they feel about being associated with the oppressive Zionist entity.
It'll be great for their careers too, like the prof at the end of Houellebecq's "Submission".
Thanks again
"they don't know how and have little interest in learning"
That about sums up the Palestinians. One writer on X called them "the most stupid people on the planet". I'm sure there are others, but he has a point.
They have been very poorly served by some of the all-time worst political leadership. First there was Hitler's Mufti, who cared about nothing more than the extermination of Jews (sounds familiar!), then the kleptocratic terrorist Arafat, who could have had a state but preferred intifada, and of course the insane savages of Hamas; then there were the other Arab leaders, from Nasser to Assad to Saddam and Quadafi etc, who used the Palestinians like condoms in a brothel, mostly to keep their people hating Jews instead of them; then lastly come the UN/NGO bureaucrats who've been eating off the Palestinians for almost 80 years, who treat them like crippled children and who run the schools that teach their kids about the glories of martyrdom, all of which helps scratch their white-savior itch.
The Palestinians are a completely instrumentalized and weaponized people, they exist to serve the needs of others, which now includes the need of Leftist professors who've never left campus or taken a punch but who want to enjoy some radical violence in the name of "liberation"—from a safe distance, of course.
The next time anyone in a position of serious leadership acts for the benefit of the Palestinian people and their safety and prosperity will be the first.
"The Palestinians are a completely instrumentalized and weaponized people,"
Does that observation support or refute my point? Or neither?
support!
I think you're conflating Hamas with an entire population and just like living under a totalitarian regime in NK doesn't mean they are all exactly like their leadership either.
I just went to a book tour chat with Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib last week. He is from Gaza. It is his belief that the Palestinians in the diaspora become radicalized, but that every day Palestinians are effectively held hostage by Hamas.
There's a young woman (early 20s) that I follow on social media who was able to get out of Gaza. She's not any kind of intellectual let alone a heavyweight, but it is her position that 'every day Gazans just want peace'.
Obviously there are arguments to pushback against her and Alkhatib from Oct 7 and reports from hostages.
But you're basically denying agency by framing it as pure destruction. Claiming an entire ethnicity does not know how to compromise is essentialism in its most classic definition. It ignores localized peacekeeping, business partnerships, political nuance, and turns everything into something kind of cartoonish.
I hate when people do this to Israelis and don't like it any better when applied to Palestinians.
And maybe the worst part of it is, there is no room in your thesis for anything other than more years of war.
I'm not sure that describing Palestinian history as expressed by their leaders is "denying agency", if anything it's the opposite, repeating their clearly stated goals.
And I know "essentialism" is a modern taboo, yet all people and peoples project some essence, especially famous modern tribes—I'm Italian and we ARE loud and talk with our hands and have Sunday dinner with our mamas, these things do point to something real, after all.
And while this essence can't possibly be entirely accurate (of course there are millions of Americans who are quiet, polite and frugal but tell that to Europeans, especially when they see us pouring out of summer tour buses), it does work as a universal shorthand and signalling, for better or worse.
I'm sure your friends are lovely people who prefer not to live in rubble but the facts are the facts: there has never been a Palestinian peace movement nor a Palestinian leader committed to peaceful coexistence, and there still hasn't been a Palestinian leader who accepts the right of Israel to exist. As the Palestinians are a people specifically crafted as anti-Israel and as dedicated to destroying and supplanting it, this is why they're most famous for hijackings, suicide bombings, and various terrorist attacks. And as for the ability to compromise, Arafat and Abbas were offered full statehood repeatedly, in 1993, 2000/2001, and 2008, yet could not bring themselves to accept never mind compromise.
Once again, history speaks clearly here.
