Is the Risk Worth the Reward?
I Don't Have a Problem With A Two State Solution In Theory, but Can Israel Survive a Total Pullout from Gaza?
Israel wants to exist in peace. The United States wants Israel to exist in peace. Some of the Arab nations have come around to the idea of letting Israel live in peace and more may be headed in that direction. Peace comes at a price though, and Israel would do well to weigh their options before committing to anything, even if it is Saudi Arabia, arguably the region’s most powerful country, that has come calling. Per CNN:
The US is currently negotiating one mega-deal involving three components, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Thursday.
The first component includes a package of agreements between the US and Saudi Arabia, another component has the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and a third component for a pathway to a Palestinian state.
“All of them are linked together. None go forward without the others,” Miller said.
For normalization to be realized between Saudi Arabia and Israel, there has to be a pathway for a Palestinian state and “calm in Gaza,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a panel at an economic conference in Riyadh this week.
“The work that Saudi Arabia and the United States have been doing together in terms of our own agreements, I think is potentially very close to completion, but then in order to move forward with normalization two things will be required: calm in Gaza and a credible pathway to a Palestinian state,” he said.
First things first: Yes, I see the part in there about a mutual defense pact between the US and Saudi Arabia. I don’t see that as changing a whole lot though. The US has had troops in Saudi since at least Desert Shield (that much I remember. I’d have to check to see if we had anything in Saudi previous to that and it’s kind of beside the point.) so we’d be forced to fight any invader just to protect our troops that are there and they supply seven percent of American oil.
Saudi, for its part, would probably provide about what a lot of our European allies provide: Logistical aid. If we have to fight a major war we’re going to see a spike in demand for oil and there’s a good chance that Saudi would be closer to where we would be fighting than mainland American anyway. A US/Saudi defense pact seems to me to be more of a formalization of how things would shake out anyway. That should, at least theoretically, make things go easier and more quickly if activating the treaty ever became necessary. I’m fine with it.
It’s the path to a two state solution that bothers me. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not dead set against the existence of a Palestinian state if it agrees to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, and agrees to normalized relations, and mutual non-aggression. (No, I don’t think an actual alliance is necessary or, in current context, realistic.) I just don’t think a Hamas governed Gaza would be willing to end the war for good. I wrote about this previously.
And, let’s face it, withdrawal in the past hasn’t worked out all that well. In 2005, Israel pulled its people out of Gaza and Samaria and abandoned twenty-five of its settlements. That doesn’t look like such a good thing now. I’m not blaming Israel for what happened on October 7, but I do believe that it probably would have been much easier to prevent with the added intelligence they would have been able to gather with the populations of those settlements in place. If nothing else, it would have give Israel a legitimate reason to have an official presence in the Strip.
I don’t see this set of treaties ending as ending the war. If Saudi Arabia wants “calm in Gaza” as a prerequisite to a treaty, it is not in the interests of either Hamas or its Iranian masters to give it to them. Any cease-fire signed with Hamas under those circumstances could be expected to last the exact amount of time it takes Israel to remove the last soldier from Gaza plus the exact amount of time it takes to fire off a rocket.
I can’t prove this, but from where I sit it looks a lot like any interest Hamas has in a cease-fire is simply to gain the time it needs to prepare for the next round of warfare. They won’t acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. Not only is it against the Hamas Covenant of 1988, but it’s how the PLO and its leader, Yasser Arafat, became irrelevant. Allowing Israel to exist means Hamas has lost. They won’t accept that. CNN lays the reason out for us:
“There will still be room for a multilateral security agreement that eventually includes Israel, along with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the U.S. and others, when political circumstances allow…the choice will be Israel’s, when it’s ready to put something on the table that moves the ball forward towards a two-state solution with the Palestinians,” Maksad said.
A multi-lateral security agreement is an agreement to protect each other if one nation is attacked. It could very easily be interpreted as requiring any country that signs a treaty with Israel to go to war against Hamas if they attack again. Hamas can’t fight Israel one on one successfully. They damn sure can’t fight a multi-national force that includes Israel. They would have no choice except to keep fighting to prevent it.
And maybe the worst part about the whole thing is that I don’t believe that whoever in the Biden administration is leading the charge toward this (and we all know Gropy Joe doesn’t have the brainpower to come up something like this on his own) has considered that. This sounds like someone in Washington is dangling the promise of peace with Saudi Arabia to get Israel to stop the war.
Unfortunately for them, I don’t think Bibi is as dumb as they are. And I don’t expect to see this thing end before the inauguration in January so it may not matter anyway. Trump may have other ideas about how things go if he wins. Lord knows he’s got a Jewish daughter and Jewish grandchildren. He may not be so willing to blame the Jews for doing what it takes to preserve their own lives. If Trump is elected (and I’m not saying he will. There’s a long time till election day and a whole mess of crap that could shake out before then) this whole thing might just go on the junk heap anyway.
Making Gaza a Saudi satrapy, with some prince placed in charge to maintain order, might lead to a stable outcome. I can't see leaving Hamas in control having a happy ending for anybody other than aspiring martyrs.
What do you mean by Two-state solution? Hell, what do they mean?
Hamas has run Gaza for nearly 20 years. Maybe all of 20 years. Gaza is its own state.
Last time I checked, the Palestinian Authority has been running the West bank for at least a decade. That is its own state.
So, right now, I'm counting at least three states.
The problem is that two states want to wipe out the third one.
I'm happy with a one state solution. The solution where Israel is a state, and everyone else is a parking lot.