Have you ever wondered why it seems the Palestinians don't have the sense to take a deal when it's offered to them, and have the nation they claim they've long wanted?
After all, the UN resolution which created Israel in 1947 also created a Palestinian state...which the Palestinians promptly rejected and thus began the 60 years of Arab-Israeli conflict.
By most accounts, they were also on the verge of a great deal in 2000 when Bill Clinton strong-armed a deal that frankly should have been humiliating for Ehud Barak to make. Why did the Palestinians walk away from that, only to start a new round of bloodshed?
A piece by Hillel Halkin at Commentary Magazine entitled "The Peace Planners Strike Again" may have some answers.
If Halkin is right, and I believe he is, it isn't so much because the Palestinians aren't smart enough to realize a good deal when they see it, but that peace is actually counter to their overall aim:
The Palestinians, after all, know that statehood will never enable them to defeat Israel on the battlefield by themselves; even were they not demilitarized, they can never possess the economic means to match Israel’s military might. What prospect they have of destroying Israel, or of weakening it to the point where additional territory could be wrested from it, would depend on one of two options. The first of these, championed by Hamas, is to resist the temptation of Palestinian independence and preserve the status quo until Israeli-Palestinian disentanglement becomes impossible and a bi-national state emerges whose Arab population with its higher birthrate inevitably becomes a majority.
The second option, preferred by the Palestinian “moderates,” is to choose statehood, however degrading its terms, while seeking to undermine Israel from within and keeping other Arab countries embroiled with it so that they remain military allies. These two ambitions would be related, for the more a growing and disgruntled Arab minority in Israel protests its second-class status, and the more Israel is accused of denying Palestinian refugees their “right of return,” the more the Arab world will go on nourishing hostile feelings toward it. If Israel does not fall by itself, a tiny Palestinian state could then still count on provoking a decisive war into which its Arab neighbors could be dragged when the right time came.
In other words, while the Palestinians would like a state, it is not their primary objective. Their primary objective is the annihilation of Israel. Pursuit of this objective supersedes even their own statehood.
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