7 reasons a Palestinian state holds more peril than promise, and a possible alternative - opinion

Albert Einstein once revealed the secret of his genius: “Simplify as much as possible – but not more so.”

His famous equation E=mc2, linked mass and energy in a manner that changed the world. He discovered it by starting with a complex equation and striking out everything that was not essential. 

Simplify! Presto! Mass and energy are forms of the same thing.

Biden, Blinken, the European Union, Arab Gulf states, professors, diplomats – all assert that a Palestinian state (“two-state solution”) is the panacea for endless Mideast wars. 

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is Jewish; his stepfather, Pisar, was the only one of 900 Polish schoolmates who survived the Holocaust. He has visited the Mideast six times since October 7. Blinken has reportedly told the State Department to review policy options, including international recognition of a Palestinian state.

Presto! 

They are simplifying – much more than is possible. The Mideast, alas, is a lot more complex than the special theory of relativity. 

I, too, as a center-leftist, embraced the two-state solution idea — until I researched this column and talked to real experts. 

Is a viable Palestinian state feasible? Does it hold promise for the Mideast? Or peril? 

Peril. Below, I offer seven reasons – and a possible alternative.

Know what you don’t know 

Let me begin first with a personal note about how to understand complex reality.

I spent 35 years in an ivory tower, researching innovation and entrepreneurship. I believed I had become an expert. I wasn’t. I did not know what I did not know.

Until I was given early retirement and went out into the world as academic director of Technion Institute of Management in Tel Aviv’s hi-tech Atidim site, working with global hi-tech firms and start-ups. Only then did I even begin to grasp the complexity of the real world. 

Far too many experts are pushing Mideast solutions without extensive firsthand feet-on-the-ground, ears-to-the-ground expertise. They mean well. But their theories are not grounded in reality. They don’t know what they don’t know. 

We offered it – They turned it down five times

In 1937, Britain’s Peel Commission proposed creating two independent states in Palestine – one for Jews, one for Arabs. It gave the Arabs 80% of the land. The Jews voted to accept it. The Arabs rejected it and continued their violent rebellion. First rejection.

On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted for Resolution 181 to create two states. The Jews accepted it. The Arabs rejected it by launching a war. Second rejection.

In June 1967, after a stunning victory in the Six Day War, half the Israeli government wanted to return the West Bank to Jordan, and Gaza to Egypt; the other half wanted to give them to the Palestinians, hoping they would build their own state. But the Arab League met in Sudan and declared: no peace, no recognition, no negotiations. Third rejection.

In 2000, prime minister Ehud Barak met at Camp David with PLO chair Yasser Arafat. Barak offered Arafat a Palestinian state in all of Gaza and 94% of the West Bank, with east Jerusalem as its capital. Arafat said no and launched a bloody wave of suicide bombings, killing over 1,000 Israelis. Fourth rejection.

In 2008, prime minister Ehud Olmert expanded Barak’s offer, to include additional land. The new (and current) Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas turned it down. Fifth rejection.

Try for a sixth rejection? I don’t think so.

Neither Israelis nor Palestinians support it

Three separate public opinion polls show that both Israelis and Palestinians reject the two-state solution – and the opposition to it is growing. 

On July 29, 2023, two months before the October 7 massacre, The Jerusalem Post reported that a reliable poll showed “support for the two-state solution dropped significantly from September 2020 – from 42% to 33% among Palestinians, and 34% among Israelis. Two-thirds of Palestinians and 53% of Israeli Jews are opposed.”

Polls by Gallup and Pew Research Center found exactly the same result. And a Peace Index survey from Tel Aviv University quoted by The New York Times also showed only 27% of Israelis support two states – and 24% of Palestinians.

If neither Israelis nor Palestinians support a Palestinian state, does anyone believe it can be successfully imposed on them?

