France is the latest country to symbolically vote to recognize a Palestinian state, following England, Spain, and Ireland. It follows last month’s official recognition by Sweden and is ahead of an impending EU Parliament debate on issuing recognition. How do you explain the irony of this in the wake of the Gaza war and the recent terrorist attacks in Israel, which have led many in Israel to lose faith in a two-state solution?
First of all, it’s just Sweden. Sweden did it because, effectively, it’s an irrelevant gesture by an irrelevant country. Countries that go about recognizing a Palestinian state in a fit of diplomatic symbolism are underscoring their own insignificance. Second, I don’t think it’s all that ironic that it happened after the Gaza war because you had what seemed to me the weight of European public sympathy behind the aggressors.
I happen to believe in the two-state solution with a Palestinian state that has more in common with Canada than it does with Iran or Yemen or what the Palestinian state is shaping up to be. And the tragedy of this kind of recognition is that it tells the Palestinians that they can behave the way they have with the use of terrorism, aggression, missiles, and lawfare and get away with it. That’s astounding. The Kurds have been responsibly building up an autonomous region in Northern Iraq for many years and yet they don’t get recognition. The Tibetans have been models of peaceful, nonviolent resistance to Chinese oppression for decades and yet the Swedes aren’t recognizing Tibet. There are many other stateless people who have a far stronger claim morally and historically to a state and yet they don’t get recognition.
With the PA’s continuing incitement against Jews and Israel, is a two-state solution just a fantasy at this point?
What I wish would happen is that people who believe in it would understand that the only way it would ever come about is by revolutionary changes in Palestinian political and ethical culture. And it has to start by saying the Palestinians should only get a state when they’re worthy of a state. That begins with being prepared to be a peaceable and responsible member of the community of states. The Palestinians are several thousand miles away from that place. So it has to begin by saying it. We do have examples in living memory of cultures that changed, like Germany and Japan.
The alternative is a situation which is in my view akin to diabetes. It’s a disease, but it’s a disease that can be managed. And the question for Israeli statesmen in our lifetime is how well they manage the disease with a view that in the very long term some other cure will arise. The word “solution” should never be used when it comes to politics. Solution is something that happens when it comes to math. Human beings don’t operate according to equations.
We have to accept that maybe in a hundred years we’ll look back on this and say that was a temporary period and we figured out how to do it. What I don’t want Israel to do is race toward solutions of one stripe or another that only invite graver problems. We’ve learned over the last seventy years that Israel, while living with all these problems, has gone from a tiny little enclave to a thriving, powerful, technologically advanced, economically developed state. So Israel has in effect gotten stronger, not weaker.
Then you would not advocate annexing Judea and Samaria, even though the quality of life for Israeli Arabs is superior to that of their counterpart in the territories?