Nuance and political partnerships are comically irrelevant here, the equivalent to pointing out your great skin while you're dying of cancer. All these same beliefs about Palestinians wanting peace were held, sadly, by people like Vivian Silver and her friends in the Be'eri kibbutz, who devoted their lives to aiding Gazans, but who were all brutally murdered on 10/7 with the aid of the people they'd helped, who provided Hamas with maps to help find and kill them. Or Aviv Kutz, 54, who lived in Kfar Aza, near the Gaza border. For years, he had organised an annual festival where Israelis flew homemade kites bearing messages of friendship towards the Strip. After October 7, he was found dead in bed, embracing his murdered wife and three children. His peace kite was found nearby.
And as for my thesis and if it has room for "anything other than more years of war", I have one simple requirement for any thesis: facing reality, clearly, squarely and honestly. Telling Israel that they have a legitimate partner for peace is just preferring fanciful illusion over established facts and history and is like telling Charlie Brown to go kick that football again, this time it's sure to work out.
I know it's painful for people to contemplate the Palestinian predicament and their status as eternal refugees living in a perpetual war zone, but all this is the very clear and predictable result of the choices of their political leaders, as much as my ability to type this without worrying about the govt arresting me is the result of our First Amendment.
What has always ailed the Palestinians is a deranged and crippling addiction to Jew hate, and you don't expect an addict to get a job and a home BEFORE they kick their addiction. The same applies here.
And they hate Israel for no reason of course. You guys just act like this feeling of hatred towards Israel just came from nowehrre and has nothing to do with what Israel actually did. Oh, so surprised they hate a movement created that circumvented their self determination rights and then created a dtate by removing 80% of the residents of the region ti create their state and exclude them based on religion. You can't talk about intolerance and no interest in peaceful coexistence in defense of a state created with explicit disinterest in coexistence and forceful seperation in rejection of cooexistence.
—circumvented their self determination rights?
Palestinians have been offered a state and full self-determination repeatedly, but turned down every offer sans counteroffer. They have to accept some responsibility for their plight. Their leadership has said clearly and repeatedly that they have no interest in their own state, but only want to supplant the hated Zionist entity.
—removing 80% of the residents of the region ti [sic] create their state?
I'm not sure of your point here, and I'm not sure where and when 80% of any population was moved, but the Arabs were offered their own state (along with the states Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, created at the same time) but chose war repeatedly (also, the Arabs who remained in Israel are full citizens are the only Arabs with full civil rights in the entire ME).
It's bizarre how people treat this one tribe and this one patch of land as sacred indigenous ground where its Ottoman residents must own and live in it for eternity. In the first half of the 20th century, when multiple empires collapsed and two world wars tore up the globe, tens of millions of people were displaced and moved (the list is endless). Every other group re-settled and got on with their lives, except this one group of Arabs, who were made into a fully instrumentalized and weaponized populace, all as part of an endless jihad to erase Israel.
—exclude them based on religion
No one was excluded based on religion. These are two separate peoples fighting over the same scrap of land. Also, Arabs have full religious rights in Israel, while there's maybe a handful of synagogues standing in the Arab world. And in case you don't know, more Jews were displaced and chased out of the ME post-WW2 than Arabs were chased from Palestine, often running for their lives. This could have been a simple swap of people, similar to how Turks and Greeks were swapped post-WW1. It's not the Israelis here who are religiously intolerant.
—a state created with explicit disinterest in coexistence
This is preposterous. Israel has offered peace plans repeatedly and made peace with Egypt and Jordan all in the name of coexistence. When has any Arab state had any interest in coexistence with Israel or any Jews? When did they offer peace?
—forceful seperation [sic] in rejection of coexistence.
Who wouldn't want forceful separation from Hamas, who has Israel's genocide writtten into its charter? Against Palestinians who've spent decades launching various terrorist attacks, suicide bombings, and then the 10/7 massacre? Please tell me about Hamas' commitment to peaceful coexistence.
Like many of Israel's opponents, you seem to want it to surrender to its enemies who've been promising to drive them into the sea for 80 years. But your history is all wrong and you seem to be working backwards, blaming Israel first then providing reasons. But blaming them for lack of peace is historically illiterate—both Arafat and Abbas were offered full statehood with almost all of Gaza and the WB, and they turned it down.
