At Dissent, Michael Walzer says that Netanyahu is walking with his eyes shut toward disaster. And he has this analysis of the Palestinians. Reads like free association, and that’s interesting.
Palestinian leaders would be happy to accept an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, but they are in no way ready to end the conflict; no Palestinian leader has even hinted at a willingness to give up the right of return. None of them are strong enough to do that, but I suspect that none of them want to do that. Their strategic goal is what I am afraid it has always been: the creation of a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state that they don’t recognize and with which they are not reconciled. But tactically they are newly inventive. They worked backward: their first resort was violence and terror; their last resort is peaceful protest. Had they reversed the order, they would have a state by now. There have been small nonviolent protests in the past, and these protests continue today in villages along the Wall, but they have been and still are marginal to the Palestinian struggle, never endorsed by Fatah or the PLO—and certainly not by Hamas. Now Israel faces the prospect of something radically new. How can it resist masses of men and women, children too, just walking across the ceasefire lines?
Actually, if the Palestinians are smart, as they are these days, they won’t walk across the lines, for that raises the specter of return, and the right of return doesn’t (yet) have sufficient international support. Come September, after the UN recognizes their state, they will march inside the 1967 lines, thousands of them—from Nablus, say, into the nearby settlements and army bases, asserting their own sovereignty and territorial integrity. And what will Israel do then? Many Israeli rightists would, almost certainly, prefer a new terrorist campaign, which would put the Palestinians once again in the wrong. That is certainly possible, but it is, suddenly, less likely than peaceful protest.
