Let Us Now Praise Infamous Men
The best bet for Israel and Palestine could lie in the sullied reputations of Netanyahu and Abbas
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NOTE: Bastiat’s Window usually focuses on economics, health, science, ethics, and culture. After a few more posts on the Middle East, we’ll return to those topics. Through January 1, 2024, half of all paid subscription revenue will go to the Magen David Adom (Israel’s Red Cross). Since October 25, subscriptions have raised nearly $2,500.
Foreword
Support in Israel for the establishment of an independent Palestine has generally resided on the political Left, with the Right strongly opposed. Here, we suggest that, paradoxically, October 7’s ghastly attack on Israel by Hamas may have created conditions under which it’s in the interests of the Right to favor fast-track Palestinian independence—for security reasons. The rationale lies in (1) two treaties signed in 1648, (2) Ariel Sharon’s unconventional logic as a general in 1970 and prime minister in 2005, (3) Western resistance to Israel’s efforts to finish off Hamas, (4) the Abraham Accords signed in 2020, and (5) Saudi Arabia’s great wealth and dread of an ascendant Iran. These confluent events set the stage for a radical policy shift, but the essential catalyst may lie in the enfeebled state of both the Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
The most famous words in the Apocrypha are found in Ecclesiasticus (a.k.a., The Book of Sirach):
“Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us. … Leaders of the people by their counsels … wise and eloquent are their instructions.”
In 2023, however, it’s possible that the saving grace of the land where Ben Sira wrote Ecclesiasticus could rest with two men who are as infamous as famous and whose current counsel is perceived by many to be neither wise nor eloquent. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas are both widely seen as aging, worn-out, relics with tarnished reputations and shapeshifting principles. Paradoxically, the sinking fortunes of both men could provide a rare opportunity to transform for the better both their places in history and the fortunes of their respective peoples.
There are powerful caveats to my thesis, some mentioned below, and some not. So, assume the purpose here is to pose a question, rather than to provide a definitive answer. Read the arguments; then let’s discuss their strengths and weaknesses in the comments.
2005: Ariel Sharon Evacuates Gaza
Twenty years ago, Ariel Sharon was Israel’s Prime Minister, and he bore many similarities to today’s Netanyahu. He, too, had seen days of glory, but time and questionable choices had sullied his image. He was viewed as an irascible hard-liner—and in many ways was exactly that. His elevation to prime minister was one of those accidents that sometimes arise from Israel’s fractious electoral system and unstable parliamentary structure. His rise was a deeply unpleasant event for Israel’s Left.
What followed, though, was a breathtaking Nixon-to-China shattering of expectations. Faced with an impossible situation, in 2005, Sharon ordered a total evacuation of all Jews, military and civilian, from the Gaza Strip and pulled off the unthinkable in a very short period of time. Approximately 8,000 Jewish settlers went, kicking and screaming, with Israeli forces demolishing their homes behind them, making their exit irrevocable. Essential to that action were Sharon’s hardline credentials, his legendary stubbornness, his Machiavellian pragmatism, and his ornery indifference to what anyone thought of him. It is doubtful that any prime minister lacking any one of those characteristics could have pulled it off.
Some might see the barbarism of October 7, 2023, as proof that Sharon’s evacuation of Gaza was a disastrous error, but one can make a strong case that the opposite is true. For security purposes, both Israel and/or Egypt still control Gaza’s border crossings, airspace, and territorial waters. But otherwise, Sharon ended Israel’s control over life in Gaza and offered its Palestinian residents the opportunity to rule themselves. As the Israelis departed, they handed over to the Palestinians the lucrative agricultural enterprises that Jewish settlers had built—facilities that could have provided Gazans with large, immediate, permanent incomes, along with the chance to build productive, peaceful, independent lives. Instead, terrorists among them quickly destroyed the facilities, and soon afterward, Gazans elected Hamas to rule over them. Once elected, Hamas promptly murdered Abbas’s Palestinian allies in Gaza, canceled all subsequent elections, and commenced seventeen years of bombardment of and murderous incursions into Israel.
Without Sharon’s evacuation, honest observers in 2023 could reasonably blame Gaza’s pathologies on occupation. Instead, Sharon’s evacuation has provided proof positive that nothing whatsoever can ever placate Hamas. Of course, occupation is still an excuse that resonates across social media, in universities, and on the streets of London, Paris, Sydney, and New York—a symptom of demagoguery and delusion.