Arabs have been stewing in anti-Jewish hate for a century now and this is where all the hatred has led them. If they really have any interest in self-determination, they should accept Israel's existence, sue for peace, and build their own society from there.
Stop talking in cliche points, absolutely intellectually bankrupt.
"Offered a state", haa yes, that is after the fact. The current Israel greenline borders removed 80% of the residents in 1948. This is such a clearlya bullshit idea "we gave your kin or people with similar language as you a state in another part of the region is why 80% of you in this place gets to lose your rights to your hones" that is not how self determination works. You can't go to Nigeria in 1950, say "you can establish a state in the North, while African Americans will establish a state in the south and expext them to just take it, people are individuals for fucksake, they don't lose their rights because they are part of a group. Israels existence is anti self determination, if self determination was applied, no such thing as Israel would exist . You keep accusing Palestinians of wanting to drive Israelis out, but the side tagt has done the most comprehensive drive out was actually Israel(it onky stooped short of 100% of the land and 100% arab expelled because of international pressure that stopped its land grab in 1948)
Enough with the bullshit about Israel enemies, it went to a region forcibly declared a state and expelled and crushed the will of the majority and is surprised it is hated.
You obviously consider the creation and existence of Israel illegitimate and believe there's some way to do-over 1949 or 1967 and appeal to some cosmic or global judge who will send all the Jews elsewhere so the Arabs can have 100% control of the Middle East instead of only 95%. But this doesn't mean you get to rewrite history and replace it with hysteria.
These endless revisiting of historical claims is just a pointless rhetorical game and a political fantasy of people who want to destroy Israel, which Israelis understandably oppose.
How many decades will the Palestinians nurse their grievance? I know people who still have the keys to the parents' homes who were chased from both Cuba and Russia after 20th-century revolutions—and yet this one group of Arabs have divine right to eternal jihad because they were displaced Ottomans over a century ago? This eternal jihad/tantrum has led to their current situation, with Gaza in rubble and the WB not much better. Isn't it time to grow up and take responsibility?
—You keep accusing Palestinians of wanting to drive Israelis out...lol
Have you read the Hamas charter? Heard of Amin al-Husseini (aka Hitler's Mufti)? That guy was such a deranged Jew hater even the Nazis told him to calm down!
Here's Arafat:
"We will continue to make war on Israel by ourselves until we get Palestine back. The end of Israel is the goal of our struggle, and it allows for neither compromise nor mediation....We don’t want peace. We want war, victory. Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else. What you call peace is peace for Israel and the imperialists. For us it is injustice and shame. We will fight until victory. Decades if necessary, generations."
Did Israelis hallucinate this!?
—forcibly declared a state
The state was declared by the UN with the help of the British, who had full territorial control at the time. Israel agreed to every peace and partition plan, which would have given Arabs almost the entire area:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:UN_Partition_Plan_For_Palestine_1947.svg
—and expelled and crushed the will of the majority...
Which majority? If I got a majority of people to say that you needed to move and/or die would you submit? Yes, Arabs hate Jews and want Israel gone and have for a century, and this is where we still stand.
Feel free to join the eternal anti-Jewish jihad, but it's been a total failure, Israel will not be erased, and maybe it's time to accept reality and plot a new path forward.
The goal isn’t to free Palestine it’s to use it as a mobilizing wedge issue for other grander visions.
I'm arguing that Palestinians should flip the script. They should leverage their outsized role in "other grander visions" to achieve practical gains.
I doubt they have the intelligence or the agency. They are too used to being pawns and sucking on the teat of foreign aid. Winding up UNRWA would be the first step, but they will never have a state.
Sure that would be great!
You are talking pragmatic rationality from a people that have not shown either the capacity or willingness to engage as such
I understand the objection, but the same was true of the Arab world at large for many decades. Yet Israel has now made peace with multiple Arab nations that eventually accepted reality. So the proof of concept is there. The key is to get the region’s pragmatic Arabs more deeply involved in pushing the Palestinians in the same direction.