Palestinians have been imbued with helpless dependency

Neither Gaza nor the West Bank has a viable economy – a precondition for an independent state. Some 90% of Gaza residents depended on UN food, healthcare, and education before the Gaza war. In 2022, some 30,208 truckloads of food, fuel, and cooking gas entered Gaza from the Rafah crossing with Egypt. And West Bank imports total 70% of GDP. 

Humanitarian aid has been inhumane because it has imbued Palestinians with helpless dependency, while blaming Israel for their poverty. Many skilled, educated Palestinians have fled abroad. Hence, a Palestinian state will be from the outset a failed state with a population addicted to living on handouts. Good luck with that (see box).

PM Marwan Barghouti? Really?

Western experts rightly doubt whether an effective, democratic election can be held in a Palestinian state. They favor imposing a strongman autocrat. The leading candidate is Marwan Barghouti, once touted as Arafat’s successor. He is highly popular among Palestinians and has topped popularity polls for 20 years.

Who is he? Barghouti headed the Tanzim, the PLO’s terrorist arm. In April 2002, Barghouti was arrested in Ramallah and charged with the killing of 26 people and belonging to a terrorist organization. He was given five life sentences and remains in an Israeli jail, candidate for a Hamas hostage exchange. 

If you think Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is a murderous thug, wait until you see his counterpart in action. Like Sinwar, Barghouti has used his time in jail to learn all of Israel’s foibles and weaknesses. We cannot risk having him lead a country on our borders. It did not work too well with Sinwar.

Poverty bordering prosperity

It rankles Palestinians to see how prosperous Israel is ($58,000 GDP per capita) while they remain poor (West Bank and Gaza GDP per capita is about $3,800). A miserably poor Palestinian state next to hi-tech Israel is for them provocative. The Quran specifically calls Jews inferior. How come, then, we’re doing so well? I believe it is a major reason for their “Palestine river to sea” mantra. Israel embarrasses them.

Writing in the daily Haaretz, David Rosenberg observes: “If the State of Palestine is impoverished and economically stagnant, political instability and violence won’t go away… given how small and close by Israel and Palestine will be.… Palestine’s problems are destined to spill over the border.”

The sad part is, it need not be that way. Rosenberg notes that the Gaza Marine field offshore has some 30 billion cubic meters of natural gas, worth some $15 billion at current prices. The West Bank borders the Dead Sea and could share in its valuable minerals. If peace prevailed, Israel would be a major market for West Bank and Gaza goods. So would the markets of wealthy Gulf Arab countries. 

Moreover, half of all Palestinians now live abroad. Many are educated. Just as Israel absorbed a million educated Russian Jews, who fueled the hi-tech boom, so might a Palestinian state attract money and energy from its diaspora. But they will not return to a venal, corrupt state.

PA: Corrupt to the core

It is widely known around the world that the Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas, is hopelessly corrupt – right to the core. Lip service is paid to the notion of “reform” – finding clean-as-a-whistle technocrats who will not line their pockets to run the new Palestinian state.

It is a pipe dream.

A devastating report by Khaled Abu Toameh, released on July 23, 2023, “The Palestinian Authority’s Corruption and Its Impact on the Peace Process,” was published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. The report asserts the following:

“Nearly three decades after its establishment, the Palestinian Authority and its institutions continue unchecked in their corruption and human rights violations. This has negatively impacted the Palestinian public’s confidence in its leadership’s policies and decisions. The ramifications of this on the Palestinian Authority’s leadership have been devastating, especially regarding the peace process with Israel and its ability to lead the Palestinians toward statehood.

“Many Palestinians observed that the only thing the ‘peace process’ brought about was the enrichment of senior PLO officials and their family members and associates, who greedily siphoned publicly designated funds to drive luxury cars and build extravagant mansions, particularly in Ramallah and the Gaza Strip.”

The rampant corruption may have doomed the burgeoning peace process, according to Abu Toameh:

“Many Palestinians quickly realized that what was unfolding before their eyes was no ‘peace process’ but a process of avaricious PLO leaders and their entourage diverting international aid and making huge profits out of the Oslo Accords. The conspicuous wealth and consumption of Mahmoud Abbas’ sons, Tarek and Yasser, have been very controversial in Palestinian society since 2009, when Reuters published articles linking Tarek and Yasser to several multi-million-dollar business deals, including a few that were US government contracts.

