Gadi Taub
Tablet, Feb. 21, 2024
“Trying to force a solution on Israel without any hope of peace will only cause more Israelis to believe that our erstwhile American ally has turned against us.”
If the news that the U.S. is going to recognize a Palestinian state that doesn’t exist was intended to break up Prime Minister Netanyahu’s wartime coalition, it’s unlikely to work. Contrary to what the Biden administration assumes, the obstacle to the “two-state solution” is Israel’s electorate, not its prime minister. The more the administration tries to ram this misguided plan down the throat of traumatized Israelis who are in no mood to compromise their security, the more the country’s prime minister will recover political support.
The calculation here is not a difficult one to make: Netanyahu’s coalition is united in the belief that promising the Palestinians a state in the middle of a war for national survival would be a declaration by Israel’s government that murdering, raping, and kidnapping Israelis is the way for Palestinians to achieve their national ambitions. Even the prime minister’s rivals in the coalition, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, have had to publicly support this consensus.
If this is not clear to the White House, it may be because the administration is clinging religiously to its failed “regional integration” policy—its appeasement of Iran—while relying on a uniformly leftist Israeli press that is eager to tell it what it wants to hear, about a nonexistent moderate electorate that will deliver a moderate two-statist coalition, if only Netanyahu can be removed from office.
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