They may be “at peace “ but that is different than loved. Peace with Egypt and Jordan is practical. And that’s fine. Love not required. If I feel that I can’t defeat you and a relationship with you can be beneficial then ok. The Egyptians buy Israeli gas because they need it. Not because they like Israel. As to the Palestinians good luck with that. Hamas longed backed by Qatar are still embedded in Gaza, Hezbollah aligned and agent of Iran will never make peace with Israel. Lebanon is barely a sovereign nation due to Iran. Same with Iraq. UAE jumped into Abraham Accords. Not sure they would do it today but they are hanging in there and are doing bilateral business with Israel. The settler movement and anti Palestinian violence is not helpful nor morally justified
Bravo
Excellent analysis and proposal. I don't know if I agree with all details, but there needs to be more discussions of various plans to get away from permanent war and occupation. I hope that US and European universities and think tanks would come up with proposals developed jointly by Arab and Israeli scholars, and force these proposals to front pages of every newspaper in the world. The politics everywhere have ossified, yet revolutionary tactics would only make things worse. So, hopefully a strong and concerted push to convince the public (Israeli, Arab, American, and European) that the status quo is unsustainable and new peace negotiations are needed, will succeed this time. Maybe now is darkness before new dawn.
Couple of issues:
1. Why would Jordan potentially destabilize itself? This seems like a big risk to the current regime there, adding a large number of potentially hostile, radical Islamists.
2. The current Western support for "from the river to the sea" is probably just feeding the dreams of the most intransigent palestinians and making them less inclined to compromise.
1. In this scenario, the Palestinian leadership would actively seek a stabilizing Jordanian role, which would mitigate the risk of another Black September. That being said, yes, there would still be a large number of potentially hostile, radical Islamists even if a critical mass of Palestinians chose pragmatism. But let's not forget that Jordan itself previously annexed the West Bank and only officially relinquished its claim in 1988. The upsides for Jordan include the reclamation of territory it once held, access to the Mediterranean via Gaza (plus an offshore natural gas field), and significant investment/support from both the West and Gulf Arab states.
2. Yes, and I'm arguing that they should take the opposite approach. The current Western popularity of "From the river to the sea" is unsustainable and impractical. Better to leverage it for attainable ends.
"In this scenario, the Palestinian leadership would actively seek a stabilizing Jordanian role, which would mitigate the risk of another Black September. "
It might have the opposite effect: a destabilizing effect. Having disengaged in 1988, leaving Israel to hold the baby, I can't see Jordan reversing that strategic victory by getting involved with a potentially destabilizing population of 'Palestinians' who are currently Israel's problem.
You're assuming that the status quo will hold indefinitely, and that trouble in the West Bank wouldn't spill over the Jordan River regardless. Jordan's stability would also be threatened by a West Bank uprising that draws in its own Palestinian population, an attempted transfer of West Bank Palestinians to Jordan, or the creation of a failed Palestinian state next door. Through confederation, Jordan would gain institutional leverage over its own greatest security risk.
Straw man: no status quo holds indefinitely. Jordan would have an interest in maintaining the status quo, rather than giving an opportunity for East and West Bank Palestinians to form a homogenous group. I doubt Jordan would want to resume responsibilities it abandoned in 1988 even if full sovereignty were offered.
There are prominent Jordanians who've already expressed interest in the idea. From an article by former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami (source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-jordanian-future-for-the-west-bank-11654788175):
"King Hussein’s waiving of Jordan’s claim on the West Bank was never ratified by the country’s parliament and was seen by many, including former Crown Prince Hassan bin Talal, as unconstitutional. In 2012, he said that since no two-state solution was still possible, the Palestinian Authority should let Jordan recover its control of the territory. The call for Jordan’s return to the West Bank was also supported by former royal adviser Adnan Abu-Odeh and two former Jordanian prime ministers, Abdel Salaam Majali and Taher al-Masri. In 2008, Mr. Majali announced a confederation plan, spurred by his fear that Israeli disengagement would provoke a massive migration or forced transfer of Palestinians into Jordan. Jordan also has every reason to fear a Hamas takeover of the West Bank if Israel departs."
