Palestinian Territories

Qatar has acquired a reputation for sharp, quick responses to crises in the Arab world and for modern and unorthodox thinking. It is undeserved. Qatari diplomatic activity is designed to advance the interests of the tiny country and of its ruling family. Its adoption of the Libyan opposition, for example, is not based on any principle (such as liberty, democracy, or free elections), for the Qatari government and its TV station, Al Jazeera, have been notably silent about the crisis in Bahrain. There, they have backed the royal family and the Saudi-led GCC armed presence. A reasonable test of the Qatari ability to provide real leadership and new thinking is Qatar’s relations with Israel, which are getting worse and worse. According to press reports, Israel’s Foreign Ministry has concluded that “Qatar has stepped up its activity on behalf of Hamas and other Gaza terror groups. Qatar has been one of the chief backers of the PA’s bid to declare an Arab state in PA-controlled areas of Judea and Samaria, and has been a major funder of anti-Israel groups abroad. Qatar also promised to fund all legal action Turkey might take against Israel in international courts over the deaths of Hamas-affiliated Turkish activists on the Mavi Marmara last year.” Moreover, the story goes on, “Qatar’s activity included significant involvement in the legal preparations of the Palestinian request to the UN, and it has been pushing the PA towards the unilateral move of declaring Palestinian statehood in September. The report states further that Qatar maintains intense ties with Hamas, which include, among other things, frequent visits by Hamas Political Bureau Director Khaled Mashal to Doha.” As a result, Israel has closed its one-man commercial office in Doha and is now blocking Qatari activities with Israeli Arabs and in the Palestinian territories, including by the giant Qatar Foundation. Qatari representatives will henceforth not be permitted to visit Israel or the West Bank. In this context it is worth asking why, if Qatar is so supportive of the Palestinians, it gives them so little money. Today Qatar announced a gift of $50 million to the Palestinian Authority, to help pay salaries. This will be extremely helpful to the PA, but it  brings its donations to the PA in 2011 to….well, to $50 million. This, from a country that runs a multi-billion dollar budget surplus each year, has an $85 billion sovereign wealth fund, and plans to spend $4 billion on new stadiums for the 2022 World Cup. The priorities are clear. Backing the royal family in Bahrain, supporting Hamas but then giving some money to the PA, and financing the rebels in Libya shows Qatari flexibility, but not courageous leadership. What does Qatar seek, beyond influence? Influence for what? If one judges by the programming on Al Jazeera, the royal family seeks a Middle East where American influence is diminished and radical groups are more powerful. But that would be a Middle East with little room for fabulously wealthy kings, sheiks, and emirs. As ye sow....

For years the Palestinian leadership has taken legal advice from a law professor at Oxford University, Guy Goodwin-Gill. But now it seems that they forgot to consult him before demanding a UN vote on Palestinian statehood. In a recent legal brief for the leadership, the good professor demolishes the arguments for UN recognition. As reported in the Palestinian media, the brief argues that a UN decision to recognize Palestinian statehood replaces the PLO with the Palestinian Authority, and this would have what the article calls “dramatic legal implications:” First of all, the prospect of substituting the PLO with the State of Palestine raises "constitutional" problems in that they engage the Palestinian National Charter and the organization and entities which make up the PLO, according to the brief. Second is "the question of the ’capacity’ of the State of Palestine effectively to take on the role and responsibilities of the PLO in the UN; and thirdly, the question of popular representation," the opinion says. Part of the problem is that the PA "has limited legislative and executive competence, limited territorial jurisdiction, and limited personal jurisdiction over Palestinians not present in the areas for which it has been accorded responsibility…."  The thing is, the PA "is a subsidiary body, competent only to exercise those powers conferred on it by the Palestinian National Council. By definition, it does not have the capacity to assume greater powers." Then there’s the impact on Palestinians not living in the West Bank or Gaza and whom the PA does not govern: They constitute more than half of the people of Palestine, and if they are ’disenfranchised’ and lose their representation in the UN, it will not only prejudice their entitlement to equal representation ... but also their ability to vocalise their views, to participate in matters of national governance, including the formation and political identity of the State, and to exercise the right of return," the brief is reported to say. The good professor does not add an issue that arises here in Washington. Right now the PLO has an office here, but why should it be permitted to remain open after the UN vote? Every six months a presidential waiver is required to allow it to remain here, due to the long involvement of the PLO under Arafat in terrorism. Would that waiver henceforth be permitted, or be exercised? But if the PLO office is closed, would the United States accredit an embassy for the State of Palestine? Obviously not, as it would be the American position that there is no State of Palestine, not yet anyway. So how about a Palestinian Authority office? Well, but if the PA is dissolved when "Palestine" is recognized by the UN...... President Abbas, call your lawyer. Too late for that? Call your UN representative and ask him how to extract you from this mess.  

