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Commentary
Wall Street Journal

Palestinians Need to Get Real About Israel

The focus should be on prosperity and good government, not perpetual resistance.

walter_russell_mead
walter_russell_mead
Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship
Palestinian demonstrators gather east of Gaza City in the Gaza Strip on May 15, 2019, during a protest marking the 71st anniversary of Nakba. (MAHMUD HAMS/Getty Images)
Caption
Palestinian demonstrators gather east of Gaza City in the Gaza Strip on May 15, 2019, during a protest marking the 71st anniversary of Nakba. (MAHMUD HAMS/Getty Images)

As Palestinian officials nervously await the Trump administration’s peace plan, one fundamental reality shapes their long and bitter contest with Israel. Diplomatically, economically, militarily, Israel has never been stronger than it is today. By contrast, the Palestinian cause has never been in worse shape. Neither Hamas, which alternates between firing rockets and begging Israel to admit to Gaza the supplies it needs to stay in power, nor the Palestinian Authority, which is compromised by corruption and divided by factionalism, can find a viable policy either to defeat the Israelis or to make peace with them.

One result—as I saw on a recent visit sponsored by the Philos Project, a nonprofit Middle East engagement organization—is that Palestinians, especially young people, are increasingly giving up on having a state of their own. Instead they favor a “one-state solution”—a single, binational state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Yet in meetings with senior Palestinian Authority officials and political observers, it was clear that this is more a cry of despair than a serious political program. A Palestinian return to the policy of rejecting the two-state solution may spur American campus activists to new denunciations of “Israeli apartheid,” but it won’t help the Palestinian cause in the real world.

Read the full article in the Wall Street Journal "here":https://www.wsj.com/articles/palestinians-need-to-get-real-about-israel…