The article also notes that King Abdullah himself has left the door open to a confederation with the Palestinians “once a Palestinian state is created.” My proposal is simply to rearrange the sequence, because a viable Palestinian state is unlikely to be created in the first place without Jordanian involvement.
"...spurred by his fear that Israeli disengagement would provoke a massive migration"
Well that isn't going to happen now.
"a viable Palestinian state is unlikely to be created in the first place without Jordanian involvement."
... is unlikely to be created, period.
Who on the Israeli side is making noises about a 'confederation'?
Palestinian nationalism is a nationalism without a nation. Intransigent opposition to Israel is the sole source of Palestinian identity because Palestinian Arabs lack any distinctive language, religion, or culture. Since that makes it hard for them to build a country of their own, a confederation as proposed by Ben Koan could be a logical long-term solution.
The Jordanian flag is just the Palestinian flag with a star in it! (They could choose to keep or remove the star when they confederate.)
No. Palestinian nationalism is a nationalism without a state. 'Nation' in this sense is simply an ethnic group with political aspirations. There are hundreds, if not thousands of such stateless nations around the world.
Your point about the Palestinians negative identity is sound. The political consciousness that defines the nation is the destruction of Israel. That isn't going to change and is no basis for a peaceful state. The only solution is the dismantling of 'Palestine' and replacing it with something else. Dan Scheuftan's emirate proposal is the best suggestion so far.
The Palestinian Arabs are part of a larger nation; they are not a distinct ethnic group. A good analogy might be the Kosovar Albanians. They succeeded in splitting off from Serbia and setting up their own rump state, but they are really Albanians, not "Kosovarians."
Nationalism and ethnicity are distinct concepts. Nation is an artificial construct effected by self-identification. By your argument, Australians and Canadians, being Anglo-Saxons would not be a separate nation. Austrians, being German ethnic, would not be a nation, most South Americans, being Spanish would not be nations.
The Pallies, being ethnically Arab, have a shared consciousness built on self-inflicted failure (The Nakba), the legal fallacy of 'occupation', the sui generis status of being 'permantent refugees', based on the fallacious right of return to their great grandparents' houses and the collective desire to destroy Israel. Even though their identity is built on bullshit, it's still a sufficiently shared consciousness to make them a nation.
True, a shared history also helps shape a nation. Palestinian national identity, such as it is, is based on the history of struggle with Zionists and Israel. But somehow the pro-Pals who make this argument generally fail to recognize a Jewish Israeli nationhood based on the history of struggle with "Palestine"!
I'm rather fond of this idea, but when I was in Jordan 30 years ago, a young man confided in me that ethnic Jordanians secretly hate their ethnic Palestinian fellow citizens, because the PLO tried to assassinate King Hussein. That distrust would have to be overcome.
30 years ago black September was 36 years in the past and now it’s 66 years. So I think it’s less of an issue. The real issue is Palestinian nationalism is far more well developed now than 30 years ago.
On that note, that's why I favor a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation (with Hashemite leadership but Palestinian buy-in and representation) vs a straight-up Jordanian annexation.
This is a fair point, but black September was 56 years ago (1970).
No way Jordan would agree to any of this. Why would they? They’ve been doing pretty well and the risks are not worth the reward.
I concur.
In the absence of any Palestinian peace movement, it seems to me that the very first step would be a public declaration (in Arabic and, if we ever get that far, Farsi and Turkish) accepting the “two states for two peoples” principle, thereby signaling that the Muslim world accepts the concept of Jewish sovereignty in a portion of their ancestral homeland.
Absent that, I see no prospect of any real move toward peace. No competent international military contingent is prepared to risk casualties. In the run up to the Six Day War, the UN peacekeepers in Sinai simply abandoned their post at Egypt’s request. And who can forget the UN troops who simply fled to Israel rather than face down Syrian armed factions.