The Palestinian Authority/PLO continues its march toward a UN General Assembly vote on Palestinian statehood. At the least, the Palestinians’ status may be elevated from that of a “non-state entity” observer to a “non-member state” observer. This development may have very negative consequences. For one thing, the text of the resolution itself may become a problem in future negotiations. If the resolution, for example, declares that the borders of “Palestine” are those of the Jordanian-controlled West Bank as of June 3, 1967 (plus Gaza), negotiating territorial compromises may become even more difficult for Palestinian leaders. How can they give away a part of what the United Nations General Assembly has said is “Palestine?” It is also possible that violence may result from the UN vote. If the Palestinians decide to begin very large demonstrations (one example: having thousands of protesters surround isolated settlements), no one can be sure whether the Palestinian and Israeli police will in the end be able to control such confrontations without any violence—from Palestinians, settlers, or the police themselves. Even the new head of the Arab League now has his doubts: "The unilateral appeal to the U.N. Security Council and U.N. General Assembly could be a very dangerous move for the Palestinians during this period and I propose that Abbas reconsider the handling of the matter," said Nabil El Araby. And American legislators have already predicted that if the PLO goes forward with its plans, Congress will cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority. This assistance is in the hundreds of millions of dollars and will not be easily replaced, for European donors are tapped out and Arab donors are stingy. These are but a few of the negative repercussions if, as I expect, the Palestinians go forward. President Abbas, the successor of Yasser Arafat but usually a sensible man, may be looking for a legacy in this vote, which theoretically precedes presidential elections in which he will not run and will finally end his long political career. Given the ever-slipping Palestinian election schedules, Abbas may have a long while to go yet as president. But whatever the timing, he should think twice and perhaps remind himself of the immortal lyrics of Groucho Marx about another non-existent country, Freedonia (in the movie Duck Soup): "The last man nearly ruined this place, he didn’t know what to do with it/If you think this country’s bad off now, just wait ’til I get through with it." Nevertheless, there is a silver lining or at least a copper lining in a UN General assembly vote on Palestinian statehood, and it is worth noting. For years now, the Palestinians have opposed Israeli actions—from construction in the settlements to the failure to reach a final status agreement—with the threat of the “one state solution.” This is the threat that Palestinians would seek a unitary state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and encompassing all of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, wherein Jews would be a minority. Thus would the main goal of Zionism, creation of a Jewish state, be defeated. President Abbas has made this threat and so have other high-ranking Palestinian officials including chief negotiator Saeb Erekat and former Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei. But the threat is logically gone after the General Assembly vote. By insisting on going forward despite American and substantial European resistance, the Palestinians are committing themselves completely to the two-state solution. Their “gain” at the General Assembly must be viewed as the final, irrevocable commitment to that outcome and should destroy their ability to make their “one-state” threats any longer. It is critical that the United States, Canada, the EU, and all countries committed to peace in the Middle East make this point loudly and clearly now and after the vote. On balance it would be far better if the Palestinians found some justification for backing away from this foolish, damaging vote. But let us not ignore the single positive factor: when the General Assembly not only declares its support for Palestinian statehood but votes that there IS a Palestinian state, the “one-state solution” must happily die a final death.

