Every time the Palestinians rebuff a peace proposal, commentators reach for an observation by the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban: ‘The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.’ It’s pithy, and depressingly accurate, but I’ve always been more struck by another Eban aphorism: ‘Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.’ Not as witty, I’ll grant you, but it gets closer to the psychology at play in this conflict. The Palestinians have been able to miss one opportunity after another because doing so has brought no lasting diplomatic consequences.
The western liberal mind is a captive of the two-state solution ideology, a lethal idealism convinced that Palestinian statehood will bring peace even as every step towards it brings only more violence. At the United Nations and in the foreign ministries of Europe, each Palestinian rejection of an Israeli offer proves that more pressure must be brought to bear on Israel.
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