Also, for now there is a close to zero chance of Jordan accepting Palestinians as citizens. Among other reasons, the Bedouins would read it as a direct threat to their power and the bulk of the population - even if they have no memory of Black September - nevertheless see the ‘48 and ‘67 Arabs of Palestine as humiliated losers to the despised Jews.
Finally, there is the theological overlay to be addressed because everyone is best protected if there is a warm peace. Now the religious doctrine is, in a word, Jews are going against Islam by refusing to submit with matters made infinitely worse because Israel unlike its neighbors is also prospering. These facts undermine Islam’s promise to its adherents that they are on the winning side.
The alternative might be a reinterpretation of doctrine to foreground those sections of the Quran that has Allah promise the Holy Land to the children of Israel. Whether this can be pulled off is an intra-Islamic matter.
The bottom line for me is that any durable resolution is a generational one especially given the horrors of October 7. While one may quibble with the details of your proposals, the foundation for peace is not there.
This just isn't going to happen. The arab world wants nothing to do with the Palestinians. Jordan in particular, because they tried this once already (taking in an absurd amount of Palestinian "refugees") and it resulted in Black September and a coup attempt. Lebanon was Christian before the PLO and Palestinian refugees started a civil war.
The Jordan thing only sounds like a good idea to a western mind that doesn't understand the history of the region.
Jordan is already ~ 60% Palestinian. So, de facto, it already has plenty to do with the Palestinians. Adding the West Bank to Jordan would increase its Palestinian population to ~ 69%. Adding both the West Bank and Gaza would increase it to ~ 73%. This would be a demographic adjustment, not a demographic revolution.
It’s a great plan, but like any other plausible end to this conflict, it requires one or more Arab state to take responsibility for security and defense of Palestine (at least ‘initially’)- see Ram Emmanuel’s 23 state solution. Let’s add a confederation with Druze & other aspirational states in the region, why not?
This is a fantasy. The Palestinians will never go for it. Western attitudes towards Israel will not reset, though they may cease to be the top issue for a while. All the Palestinians have to do is wait for boomers to die off and watch the bipartisan support for Israel rapidly switch polarity. At that point it’s just a matter of time before a Democratic president comes into office and not only cuts aid to Israel, but embargos arms to them, including placing secondary sanctions on friendly nations who sell to Israel. The Iranians have just shown it is now quite easy for an asymmetric adversary to convince insurance companies to turn off civilian shipping, and such an administration will do nothing to prevent the Iranian proxies from imposing an effective embargo on Israel. Without a steady flow of replacement parts the IAF will find it harder and harder to keep flying aggressive missions as this goes on longer and longer. Israel has the will to persist in the face of this kind of treatment, but they will have to resort to less precise munitions without American aid and this will only turn the world harder against them. This is the plan. The left tells you this is the plan every time they accuse Israel of “apartheid” because they’ve run this playbook before. Israel has assets that Rhodesia and South Africa did not have, and I like their chances a lot better, but it’s going to be hard for Israel to make it through the next century without being ethnically cleansed. It needs to make hay while the sun is shining and secure alternative alliances for the coming storm.
"...before a Democratic president comes into office and not only cuts aid to Israel, but embargos arms to them, including placing secondary sanctions on friendly nations who sell to Israel."
I doubt it would come to that. Israel and the US need each other equally. Whatever rhetoric might win elections would face the hard reality of geopolitics when push came to shove.
Israel is a short term tactical asset in a region that is becoming less and less important every year as the energy transition proceeds. It’s not at all clear that Israel is a strategic asset for the US over the long haul given the animosity that supporting them generates towards the US and the way Israeli wars have a way of dragging America in. Even if you consider Israel a strategic asset, the show will go on if America suffers even a significant strategic setback in the Middle East. Metropolitan America will carry on regardless of what happens at the periphery of empire, and for a movement that both hates the American empire as an end in and of itself and has made support for the ethnic cleaning of Israel a litmus test to be a member in good standing, a setback like that will not be much of a deterrent. Leftist Americans are so safe and insulated that they just don’t care about that kind of thing. Scoring points internally is far more important. You might as well say the Ming will never decommission their treasure fleets because then they will ceed the age of exploration to the Europeans. The problem with realist international relations is that it fails to account for countries being retarded for weird internal reasons when this happens all the time.