The last time the Middle East Quartet met, on July 11, it was unable even to issue a statement about the key issue before it—the Palestinian effort to get the UN General Assembly and Security Council to declare Palestine a state and admit it to membership. Nor has the Quartet  been able to issue a statement about the attacks the Assad regime has been carrying out this week against Palestinian refugee camps in Syria, which have led thousands of Palestinians to flee their homes. But it did on August 16 get itself organized to address what it apparently saw as a graver issue and a greater threat to peace, Israel’s announcement of plans to construct additional housing units in Jerusalem and Ariel. Nowadays the Quartet seems able to reach agreement on only one thing: criticism of Israel. This is the lowest common denominator among the United States, EU, United Nations, and Russia, and it is pretty low indeed. If this is the only function of the Quartet, the better path would be to disband it now—for the statements it is making and the statements it seems unable to make combine to bring discredit on all participants.

If there is a single issue that explains the failure of Obama policy toward Israel, it is settlements. And this week the administration once again indulged itself in a knee-jerk reaction that displayed incomprehension in a way that harms U.S.-Israeli relations without doing the slightest bit of good for the Palestinians. This week Israel announced a plan to construct 277 more housing units in Ariel, a settlement that is a town of 18,000. The new units are to be constructed in the center of  the town, it was also announced. This is a significant fact, for construction of new units at the edges of the town would mean that the security perimeter would need to be extended to protect the new housing and the people in it. But this will not happen, and Ariel will expand in population but not in land area. It is not, in the usual Palestinian Authority parlance, "taking more Palestinian land." When I worked on these issues in the Bush Administration, we discussed settlement expansion thoroughly with the government of Israel and (as I have explained elsewhere) reached agreement on some principles. These were that Israel would create no new settlements and that existing settlements would expand in population but not in land area. New construction, that is, would be in already-built-up areas, and the phrase we used was "build up and in, not out." The usual complaints about new construction in the settlements were that "it is making a final peace agreement impossible" or at least more and more difficult by "taking more Palestinian land" that would have to be bargained over in the end and whose taking would right now interfere with Palestinian life and livelihoods. We understood that there would never be a long construction freeze even if there might be some brief ones, for the settlements--especially the "major blocks" that Israel will keep--are living communities with growing families. So we reached that understanding with the Israelis: build up and in, not out. That way whatever the chances of a peace deal were, construction in the settlements would not reduce them. This agreement the Obama Administration ignored or denounced, suggesting at various times that it never existed or that, anyway, it had been a bad idea and all construction must be frozen--even in Israel’s capital, Jerusalem. (To be more accurate, construction by Israeli Jews was to be frozen; construction by Palestinians could continue). No Israeli government could long accept such terms and though the Netanyahu government did agree to a short and partial freeze, when that failed to bring the PLO back to the negotiating table the freeze was ended. This Obama fixation with a construction freeze proved disastrous because the president and his secretary of state took the view that it was a precondition for negotiations without which the Palestinians could not be expected to come to the table. Of course once that American position was announced the Palestinian leadership had to adopt it, lest they appear weaker in asserting Palestinian "rights" than Washington. The argument over the construction freeze embittered U.S.-Israel relations and killed any chance of negotiations in 2009 and 2010. Late in 2010 the policy was finally abandoned. Nothing has replaced it, and no one really knows what administration policy is these days beyond getting past September’s expected UN General Assembly vote on Palestinian statehood. But if the fixation on freezing construction in settlements is no longer the main pillar of Obama policy, those old sentiments and statements linger on. Thus did the announcement that new units were to be built in Ariel evoke a new denunciation from Washington. To be sure, it did not come from the president himself and was a pretty low-key affair; it did not suggest that new a crisis in bilateral relations loomed. But this was a reminder that the administration appears to have learned nothing, and still does not understand the difference between expanding a settlement physically and expanding the population of a settlement by building in already-built-up areas. Why not? Without dealing with the question of which individual policymakers are responsible for this foolish policy, it does seem that the policy is based on the view that every square foot of land controlled by Jordan before the 1967 war is rightly part of "Palestine," so that every Israeli action on that land is wrong. This view also explains why the president believes peace negotiations should start from the "1967 borders." But there are no "1967 borders," just the 1949 Armistice lines that all sides agreed in 1949 were not to be regarded as permanent. It is reasonable to have the 1949 map on the table when negotiations begin, and to have next to it the 2011 map, and to seek a compromise. It is not reasonable to view it as a violation of international law and a threat to a peace agreement every time bricks and studs and drywall show up at the center of an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. In the real world those new units in Ariel do not make a final peace agreement harder.

