The Central Obstacle to Peace between Israel and the Palestinians Isn't Politics

In his excellent article, Elliott Abrams lays out clearly why attempts to create a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria have failed to yield results. In doing so, he reveals the contradictory and disingenuous claims made by Palestinians: on the one hand they declare that they want statehood in the West Bank and Gaza, on the other they make abundantly clear that their real aspiration isn’t independence, but the destruction of Israel, regardless of its borders. Below, I wish to highlight two points I believe Abrams misses, and then turn to his proposed alternative: Palestinian confederation with Jordan.

First, it’s worth paying some attention to an additional failure of the organizations at the forefront of the Palestinian national movement: the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), its Fatah faction, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) created out of the first two. These institutions, since the signing of the Oslo Accords, have never managed to create a unified, or unifying, national consciousness that would bind together the Arabs of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and Jerusalem. The forging of a sense of a shared, distinctive national character is the sine qua non of any national movement and must be the basis of the state it aims to create or maintain. It’s worth noting that Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, Jordan, and Algeria have also been unable to achieve or foster such an identity.

Second, Abrams pays insufficient attention to the goals, words, and dogmas of Hamas—an Islamist, jihadist, and fundamentalist movement which took over the Palestinian parliament in January 2006 democratically and the Gaza Strip in June 2007 violently. Hamas’s religious ideology does not contradict the national ideology of the PLO, but rather complements and exacerbates it, injecting a religious element into a national and territorial conflict. The result is that what might otherwise be a solvable problem of borders and demographics takes on almost cosmic meaning as a struggle between Islam and Judaism that began in the 7th century between Mohammad and the Jews of the Arabian city of Medina.