In the early years of Sharon’s 2001-2006 premiership, a great Israeli friend of mine—someone from Israel’s Center-Left—was nearly despondent over his election as prime minister. But Sharon’s evacuation of Gaza and other stereotype-busting actions he took upended her prior perceptions. Less than five months after the evacuation, on January 4, 2006, Sharon suffered a massive stroke, dissolving into a coma from which he never emerged. My friend was as despondent about his illness and vanishment from the political scene as she had been about his rise five years earlier.
1970: Sharon Proposes an Independent Palestine
Sharon’s Machiavellian pragmatism on Gaza should not have been a shock. Fifteen years earlier, he had stood nearly alone in starkly defying conventional Israeli wisdom. During 1970’s Black September war, Palestinian forces under Yasser Arafat came close to toppling Jordan’s King Hussein and replacing him with a Palestinian-ruled government. (Jordan had been part of Great Britain’s Palestine Mandate.)
The specter of Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) ruling Jordan from just across the narrow river terrified Israel’s people and leaders. The one striking exception was Sharon, who suggested that Israel do nothing to prevent the PLO’s takeover. “But that would mean a terrorist state on our borders!” came the shocked response. Sharon, however, argued that if Arafat ruled a Palestinian State from Amman, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be reduced to a mere border dispute rather than a nation versus a stateless people. One can always settle a border dispute, he said, whereas a stateless people is an intractable problem.
No matter how murderous its intentions toward Israel, a sovereign Jordan-as-Palestine might also have been constrained by international law in ways that simply don’t apply to amorphous non-state actors like Hamas or the Palestinian Authority. Would a PLO-ruled Jordan-as-Palestine have posed a greater danger to Israel than, say, the combined forces of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and others in 1948? Or the combined might of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in 1967? Or of Egypt and Syria in 1973? In those three wars, Israel’s enemies had names, addresses, phone numbers, and clearly defined responsibilities and limitations under international law—as Arafat would have had, ruling from Amman.
Monopoly of force within mutually recognized territories has formed the core of international relations since the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648. It is this legacy (plus 18th and 19th century amplifications) that gave finality to Israel’s repeated defeats of its state-based attackers, as opposed to the never-resolved issues with Palestinians. Westphalian principles also enabled the establishment of peace treaties, however imperfect, with Egypt and Jordan and, later, with Morocco, Sudan, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates under the Abraham Accords. Post-Westphalia, international law offers stern guidance to nations and little practical advice to stateless agglomerations—or those adjacent to them. Dealing with Palestine would be quite different from dealing with Palestinians.
Most importantly, monopoly of force confers upon a sovereign both the right to defend its national territory and also the obligation to constrain non-state actors within its realm; and it imposes clear culpability when the sovereign fails in that obligation. One might cite Lebanon as a counterexample, given Hezbollah’s ominous presence and episodic violence against Israel. But the caveat there is that for decades, Lebanon has hovered between functioning state and lawless no-man’s-land like Gaza. But even Lebanon’s feeble government has shown some power to rein in Hezbollah. In contrast, no nation holds such power over Gaza or the West Bank, as the Palestinian Territories are at present the only sizable populated lands on earth that are claimed by no sovereign nation.
Sharon as Template for Netanyahu?
With the 2005 Gaza disengagement, Sharon rehabilitated his reputation and is now remembered as something of a convention-defying visionary who might have accomplished much more had a stroke not felled him so soon after the evacuation.
2023’s situation parallels 2005’s. Netanyahu, like Sharon, is an irascible hard-liner, a man with sullied reputation (both politically and morally), and—this time around—a somewhat accidental prime minister. Like Sharon, Netanyahu is probably more transactional than ideological. Like Sharon, it’s not hard imagining him tossing aside seemingly sacred principles if he perceived doing so to be self-serving and/or beneficial to Israel’s strategic interests.