Palestinian cabinet minister Mohammed Dahlan waves after returning to Gaza from treatment abroad October 22, 2005 (Mohammed Salem/Courtesy REUTERS). For many years Mohammed Dahlan was the top security official in the Palestinian Authority. Today, he is under assault by the PA; in late June his home was raided and he fled to Jordan. Dahlan is a Gazan who joined Fatah as a young man in 1981. During his years in Israeli prisons he learned fluent Hebrew. At various times he has been Minister of State Security, head of the “Preventive Security” organization (which was was viewed as the toughest Fatah strike force), and a member of the Palestinian legislature. In 2009 Dahlan was elected to the Fatah Central Committee. During my own years in government I met with him many times and he was clearly one of the five or six most powerful Palestinians; he was viewed as a skilled politician and a bulwark against Hamas. He was also viewed as corrupt, and the question was whether he was an effective military leader. The easy Hamas take-over of Gaza in 2007 gave the unfortunate answer. Now Dahlan has been expelled not only from the Central Committee but from the Fatah Party as well, partly due to accusations of corruption. This is ridiculous; if every Fatah official involved in corruption were expelled the Central Committee would lack a quorum. But in reaction, Dahlan has made some interesting charges against his former colleagues. Dahlan’s general attacks on President Abbas are nasty: “Abbas does not recognize any law, morals or values….Abbas feels that he’s above the law…. Abbas is trying to cover up for his political, organizational and internal failures.  Fatah has lost the Gaza Strip, the parliament and even the municipal elections. In his era, we have become without a political horizon and there’s no hope for Palestinians. We are in a pathetic situation.” More striking are his allegations about the Palestine Investment Fund or PIF: “Dahlan said that the dispute with the PA president erupted after he demanded to know what had happened to $1.3b. that was in the account of the Palestinian Investment Fund….Dahlan said that after the death of Yasser Arafat, the responsibility for the fund was transferred to Abbas in 2005. ‘This is money that Yasser Arafat had collected from Palestinian taxpayers for the day that we would need it,’ Dahlan explained. ‘There aren’t more black days than today, where our employees are not receiving salaries. Why doesn’t he pay from this fund, which he controls personally? The PLO does not know about this sum. This is documented money that was delivered to him [Abbas] from an international accounting company.’  Dahlan said that when he exposed the issue of the PIF last April, Abbas got furious….Mahmoud Abbas thinks that the people don’t know where this money is and who received it. Now he’s admitting that there is only $700 million in the fund.  But the real sum should be about $2b.’” The PIF was funded mostly by assets “under Arafat’s control,” as it was politely put: that is, money Arafat stole but that was recovered. It appears that at least $800 million was in the Fund by the beginning of the previous decade. Today, the Fund’s spiffy web site (www.pif.ps) says that it has $800 million in assets and has distributed $600 million over the years to the PA. But Dahlan’s allegations are not the only ones one hears from Palestinians. Management of the fund was in the capable hands of Salam Fayyad until the Hamas election victory in 2006; it was then separated from the PA government to avoid sanctions imposed against the PA. But that independence from the government has led to charges of corruption, lack of oversight and accountability, and self-dealing. As one article put it, “Mohammad Mustafa, the chairman and CEO of the PIF, doubles as Abbas’s chief economic adviser. As has been the case since its inception, the board is dominated by prominent businessmen, some of whose companies have taken part in ventures in which the fund has important asset stakes.” In view of the PA’s dependence on foreign aid for survival, this entire mess is dangerous. Dahlan is certainly a very biased source for information about the PA and Fatah and these days may be motivated by a desire for revenge. But a careful look at PIF finances and management is once again in order.

