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Why the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Can't Be Solved

(American Purpose) Michael Mandelbaum - For three decades, successive American presidents invested diplomatic capital and their own time in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The effort failed in the past and is doomed to fail in the future because the Palestinians do not want a Palestinian state that would exist peacefully next to Israel. Their overriding goal is the destruction of Israel and they will enter into no arrangements that require their acceptance of a Jewish state in the Middle East as permanent and legitimate. Over the years the Palestinians have provided massive and incontrovertible evidence that this is in fact their position. They have refused several generous Israeli offers of statehood and have offered no proposals of their own in return. They have taken no serious, concrete steps to prepare for statehood, and in their public statements and the curricula of their schools they have relentlessly anathematized the idea as well as the fact of Jewish sovereignty. Palestinian negotiators have consistently stipulated as a nonnegotiable demand a "right of return" for anyone who can claim descent from anyone who left the British Mandate of Palestine in 1948. Such a claim has no moral, legal, or historical foundation, and it has served as a weapon in the Palestinians' ongoing campaign to destroy the state of the Jews rather than create their own. Palestinians became refugees in 1948 because, and only because, of the war of annihilation that first local Palestinians and then five Arab countries launched against the Jewish state. The Biden Administration should observe the diplomatic equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath in medicine: it should do no harm. Persisting in trying to broker an agreement while the Palestinians insist on a right of return does do harm. It encourages the Palestinians to believe, or at least to hope, that the American government does not oppose the elimination of Israel, which in turn gives them reason to continue to seek it. The writer is Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
2020-11-26 00:00:00
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