Fifty-three years after Black September, Sharon’s argument that hostile nations are preferable to hostile stateless peoples ought to press on every Israeli’s thoughts. To engage in this question, Israelis need not trust Abbas or the rogue groups operating in the West Bank or the popular opinion of the Palestinian street. Gaza aside, at this point in history, the relevant question is whether an independent West Bank would be any worse for Israel than the corrosive standoff that has now spanned two full generations. What Netanyahu thinks about this in the privacy of his own thoughts is unknowable to the rest of us. But he certainly knows that his personal and political reputation is in the dirt and that Israel’s West Bank presence is costly and corrosive. He no doubt knows that the time for him to shape his place in history and to improve the security of his people is quickly running out. Given the events of the moment, a century hence, his name may be remembered only as a feckless leader so distracted as to allow the medieval slaughter of October 7.
Netanyahu as Template for Abbas?
Fortuitously, there are also parallels between Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas, too, is a shell of his former self. In many ways, he, too, is a failure, both in terms of governance and personal probity. At age 88, Abbas’s window of opportunity is closing even faster than Netanyahu’s.
With both men sitting uneasily, one can imagine Netanyahu whispering to Abbas, “As Israel finishes off Hamas, it’s time for you to declare a Palestinian State, which Israel will recognize immediately.” Very likely, a vital ingredient would be the simultaneous recognition of both Israel and Palestine by Saudi Arabia—and the Kingdom’s intimate involvement afterward. As the ruler of a sovereign nation, Abbas could credibly re-establish dominion over a post-Hamas Gaza in a way that a Palestinian Authority subservient to Israel cannot. For the Saudis, this event would fulfill their desires to recognize Israel, end the Palestinians’ statelessness, and throttle Iran’s influence on the region.
With such a move, Israel would have to reconsider the status of the West Bank settlements. Part of Israel’s problem with responding to Hamas on October 7 was that Israeli security forces were heavily deployed to remote settler communities in the West Bank, placing them hours away from the far more perilous Gaza border. Netanyahu’s governing coalition includes some for whom those West Bank settlements are sacrosanct. But the experience of October 7 suggests that whatever one thought before, the small, remote settlements are now an unaffordable extravagance—an unacceptable drain on Israel’s security mechanisms. That was Sharon’s epiphany in 2005, so might it be Netanyahu’s in 2023?
When Sharon reached that conclusion, he lost the zealous supporters of Gaza settlements in his coalition—including then-former Prime Minister Netanyahu. But, seeing a chance to end the toxic impact of Gaza, Sharon constructed a coalition of strange bedfellows—including many on the Left who had previously despised him.
On Settlements and Saudis
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In 2023, like Sharon in 2005, Netanyahu may be the one figure in Israeli politics sufficiently strong, transactional, Machiavellian, and ornery to reverse his own longstanding alliance with zealots for West Bank settlements. He certainly has legitimate grounds for arguing that, regardless of what was true before October 7, Israel can no longer afford their distraction. As with Ehud Barak’s 2000 offer of an independent Palestine, Israel would likely insist on retaining some large West Bank communities huddled next to the pre-1967 border (e.g., Ma’ale Adumim); Barak’s proposal then was that Israel would ultimately surrender a similar area of its own pre-1967 territory in exchange for those communities. But such land swaps could be negotiated sometime after the establishment of an independent Palestine. As Sharon said of an Arafat-run Jordan, border disputes are always resolvable.
Bringing Palestinians into the Westphalian structure would also give Arab nations like Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Qatar good reason to join the Abraham Accords and establish diplomatic relations with Israel—along with countries like Indonesia, Mauritania, Somalia, and Niger. Such a maneuver would also discombobulate some Israel-hating forces in Western streets, on university campuses, at the U.N., in the press, and across social media.
Netanyahu, Abbas, and Saudi Arabia all possess powerful motives for implementing fast-track Palestinian independence. Very likely, the blueprint to do so already exists. Before October 7, Israel and Saudi Arabia were nearing the historic establishment of diplomatic relations. Reports surrounding those negotiations indicate that Israel would have made significant concessions to the Palestinians as part of the deal. Very likely, Hamas’s barbaric attack was designed to scuttle any Israeli-Saudi-Palestinian accord and, for now, appears to have successfully done so. Defying Hamas’s barbaric interference in this process would be seen a stunning blow to the terrorist group’s capacity to blackmail the world—the Arab World in particular. Saudi Arabia could properly claim to have been the force that finally sired an independent Palestine, and its financial wherewithal would enable it to offer ample carrots and sticks to encourage Abbas’s fledgling government to respect a cold peace with Israel—perhaps assisted by prior signatories to the Abraham Accords. Such a deal would also serve the interests of both the Biden Administration (who faces heavy pressure from his party’s anti-Israel Left) and Republicans anxious to support Israel and to tout the legacy of the Abraham Accords.