In June, Saudi Arabia granted Jordan $400 million in aid. This week, the Saudis added a billion dollars more, and this $1.4 billion is cash—not loans, not investments, but budget support. This amount almost entirely covers Jordan’s projected budget deficit for 2011 of $1.5 billion, and of course the country will receive additional aid from other governments. By contrast, the Saudis have given $30 million to the Palestinian Authority in 2011. And partly as a result, the PA is broke, has a billion dollars in debt, and has now put its public employees on half salary. These figures provide a far better insight into Saudi priorities than speeches or UN votes.

Will the Arab League pay up? Because donors are not meeting their pledges,  the Palestinian Authority is nearly broke and cannot meet its payroll. The PA told a specially convened session of the Arab League today that it needs an immediate injection of $300 million. Already, PA employees are on half salary. This is not because the United States or the EU is failing to support the PA financially, nor because Israel is failing to pass on withheld tax revenues it collects on behalf of the PA; the US, EU, and Israel are meeting their commitments.  It is solely because Arab states are not paying up, as PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has candidly pointed out. And yesterday PA Foreign Minister Riad al-Maliki said the same thing: "The importance of the meeting is that it has become urgent that the Arab countries meet their financial obligations, particularly given the looming possibility that the Palestinian Authority will be unable to pay salaries for this current month and the next one, which is Ramadan." This is a simple and quick test of the oil-rich Gulf states, and especially Saudi Arabia. With crude oil in the area of $100 a barrel, it is not a measure of their financial ability; they have the money.  And that being the case, this is a far better test than speeches and UN votes of just how committed to Palestinian progress they really are.

A fair measure of the dedication to the Palestinian cause on the part of Arab governments is whether they put their money where their mouth is. In that context, a news story today conveys an answer: "The Palestinian Authority will pay its employees only half their monthly salaries in July, the prime minister told reporters here on Sunday, because of what he said was ’the failure of donors, including our Arab brothers, to fulfill their pledges.’" Donors had pledged $971 million to the Palestinian Authority this year, but the year is half over and only $330 million has been delivered. It turns out that only the UAE, Algeria, and Oman have met the pledges they made years ago via the Arab League. The rest, including the vastly wealthy Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, are delinquent. Despite the roughly $100 billion in extra domestic spending this year of the Arab Spring to buy off its populace, Saudi Arabia will record a budget surplus of about $25 billion. So the failure to assist the Palestinians is the product of hostility, neglect, or uninterest. By comparison, the EU significantly increased its aid to the PA this year, from 100 million to 185 million Euros, or about $275 million--and this does not count the assistance coming from individual member states of the EU. Total aid to the Palestinians from the United States runs about $600 million per year. It is probably an exaggeration to say the Palestinians would be better off if instead of all those Arab pledges they got five dollars for every speech, TV or radio program, and newspaper article in Arabic that denounces Israel and swears eternal loyalty to the Palestinian cause. Or perhaps not.

In the Obama Administration, United States policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has placed the settlement issue front and center. In a review essay entitled "the Settlement Obsession" in the magazine Foreign Affairs, I argue that this approach is wrong. Israeli attitudes toward the settlements reflect a clash within Zionism, between those who see "redemption of the Land" as its key goal and those who see establishment of a Jewish democratic state as the objective. In the essay, I explain these disagreements and their policy impact. But I do not believe that the settlements explain why there has been no peace accord, for after all there was no peace agreement between 1948 and 1967--when not one settlement existed--and Israeli prime ministers have several times in the last twenty years offered terms that included removal of most settlements so long as the major blocks remain in Israel’s hands. Other issues explain the failure to reach an agreement: Jerusalem, and the related issues of the so-called "right of return" of Palestinian refugees and acknowledgment of Israel as a Jewish state. Even if negotiations recommence, it is hard to see how they will succeed unless the PLO leadership is willing to accept Israel as a Jewish state and to tell their own people that Palestinian refugees and their descendants will have rights in Palestine--but none is Israel.

