18 June 2015
How Israel Can Benefit Diplomatically from the Dissolution of the Palestinian Unity Government
With the end of the PA-Hamas ‘government’, we can now expect greater international pressure on Israel to embark again on the ‘peace-process’ with the PA. Indeed, only recently PM Netanyahu announced a readiness for such talks. This may have been advantageous from an image point of view. But it also involves a serious difficulty which can easily be rectified.
The difficulty is that simply agreeing to peace-process negotiations with the PA creates a false impression. This severely damages Israel by fostering the incorrect belief that a win-win solution to the conflict is possible. Yet as long as the Palestinians refuse to accept Israel as a Jewish state, and to deny 2 states for 2 peoples, there can be no implementation of the favorite solution of the international community – the 2-state solution.
The difficulty is that simply agreeing to peace-process negotiations with the PA creates a false impression. This severely damages Israel by fostering the incorrect belief that a win-win solution to the conflict is possible. Yet as long as the Palestinians refuse to accept Israel as a Jewish state, and to deny 2 states for 2 peoples, there can be no implementation of the favorite solution of the international community – the 2-state solution.
A diplomatic own-goal
That is, agreeing to talks as if a win-win solution to the conflict were feasible in these circumstances obscures from view the zero-sum/winner-takes-all strategy of the Palestinians. As a result, this remains the unseen driving force of the conflict (see Abbas’ Cairo Interview and The Israeli Demand that Palestinians Accept Israel as a Jewish State ).
Without this being clear, those who profess to believe that peace will only be achieved by an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank will continue to blame Israel for not agreeing to withdraw. Israel’s diplomatic approach is thus a key element that reinforces the belief that Israel is yet again to blame for the inevitable failure of any talks.
In other words, the continued lack of international awareness of the Palestinian refusal to accept Israel as a Jewish state is in part due to Israel’s own international diplomatic stance. This in turn is reflected in its non-existent public diplomacy on this core issue.
Solving the problem
Therefore, a better response is to ...