The idea that Israel and the US need each other equally is laughable. Israel needs the US as a matter of survival. The US doesn’t need Israel at all, and will at worst be embarrassed by a loss of the alliance.
«The idea that Israel and the US need each other equally is laughable. Israel needs the US as a matter of survival. The US doesn’t need Israel at all,»
The USA could do without Israel if there were no oilfields in the vicinity and no vital sea route chokepoints in the vicinity. But there are so it is quite important for the global power of the USA to keep that entire vicinity destabilized, and sacrificing a bunch of religious fanatics for that the task is a fairly cheap strategy.
In what way is it within US interests to keep the region destabilized? We want it stable and producing oil that it sells into the world market. And it’s not as if we would be without allies in the region if Israel were to go away.
«In what way is it within US interests to keep the region destabilized?»
It is not just the USA it is also the EU and the Russian Federation: the Levant is the "near abroad" of 3 big regional powers that need to be contained, and those 3 big regional powers were the origin of vast empires that one after the other attacked Europe and Russia: Iran, Arabia, Turkey. In Europe schools for now still teach about the heroic resistance of the greeks and romans against the invading iranians in the ancient age, as well as the heroic resistance against the invading arabs in the middle ages, and the heroic resistance against the invading turks/tatars in the modern age.
Regardless these 3 regional powers control the straits of the Bosphorus, the Suez canal, the straits of Hormuz, the straits of the Red Sea which makes them a big threat to both the EU and the Russian Federation. Not directly to the USA, but the USA elites prefer that nobody but themselves can block those straits.
«We want it stable and producing oil that it sells into the world market.»
You may want that but the USA elites do not need imports of oil and want USA oil exports to have a high price and less competition from iranian, iraqi, arabian, libyan suppliers. Otherwise why would they repeatedly wreck big oil producers like Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, Iran? Do you really think that they are that serially stupid?
Power come from being able to either take things for oneself or to deny things to others and the global power of the USA is mostly in the ability of the USA Navy to block all main sea trade routes (plus the ability of the USA Treasury to block all main flows of payments and the ability of the USA CIA to "color revolution" a state).
«And it’s not as if we would be without allies in the region if Israel were to go away.»
The USA have no allies except perhaps France (and even more perhaps Morocco), only vassals. In particular most of the elites of Arabia and the Levant are very ready to sell-out to the best offer because they understand well how weak they are and how fragile is their rule and simply want to maximize their loot while they are in power. Israel itself is no ally of the USA, just a tool.
"The US doesn’t need Israel at all, and will at worst be embarrassed by a loss of the alliance."
The ignorance of geopolitics of the antiIsrael bigots is astounding. As if the US would allow Israel to drift towards China or Russia.
"The energy transition?" The strategic alliance isn't going to diminish importance because of a myth. 😂😂😂
Green energy was 85% of new electric capacity last year. This is all going to play out in a generation or two so there will have been plenty of time for the transition to proceed. It will not be complete by any means, but there will be lower demand for oil and consumers will have a lot more options for ways to stretch things out and care less about what oil producers are up to. It’s crazy to think that fossil fuels will be irrelevant, but it’s equally crazy to not notice that we’ve just crossed and inflection point when it comes to the levelized cost of energy from solar and think about the implications of that in 20-40 years.
Nameplate capacity and 'levelized cost of energy' are two tricks in the green energy scam swag. Therefore, while renewables accounted for over 85% to 92% of new additions globally in recent years, they still account for around 30-40% of total global electricity generation, with fossil fuels continuing to provide the majority of total global megawatt-hours. And that only talks about electricity, which only accounts for 20% of global energy consumption.