“Western donors’ failure, or refusal, in the first two decades after the ‘peace process’ to hold the Palestinian Authority accountable for their outlandish abuse of funds was one of the main reasons most Palestinians lost faith in the Oslo Accords. Corruption remains a significant obstacle to fulfilling the national aspirations of the Palestinians, particularly in building a democratic society, transparent institutions, and establishing a Palestinian state.

“Worse, the corruption has played into the hands of the Palestinian Authority’s rivals, particularly Hamas, the Islamist movement that does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and whose 1988 Charter calls for Jihad (holy war).”

Hamas was, and remains, highly popular in the West Bank. It leveraged popular hatred of Palestinian Authority corruption and has rapidly replaced it with its own corruption, visible in the mountains of cash the IDF has found in the Gaza tunnels. 

A viable Palestinian state cannot emerge from a rotten culture with leaders who have sticky fingers, and where political influence is sought solely for personal enrichment. Not entirely unknown in Israel, either. As Likud Sports and Culture Minister Miki Zohar once put it: “Kavod, koach, kesef” (Honor, power, money). 

A trial state in Gaza

After 2,000 bleak words of doom and gloom, I desperately searched for a positive, creative idea. I found it in an article by Jerome M. Segal, director of the International Peace Consultancy, in Foreign Affairs, February 2024. Here is a brief summary of his proposal:

In 1995, Segal pitched his 20-point Gaza-first proposal to Yasser Arafat, at the request of [then-prime minister] Shimon Peres. Arafat rejected it. 

The basic idea, revived in 2024: A three-year test period for a trial Palestinian state in Gaza only, backed by the US, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, and the UAE; if the PLO accepts, the US will support recognizing the State of Palestine; as Israel withdraws from Gaza, Hamas accepts PLO authority, with acceptance of a Palestinian declaration of independence, that rejects the threat or use of force, violence and terrorism, against the territorial integrity of other states; if the three-year trial is successful, final status talks begin, built on former US secretary of state John Kerry’s 2016 plan, which included demilitarization of the Palestinian state, 1967 borders modified by equal land swaps, and a Palestinian capital in east Jerusalem.

Segal observes that Israelis who oppose a Palestinian state might agree to a Gaza-first test – if only because they believe it will fail. Palestinians may believe, at last, that it is a step toward a true independent Palestinian state.

As war rages in Gaza, a way must be found to permanently remove the threat to Israel’s southern border in a manner that also meets Palestinian aspirations. 

So far, the 139 countries that recognized the State of Palestine have been part of the problem, not the solution, by pouring money into Gaza that stoked an underground war machine that could have instead fed, housed, clothed, and educated the people of Gaza. 

In Israel, the Start-Up Nation, entrepreneurs try ideas out as minimum viable products before scaling them up. 

How about a prototype Palestinian state, starting with Gaza as a minimum viable proposal, moving toward a fuller, more permanent solution, supervised and backed by nations with deep pockets and wise counsel? 

Can we talk? 

––––––––––––––––––––

Postscript: On February 26, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, in office since 2019, resigned. He may be replaced by Mohammad Mustafa, a former deputy prime minister, economist, and chairman of the Palestinian Investment Fund.

Shtayyeh said he was resigning to allow for the formation of a broad consensus among Palestinians about “political arrangements” following Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. The US has applied strong pressure on the Palestinian Authority to form a corruption-free government of technocrats, capable of administering Gaza.Shtayyeh opened the door to a national unity government in his resignation, without naming Hamas.

“The upcoming phase and its challenges necessitate new governmental and political arrangements, taking into consideration the evolving situation in Gaza, national unity discussions, the urgent need for Palestinian consensus based on national unity, broad participation, solidarity, and the extension of authority over all of Palestine,” Shtayyeh said.