Can the United Nations General Assembly make Palestine a state?  The answer is no, and yes. It appears that the Palestinians initially thought they could become a UN member state even if the United States vetoed their efforts in the Security Council. There was discussion a few months ago of a "Uniting For Peace" resolution in the UNGA, a procedure allowed by the UN Charter for action when the Security Council is tied in knots and unable to act. But UN lawyers soon clarified what is obvious on reading the Charter: that provision may be available for certain actions, especially dealing with threats to peace, but does not override the Charter provisions relating to membership. Chapter II, Article 4 says that “peace-loving states” that accept their obligations under the Charter are eligible for membership, but “The admission of any such state to membership in the United Nations will be effected by a decision of the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.” Membership thus requires an affirmative recommendation by the Security Council and as well as an affirmative vote in the General Assembly. As the United States has told the Palestinians there would indeed be a veto, there will be no opportunity for "Palestine" to become a UN member state next Fall. But the Palestinians may have a trick up their sleeve that could get them much of what they seek. While the General Assembly cannot alone grant UN membership to states, it can grant “permanent observer” status—something never mentioned in the Charter but now accepted by long practice. And indeed the PLO is an observer, elected in 1974, but its exact (and unique) UN status is as an “entity” that is a permanent observer. By contrast the Vatican has the status of being the sole "non-member state" that is a permanent observer. While the Vatican alone holds this status today, in the past Switzerland, Austria, Finland, Italy, and Japan have held it before becoming full members of the UN. The General Assembly has the ability to accord that “non-member state permanent observer” status to the PLO or to "Palestine." And that may now be precisely the Palestinian objective. Within the UN, the change in Palestinian status would not matter much. All permanent observers, member states or not, have the same “standing invitation to participate as observers in the sessions and the work of the General Assembly.” The Palestinians can already attend and speak at meetings (as Yasser Arafat so memorably did in 1974, a gun holstered on his hip), and even with the new and elevated status would not have a vote. But outside the UN, the change in status might matter a good deal. Today the Palestinians are unable to bring cases against Israel at the International Criminal Court, because only states can do so. If they try again after a UN vote gives them "non-member state" status, they can claim that the General Assembly has recognized them as a state and the ICC should follow that precedent. Governments that do not accord them full diplomatic status today might be tempted to follow as well. Campaigns against Israel for "occupying the territory of another state" might gain strength, and indeed the whole "BDS" or boycott, divestment, sanctions movement could. Moreover, the Palestinians would have at least something to show for this year’s diplomatic campaign--besides frustration and some resentment in Washington and a few European capitals. They would have failed in their original goal but could claim at least a partial victory, even if real statehood continued to elude them. That’s the rub, of course-- it would. Indeed it might be even further away, if the main effect of their campaign were to delay serious negotiations and further alienate Israelis and Americans. For in the end, it isn’t just the UN Charter that tells us the General Assembly cannot create a Palestinian state. Reality teaches the same lesson. That the PLO is following this path suggests a lack of interest in the genuine negotiations that are the only real path to statehood. This is not surprising at a moment when Palestinian attention is mostly focused on domestic politics--Fatah vs. Hamas--and the PLO’s leader, Mahmoud Abbas, has his sights set on retirement next year. It may yet be possible for the United States to come up with a form of words that brings the two parties to the negotiating table this summer and thereby allows Abbas to back away from the UN shenanigans. But this entire episode reveals a lack of Palestinian seriousness about negotiations and suggests that, while talks may commence and avoid the September UN confrontation, they will go nowhere. Like the talks the United States engineered in September 2010, such negotiations might start with hoopla and ceremony, but would most likely break down in the subsequent few months.

