Israel-Palestine is a Wicked Problem

In his latest New York Times column Tom Friedman expresses increasing concern over the situation, not solely because of the violence and loss of life but because of the risks it holds for Democrats and for American Jews:

Because without that horizon — without any viable hope of separating Israelis and Palestinians into two states for two peoples — the only outcome left will be one state in which the Israeli majority dominates and Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank will be systematically deprived of equal rights so that Israel can preserve its Jewish character.

If that happens, the charge that Israel has become an apartheid-like entity will resonate and gain traction far and wide. The Democratic Party will be fractured. A rising chorus of progressives — who increasingly portray the Israeli army’s treatment of Palestinians as equivalent to the Minneapolis Police Department’s treatment of Black people or to the treatment by colonial powers of Indigenous peoples — will insist on distancing the United States from Israel and, maybe, even lead to bans on arms sales.

Meanwhile, centrist Democrats will push back that these progressives are incredibly naïve, that they have no clue how many two-state peace plans the Palestinians have already rejected — which decimated the Israeli peace camp — and that none of their causes, from women’s rights to L.G.B.T.Q. rights to religious pluralism, would last a minute on the Hamas-run campus of the Islamic University of Gaza.

As the past two weeks demonstrated, every Jewish organization and synagogue in America will be heatedly divided over this question: Are you willing to defend a one-state Israel that is not even pretending to be a democracy anymore, a one-state Israel whose leaders prefer to rely on the uncritical support of evangelicals than the critical support of Jews?

Finally, Jewish and non-Jewish students on every college campus also will be forced to wrestle with this question or run as far away as possible from the debate. More and more will abandon Israel. You can already see it happening. And anti-Semitism will flourish under the guise of anti-Zionism.

It will get very ugly. All nuance will be lost. Twitter and Facebook will become battlefields between Israel’s critics and defenders, and Donald Trump and the Republicans will fan the flames, telling American Jews that they have no future in the Democratic Party and beckoning them to come over to the G.O.P. — which, with its evangelical base, does indeed unquestioningly support the Jewish state … for now.

He proposes the Biden Administration do the following:

• Act as though the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank is already a Palestinian state.
• Open a diplomatic mission to the Palestinians in Ramallah and invite a diplomatic representative of the PA to Washington.
• Propose negotiations using the plan produced by the Trump Administration as a starting point.
• Encourage the Arab states that have normalized relations with Israel to move their embassies to West Jerusalem.
• Encourage Arab states to “massively increase” their financial support for the PA.

I deeply miss John Burgess. He believed that the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians could be resolved, essentially, by paying the Palestinians off. IMO those days are gone. Contrary to the view being promoted by American progressives, continuing attacks on Israel from Gaza and the West Bank have eviscerated the peace movement in Israel and there are factions within Israel which will accept nothing less than a Greater Israel, absorbing all of the Palestinian territories and more. Meanwhile the corruption and impotence of the PA has rendered it non-viable as a negotiating partner and Hamas is actually gaining steam among Palestinians by its ongoing attacks against Israel. There are factions among the Palestinians which will accept nothing less than pushing the Israeli Jews into the sea.

The effect of more support for the PA will be to finance corruption and create the risk that the money will ultimately end up in the hands of Hamas.

Contrary to what Mr. Friedman seems to believe it’s a truly wicked problem. Not only is there no solution I can’t even envision a meaningful process.