No one can predict what will 'play out' in a generation or two. Like your LCOE metric, such predictions rely on magical thinking, like your predictions for geopolitics.
Saying “the derivative may be bigger but the value is smaller” isn’t actually the dunk you think it is when we are talking about the world in a couple of generations. Also keep in mind that we don’t need a total transition for green energy to radically change the geopolitical implications of oil. There are plenty of oil producers outside the Middle East and if there is enough green energy deployed the world may be able to just do without middle eastern oil for extended periods. On top of that, every time there is oil instability, it incentives people to build alternatives, so every time someone uses oil as a geopolitical weapon it becomes less and less effective. That wasn’t true before the cost of green energy fell so much, but now it is. Also, with any luck by the time this all plays out nuclear will be more widely deployed, which is also removing fossil demand.
I'm not actually sure the anti-Israel faction in the West will gain power. In America Palestine is assumed with the DSA wing. They may take over the Democrats, but they will never win nationwide. Moreover, in Europe the rising parties are right wing. They can probably be turned into pro-Israel parties.
Young right wingers do not like Israel. Many of them are antisemites in the traditional sense. Once the boomers die, the Republicans will no longer be reliable allies for Israelies. I don’t think they would ever blockade or embargo Israel because they don’t like the Palestinians either, but they would certainly cut aid and stop providing diplomatic cover. They may resist a Democratic president embargoing Israel but if they do it will be entirely because of negative partisanship, not because they are friends of Israel.
1. The Jordanian King would be taking a big risk by accepting this many new people and becoming the new front line with Israel.
2. If Jordan eventually transitions to democracy then all of a sudden Hamas is far better resourced than it was before.
I can see a majority of Palestinians and perhaps even Jordanians agreeing with this, but not the King and not Israelis.
Ideally, the Jordanian government would ban Hamas and any irredentist parties. However, you're right that enforcement would be difficult. That's the main reason I think Jordan should only take the West Bank.
Additionally, non-contiguous states are tricky.
On the other hand, Palestinian nationalism (as well as most forms of nationalism) generally rejects the idea that the nation itself can simply be divided between two separate states. It's common to hear Palestinian nationalists insist on the unity of the Palestinian nation.
The charter of Likud says "The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river". The plan has always been a two-state solution one for the palestinian jews west of the Jordan, and one for the palestinian non-jews east of the Jordan (Transjordania) where to exile all those evicted from their land.
Regardless all these proposals are delusions: the elites of both sides seem to have decided that any end to the conflict will mean they will lose power, so the elites of both sides have been committing atrocities against the other side to poison popular sentiment on both sides.
The elites of both sides also tell their subject that they do not need to compromise because eventually their own side will get all of the land: the israeli side because they have nuclear weapons and better organization and unlimited USA funding, and the other side because they think that like in the past 1,400 years some new empire will conquer all of the levant, and then will gift them all the land.
Which means that the conflict will continue to destabilize the region for a long time to the benefit of some great powers (but not of China) and I fell sorry for the ordinary people on both sides who are being used. But I must admit that as weapons of destabilization fanatics like Netanyahu and HAMAS are very effective.
The California natives got citizenship, there is currently no law that gives different groups in California different rights and citizenship status based on identity. India Pakistan both had displacements, both would exist without the displacement easily, they negotiated a right of return in the Dehli Pact.
Greek and Turkey are of course crazy and not a model any part of the world should emulate.
Serbia and Kosovo didn't expel 80% of the residents of anywhere to create their state but they did used to have discriminatory laws and that is bad.
And India Pakistan is not a model to emulate, those two like Greece Turkey essentially work by pointing Nukes at each other.. Israel is not letting a Palestine state be armed, Palestinians are not gonna feel safe being unarmed and at the mercy if Israel forever.
The closest analogue is clearly just Canada, New Zealand, US and their respective natives. Northern ireland and the Brits. The Pogromed German Jews have been given right of return.
And this argument has a particular flaw when it comes to Israel cause Israel is literally contrary evidence of the claim on its own, it's a 2000 yr old recidivism movement.