Hillel Halkin has the lead article in the March issue of COMMENTARY: “Israel: The Waiting Game:”
[O]f the various solutions that have been proposed for the Palestinian problem, including the “two-state” formula that has been a shibboleth of international diplomacy for the past fifteen years, none has the slightest relevance any longer.
The rise of Hamas, the disintegration of the Palestinian Authority as a governing body, and the spread of civil anarchy in its place have turned the vision of a Palestinian state living peacefully alongside Israel, always an optimistic construction of the facts on the ground, into an out-and-out fantasy. The Palestinians are not undergoing a temporary crisis that soon will or can resolve itself. . . . They are living the result of long-term processes of economic impoverishment, endemic corruption, a failure to build democratic institutions, the absence of a functioning legal system, a breakdown of central authority, the rule of military organizations, gangs, and clans, and the Islamic radicalization of growing segments of their population.
All of this would take years to reverse even under a strong, secularly oriented, pragmatic Palestinian regime of the kind that has no chance at the moment of being established. . . .
The notion, regularly repeated in Washington and the capitals of Europe, that one can tip the balance by strengthening Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and the supposed “moderates” in Fatah against Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and the rejectionists of Hamas, thereby producing a stable Palestinian government capable of negotiating with Israel, is mere whistling in the dark.
Halkin recounts how the Rabin-Peres Oslo Accord collapsed; then the Barak withdrawal from southern Lebanon and new peace negotiations with the Palestinians failed; then Ariel Sharon’s disengagement policy did not (as he delicately puts it) “achieve what was hoped for;” then Ehud Olmert’s war in Lebanon “delivered the coup de grace to [his own policy of] unilateral disengagement;” and now Israel cannot even stop the rocket attacks from Gaza. Next up, Iran.
Steven Shanok explains, in an article worth reading in its entirety, why every new peace plan is Groundhog Day. (Hat tip: BtB).