According to Reuters, Mustafa has said the PA could do better “in terms of building better institutions, providing better governance so that ... we can reunite Gaza and the West Bank.” But “if we cannot remove occupation, no reformed government, no reformed institutions can actually build a good successful governing system or develop a proper economy,” he said.

Mustafa said he would continue to focus on humanitarian efforts in the short and medium term, expressing hope that Gaza’s borders would be reopened and a reconstruction conference convened in the near future.

Asked what future role he saw for Hamas, Mustafa said the “best way forward is to be as inclusive as possible,” adding that he would like Palestinians to unite around the PLO agenda. Mustafa, 69, who was born in Tulkarm, has a doctorate in business administration and economics from George Washington University, and worked at the World Bank in Washington. He was elected to the PLO Executive Committee in 2022.■

A true expert weighs in

Col. (ret.) Moshe Elad is my former Neaman Institute colleague, and a feet-on-the-ground West Bank expert. From 1982-1998, Elad served in senior roles in the West Bank. In 1995, following the Oslo Accords, he established the security coordination and liaison system with the Palestinian Authority (PA). He is the author of a new book, The Core Issues of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

“My opinion is that the Palestinian Authority in its current form has failed in every aspect of managing Palestinian society. It lost its half (the Gaza Strip) in the struggle with Hamas 17 years ago and managed its second half (the West Bank) with great difficulty, with a huge budget deficit, lack of transparency, and massive corruption. Another point that stands out in the management of the West Bank is the addiction to grants and the reluctance to leave the cycle of receiving without giving. In its current form, the Palestinian Authority is incapable – and we should not even try to allow it – to control the Gaza Strip. It is possible to improve the situation by introducing new people at the top of the Palestinian Authority who were known in the past for good management – with them there is a chance that it will succeed, provided that they have backing of any kind, moral, economic and financial. Unfortunately, the United States is too naive in its perception of the Palestinian Authority and believes it is sufficient that there are people there who wear suits and ties, who declare that they are not involved in terrorism and who maintain contacts with Washington in order to agree to cooperation. Biden and Blinken would not allow the Abu Mazen administration to enter any office in America, but they agree to allow them to manage Gaza. Therefore, this is sad and annoying.

“We live in a Middle Eastern atmosphere that has its own rules. In Palestinian society, the leader is not criticized but rather protected. If you criticize him or his actions, it is interpreted as treason. That’s why for many decades we don’t hear about an opposition among the Palestinians, and if it existed it would certainly be tougher and more extreme. If Barghouti rules the West Bank after early release from prison, he will be more extreme than Sinwar.

“Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority help Israel in an excellent way in security issues. The opposition in both countries and in the Palestinian Authority are constantly attacking Israel. The leaders, Sisi, Abdullah and Abu Mazen, who know the excellent security coordination and are aware of its fruits, are committed to the Arab “unity of the line” and therefore do not refrain from attacking us, as a ‘tax’ payment to their people.

“Jordan receives annually 100 million cubic meters of water from Israel in accordance with the 1994 peace agreement. Have you ever heard a good word from them about it? If we didn’t provide them with water, they would dry up – but this is accepted by their citizens as an Israeli duty, and in general, why say thank you to the Zionist enemy?

“Israel helped Egypt fight ISIS with intelligence and assistance in bringing troops into Sinai in violation of the 1978 peace agreement. The captains of Egypt went out of their way to thank us but in a discreet way only, while the huge opposition there did not appreciate it and did not say a good word but remained silent.

“There are 25 countries in the world that according to The Economist are considered backward failed states. At the top of the list is Somalia. If the Palestinians get the status of a state, Somalia will only be second. In no parameter that has ever been tested have the Palestinians crossed the threshold of criticism: transparency, proper administration, security, corruption.”

The writer heads the Zvi Griliches Research Data Center at S. Neaman Institute, Technion. He blogs at www.timnovate.wordpress.com.