The Palestinian Dream Palace (Bret Stephens)

This article by Bret Stephens is the third important piece in the mainstream media over the past couple of days that challenges the conventional wisdom of PLO saintliness and Israeli blame. (The first two were by Dennis Ross and, to an extent, David Brooks.)

Stephens nails it:

...People who are in the business of making excuses for Palestinians—and the apologists are legion—sagely explained that the vote for Hamas wasn’t a public endorsement of a terrorist group sworn to Israel’s annihilation, but rather a vote against the corruption of Fatah, Mr. Abbas’s party. As if the two propositions could not both be true. As if Palestinians were unaware of Hamas’s intentions. As if a vote against venal officialdom palliated a vote for violent ideologues.

So it has been with the rest of Mr. Abbas’s serial fiascoes over the decade, culminating in his failed bid last week to force a vote in the Security Council over Palestinian statehood. In 2005, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, leaving Mr. Abbas in charge and giving him a chance to make something of the territory. Gaza dissolved into civil war within months. In 2008, Israel offered Mr. Abbas a state covering 94% of the West Bank, along with a compensatory 6% of Israeli territory and a land bridge to Gaza. Mr. Abbas never took up the offer.

Last March, President Obama personally offered Mr. Abbas a U.S.-sponsored “framework” agreement. Again Mr. Abbas demurred. The following month, Mr. Abbas signed a “reconciliation” pact with Hamas. War came by summer.

Now Mr. Abbas has moved to have “the state of Palestine” join the International Criminal Court, chiefly in order to harass and perhaps arrest Israeli military officers and politicians spuriously accused of war crimes. The gambit will fail for the simple reason that two can play the game.

So why does Mr. Abbas persevere?

Because, as the late Fouad Ajami knew so well, the pleasures of dreaming are better than the labors of building, just as the rhetoric of justice, patrimony and right is so much more stirring than the fine print and petty indignities of compromise. Mr. Abbas consistently refuses a Palestinian state because such a state is infinitely more trivial than a Palestinian struggle. Becoming is better than being. So long as “Palestine” is in the process of becoming, it matters. Once it exists, it all but doesn’t. How many times will some future president of an established Palestinian state get to visit the White House?

This explains why a Palestinian state—a reasonably peaceful and prosperous one, at any rate—is deeply in Israel’s interest. And why no Palestinian leader will ever accept such a state on any terms. After the endless stream of Palestinian rejections—from the 1947 U.N. partition plan to the “Three No’s” of the 1967 Khartoum Resolution to Arafat’s refusal to make a deal at Camp David in 2000, one begins to sense a pattern. Palestine can never hope to compete with Israel except in the sense that the fantasy of Palestine will always have an edge on the reality of Israel.

Over a beachfront lunch yesterday in Tel Aviv, an astute Israeli friend had the following counter-fantasy: What if Western leaders refused to take Mahmoud Abbas’s calls? What if they pointed out that, in the broad spectrum of global interests, from Eastern Europe to the South China Sea, the question of Palestinian statehood ranked very low—on a par with, say, the prospect of independence for the Walloons? What if these leaders observed that, in the scale of human tragedy, the supposed plight of the Palestinians is of small account next to the human suffering in Syria or South Sudan?

In that event, the Palestinian dream palace might shrink to its proper size, and bring the attractions of practical statecraft into sharper focus. Genuine peace might become possible.

Don’t hold your breath.