Tsafrir Abayov/AP Photo
Israeli police officers evacuate a woman and a child from a site hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, in Ashkelon, southern Israel, Saturday, October 7, 2023.
Here’s one thing that Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas have in common: None of them let Palestinians vote.
While Arab citizens of Israel can and do vote in Israeli elections, Israel’s refusal to allow the creation of a Palestinian state effectively disfranchises the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza on the paramount issue of their collective life. Still, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas do govern, after a fashion, in their respective terrains, but they don’t govern democratically. The Palestinian Authority has not held an election since 2006 rather than risk defeat, and since Hamas took power in Gaza in 2007, it also has held no elections and cracked down on domestic opposition. The residents of Gaza didn’t get to vote on the current attacks, or on any of their many predecessors, or for or against the sectarian government that waged them.
The justifiable fury that Palestinians feel about Israel and its occupation would doubtless spur many of them to support the current attacks if given a choice, but others would conclude that Israel’s military response and much of the world’s political response would only make things worse. Had they been told in advance that Hamas would target children and the elderly for killing and kidnapping, to be broadcast to the world via social media, some would have concluded those military and political responses, sure to be more devastating than any that had come before, made these attacks a profoundly self-sabotaging idea. And, as Palestinians are no less or more human than anyone else, some would have simply been appalled at such violence, as they are also appalled when children are killed by Israeli armed forces in the West Bank.
But Hamas didn’t convene a conclave or commission a poll. They just went ahead.
As someone who’s supported Palestinian statehood for the past half-century, the response of a number of Westerners who agree with me on that question has been as infuriatingly stupid as it’s been morally bankrupt. The case for Palestinian statehood is every nation’s generally self-evident case for national self-determination, but it is greatly diminished when it is linked to the deliberate barbarism of Hamas. The pro-Palestinian demonstrators on the streets of New York and other cities, by the very fact that they’ve taken to the streets now, have made that link more forcefully than the opponents of Palestinian nationhood ever could. Did they think the American public would be more receptive to the Palestinian cause because of Hamas’s murders? If they did, they probably also believe that Americans’ immediate response to Pearl Harbor was to repeal the Oriental Exclusion Act.
The Palestinians have real enemies, but with friends like these, their slim prospects for statehood grow steadily slimmer.
Their real enemies—Israel’s far-right and center-right parties, which dominate the Knesset—have made Israel’s 56-year occupation of Palestinian territories even more oppressive and violent in recent years. Those forces have grown stronger in Israel in rection to each successive intifada, as the pro-two-state Israeli left has dwindled to a sliver of the electorate. At this juncture, it’s impossible to envision the Israelis and Palestinians resolving this conflict themselves or, for that matter, doing anything other than intensifying it. Once the current round of slaughtering civilians has run its god-awful course, the United States and other nations with the wherewithal to enforce borders and provide financial aid should do all they can to compel a two-state solution. Some populations, like the Israeli settlers on the West Bank, will have to be and deserve to be moved—in the settlers’ case, to within Israel’s internationally recognized borders. Anyone who still believes a single state of Israelis and Palestinians is a viable option has to believe that the worst instances of settlers’ violence in the West Bank and Hamas’s mass murders of the past few days are both jim-dandy, for they’d be everyday occurrences in a unified state.
