President Obama is the latest in a long line of political personalities to think that establishing a Palestinian state would allow the Middle East to live happily ever after, and he has been pressing for it urgently. Superficially, such a state seems a properly human outcome that would at last allow the Palestinians to take control of their lives, as people ought to. At various points in the past, such a state could very possibly have been negotiated, but each time Israel and the Palestinians had demands that neither was willing to concede to the other.
The proposed state of Palestine consists of two entities, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But the time is long past when president Mahmoud Abbas, who has just resumed direct negotiations with his Israeli counterpart, could speak for both parts. Hamas, the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has seen Israel retreat from Gaza and mounted a coup there against Abbas, evolving into a small but fierce force in the global Islamist jihad. Iran, the engine of the jihad, is the unacknowledged presence in the Washington negotiations.
The most heartening development in this disheartening situation is that conditions on the ground in the West Bank are improving: With financial and technical assistance from the United States, the European Union, and from the hated Israelis themselves, there has been significant work done to build the machinery of governance. Abbas’s security forces — which operated in Yasser Arafat’s day as independent gangs of hoodlums at war with all and each other — are being transformed into a legitimate police force, with U.S. training conducted in Jordan. The transformation is incomplete, to be sure, which is why the best outcome of these talks —whether they break down, founder, or continue — is one that buys Abbas sufficient time to develop more of an infrastructure of governance, thereby heading off a complete Hamas takeover of the Palestinian proto-state.
Abbas is not popular. He stays in office because he has postponed elections on the West Bank. Both he and the Benjamin Netanyahu government fear that another crisis could place both parts of the state of Palestine in the hands of Hamas. This coincidence of interests has strange consequences. Unable to fully to control his territory, Abbas still has to rely for security on Israeli forces, some of them operating under cover and at night. By the same token, Israel has to rely on Abbas to crack down on Hamas and detain those planning jihad. Needless to say, this unspoken deal is shadowy, fraught with betrayals and double crossings.
Abbas holds thousands of Hamas members in prison and has been busily purging schools and mosques. But as the recent murder of Israelis on the West Bank shows, Hamas is still capable of causing murderous havoc outside of its base in Gaza. Its spokesmen like to say that whatever Abbas may agree to in Washington does not obligate anyone.
It is not realistic to expect Israel to maintain the 75-year-old Abbas in power as a mini-dictator indefinitely. Yet in the event that Hamas were to succeed in taking over the West Bank, a bloodbath would follow, with survivors from the Abbas administration, and perhaps Abbas himself, running for their lives into exile. Such a Hamas victory would also enable Iran to open a new front, with Tel Aviv and central Israel within close range of its missiles and air force.
A Hamas takeover is the second-worst possible outcome. The worst outcome is open regional war, with the atomic ayatollahs allied with Hamas. The status quo may be fraught and unnatural, but it is endlessly preferable to those options. The question touching the Palestinian state is not so much “When?” as “What sort?” The foremost priority in these negotiations should be to ensure that it is not one dominated by Hamas or by Iran.
Editors in the National Review
