Palestine Panic
A weak leader and a dangerously bleak future
THE two-state solution, a longheld US-backed plan for a rosy Mideast future, is threatened by Mr. Yesterday — someone hopelessly clinging to the past.
That Mr. Yesterday isn’t Donald Trump, whose aides deleted the words “two-state solution” from the Republican platform. And it isn’t Hillary Clinton, whose would-be veep, Tim Kaine, last year boycotted the Israeli prime minister’s speech to Congress. Hillary and Kaine cherish the two-state solution dearly.
It isn’t Bernie Sanders, whose supporters hoisted a Palestinian flag on the convention floor Monday in lieu of Old Glory. Or Rep. Hank Johnson, (D-Ga.), who this week called Israeli settlers “termites.”
It isn’t even those idiots who burned an Israeli flag in front of the convention hall Tuesday night to protest, well, something. If anything, those Israeli-flag-burners represent the future of America’s progressive left, not its past. They threaten a tomorrow that’ll make us weep for yesterday.
Nor is it the usual suspect, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.
Nah. Mr. Yesterday, the man who dreads two states more than anyone in America, Europe or Israel, is none other than the presi- dent of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.
This week, just as Democrats struggled with how strongly to support a state of Palestine without angering their shrinking but still powerful pro-Israel base, Mr. Yesterday aimed his lance at a 99year-old windmill by launching a battle against the Balfour Declaration at an Arab League summit in Mauritania.
The Arab League is a relic that goes mostly ignored (for good reason), and even its summits tend to be sparsely attended these days.
But the perennial beneficiary of such outmoded gatherings, the Palestinians, managed to create some news: Abbas’ foreign minister, Riyad al-Malki, blamed England for the mess in Palestine and asked for help in suing the British government.
Wait, the Brits? What did they do now? Well, Arthur James Balfour, the then-UK foreign secretary, issued a historic declaration that in 1917 promised the Jews a “homeland” in Palestine, which was about to be ruled from London.
Or, according to Malki, they “gave people who don’t belong there something that wasn’t theirs.” So Palestinians will now sue them.
“We are all aware of the significance of the 100-year anniversary,” a senior British diplomat told me Wednesday, adding, however, “I’m not sure looking back is the best way to bring peace.”
Right. But don’t tell that to Mr. Yesterday.
More fundamentally, Abbas has already raised a Palestinian flag at Manhattan’s First Avenue UN headquarters and received blessings for a Palestinian state in places like Geneva, Sweden, Mauritania and the back pages of US party platforms. Yet, he has proved completely useless in creating a state on the West Bank.
And his attempt to pretend the last century of history, in which Jews created an independent and thriving state, never happened raises suspicions that Abbas never really was all that comfortable with the existence of Israel on lands Arabs consider their own.
At the age of 80, Abbas has now spent a dozen years in an office he’d been elected to hold for four. As he nears the end of his career, many in the West Bank wonder if he’s all there. This week’s antiBritish gambit will only reinforce those questions.
And if he’s starting to fade? Well, Mr. Yesterday never prepared his people for tomorrow — that day after he steps down or dies. Several leader-wannabes will duke it out then, and — like Arab nations throughout the region’s volatile history — they’ll likely fail to resolve their differences peacefully or quickly.
So all those who get so exercised about how the two-state solution is represented in party platforms better relax. America, Britain, Europe and even Israel won’t prevent Palestinians from peacefully living and thriving in an independent state.
As they always have, only Palestinians will.
As for that other side of the vaunted two-state solution: Even Mr. Yesterday can’t turn back the clock to 1917, or any other time in history.
So Israel will continue to flourish, with or without Palestine by its side.