A group of very well-known American leaders has written an open letter to the president blaming almost every aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Israel and urging heavy American pressure to change Israeli policy. If Israel does not comply, the letter suggests, the president should impose "consequences." The letter appears in the current edition of The New York Review of Books, and the group is led by Lee Hamilton. It is disturbing that such views characterize the influential signers of the letter, and that they chose to attack Israel while many have remained silent on the bloodshed, death, and repression in Libya and Syria. While uprisings there and in Tunisia, Bahrain, and Egypt are proving each day that what happens between Israelis and Palestinians does not determine the fate of the Middle East, the letter reflects the apparently unshakeable belief that the central and fundamental problem in the region is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even the evidence of the Arab Spring appears unable to defeat this attitude. In this week’s edition of The Weekly Standard, I analyze and criticize the letter and the policies it proposes.

An Israeli soldier patrols along the Israeli-Syrian border near Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights (Ronen Zvulun/Courtesy Reuters) Yesterday was the 44th anniversary of Israel’s lightning victory over the Egyptians, Syrians, and Jordanians in the 1967 war. Like the observance of al naqba, or the disaster (which coincides with Israel’s founding) of a few weeks ago, the observance of the anniversary of al naqsa—the setback—was tense. Syrians, along with Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon have sought to use social media to build a non-violent movement to challenge Israel on its borders during these highly charged anniversaries. (The Assad regime—eager to shift public and international attention away from the upheaval in Syria—has helped, busing Palestinian refugees from camps near Damascus to the Golan Heights). In all, 22 people in on the Syrian side of the line were killed yesterday and another 350 wounded. Against the broad history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, these demonstrations and the much larger ones in May are hardly remarkable. Yet for all its banality, the demonstrations on May 15 and June 5 reveal in the starkest terms why there is not going to be a deal between Palestinians (along with the wider Arab world) and Israelis. The protests, which featured Palestinians bearing keys and deeds to property lost in Israel’s creation, reflect nothing less than the mutually exclusive legitimacies that are the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict—the Jewish connection to the land juxtaposed with Palestinian demands for justice through return to their homes. These mutually exclusive legitimacies are the reason why, for example, Israeli governments have begun demanding that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a “Jewish State” as a sine qua non of any final peace deal. At first blush, it seems odd and indicative of the Israeli leadership’s own doubts about the country’s legitimacy in the Middle East to demand that their adversaries accept the “Jewishness” of Israel as a condition for peace. Yet, prying recognition of Israel’s Jewish character from Mahmoud Abbas would have the politically beneficial effect (for Israel) of Palestinian self-abnegation. That’s precisely why the Palestinian leadership not only refuses this condition, but, in response, invokes the Palestinian right of return to Israeli territory as a way of leaving open the question of Israel’s legitimacy in the region. The Palestinian denial of Israel’s legitimacy and Israel’s denial of responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem suggests that each side sees the other as ephemeral, a problem that will eventually go away, leaving those who believe this narrative to conclude (erroneously) that they have time on their hands. They don’t, but in an environment where neither side actually recognizes the other—despite protestations to the contrary—and believes they can outlast their adversary, the chances of a deal bringing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an end are remote.

In late May President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu delivered two speeches each in Washington, debating how to understand events in the Middle East. But the third man was missing: Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the PLO, the Palestinian Authority, and the Fatah party. Abbas’s decision to embrace a unity government with the terrorist group Hamas was, nevertheless, what lay behind the events in Washington. In an article in this week’s edition of The Weekly Standard, I examine what happened in Washington and the choices that lie ahead for Abbas, Netanyahu, and Obama. In brief, I call Abbas’s tenure as Palestinian leader disastrous, and argue that there can be no hope for peace negotiations right now. What’s more, the very real progress that has been made under the leadership of PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is now in danger of being reversed.

The recent speeches by President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu haven’t advanced prospects for peace, which are crippled by disagreements over core issues and mistrust between U.S., Israeli, and Palestinian leaders, says CFR’s Steven A. Cook.