The Power of Narrative
Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948 was a rapid response to the indecision and chaos surrounding Britain’s departure from Palestine. A Palestinian Declaration of Independence, supported by Israel and Saudi Arabia, would similarly jolt the current dynamic. With the question of Palestinian independence suddenly settled for all time, Israel would have a much freer hand to finish off Hamas—which would also be in the interests of Abbas and Saudi Arabia.
In this admittedly conjectural scenario, the presently bruised, battered Netanyahu would transform himself into a brutally pragmatic prime minister whose willpower ended an intractable standoff that has languished for over half a century. Abbas would be remembered as the first president of an independent Palestine. Regardless of their other failings, both would likely be untouchable for the rest of their lives, regardless of past misdeeds.
Netanyahu was relentlessly opposed to Sharon’s evacuation of Gaza, and more recently, he has allied with the more fervent West Bank settlers. But, to borrow a term with a long history in the Israel-Palestine conflict, the facts on the ground for Netanyahu are very different from those he faced in 2005—and from those he faced on October 6, 2023. Sharon, too, was a powerful defender of the settlements—until the day he wasn’t.
Some on Israel’s Left would, no doubt rend their clothing at the thought of rehabilitating Netanyahu. But they might well want to ponder a bit of wisdom uttered by another man of the political Right, Ronald Reagan, who said, “There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit.
AFTERWORD
I live half a world away from Israel and Palestine—a lifelong student of history, but not an expert in military or security affairs. I understand the caveats and cautions one might apply to what my essay above suggests—most prominently Israel’s lack of strategic depth—the extreme proximity of a nascent Palestinian state to Israel’s population centers.
My thinking is partially informed by my memory of standing on the Golan Heights in 1999, with a former soldier pointing east to the nearby Syrian border, then west toward Israel’s northern population centers, and then slightly northward toward the hills of Lebanon. A stark, three-dimensional reminder that strategic depth exists nowhere in Israel. But the relatively quiet Israeli-Syrian border is telling. No nation has been more virulently inimical to Israel than Syria, whose bloody dictator, Bashar al-Assad, possesses vast military resources. He has killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and could easily turn his weapons westward and pulverize Israel’s cities in minutes or seconds. He does not do so, in large part because Syria’s status as a nation-state entitles Israel to respond to attacks by Syria (or by terrorist groups operating out of Syria) in ways that cannot be used against stateless Palestinians.
Many pre-October 7 impossibilities, good and bad, are now possible, and many prior possibilities are no longer tenable or desirable. This essay doesn’t naively suggest that warm friendship would quickly bloom between Israel and a newly independent Palestine. It suggests only that post October 7, an independent Palestine might be less politically and militarily problematic for Israel than the status quo. Independence might offer at least the possibility of warmer relations sometime in the future, but that’s a topic for another day.
LAGNIAPPE
Europe at the Peace of Westphalia, 1648
The Peace of Westphalia, embodied in two 1648 treaties, brought peace to the Holy Roman Empire and ended the Thirty Years’ War that had killed around eight million people. While the above essay, “Let Us Now Praise Infamous Men,” refers to Westphalian principles of nation-states, the actual role of those treaties in modern international relations is hotly debated. From Wikipedia:
“Some scholars of international relations have identified the Peace of Westphalia as the origin of principles crucial to modern international relations, including the inviolability of borders and non-interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. This system became known in the literature as Westphalian sovereignty. Most modern historians have challenged the association of this system with the Peace of Westphalia, calling it the ‘Westphalian myth.’”
What can I say Robert? Beautifully written! I disagree with every syllable! Except for when you referenced Sharon as supporting Jordan is Palestinian, which it is, 75-85% of it, regardless of the Bedouin "king" that runs it. But even then, the Palestinians as they present themselves to this day are not interested in Jordan or the West Bank. They want Tel Aviv and Haifa and Jerusalem, and they never stop saying that openly and empathetically. It is too late for two states west of the Jordan river. There is Israel and there is Jordan. That's it.
Well, okay then.