When is a Palestinian State Really a State?

Wall Street Journal

What does it mean to call a nation a state?

In many ways, that is the nub of the disagreement between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when it comes to dealing with the Palestinians. Their split on the question was on public display as the two met in the White House Monday, but the differences are more subtle than the headlines and the superficial analysis of their meeting suggests. The American president is in favor, as his predecessor was, and as the previous Israeli government said it was, of a “two-state solution.” That is to say, the way to make permanent peace between Israel and the Palestinians is for everybody to agree that there will be two internationally recognized independent states in the region, one run by the Israelis and the other by the Palestinians.

Sounds simple, right? But Netanyahu thinks it isn’t that simple, or shouldn’t be. And that’s why he refuses—as he did again at the White House—to say that he, too, is in favor of a two-state solution.

The difference isn’t that he wants Israel to continue to occupy all the land now under its control, or to rule over the Palestinians. The Israeli prime minister is willing to cede land, and flatly says he has no desire for Israel to govern Palestinians any longer.

The problem, in his mind, is that people are throwing around the word “state” too freely and allowing for too many assumptions about what that word means. Being a state means running your own affairs, picking your own leaders, and having your own economic system—none of which Netanyahu appears to have any problem with when it comes to the Palestinians.
But when people say “state,” Netanyahu worries, they also are implying a self-governing unit that can raise an army, acquire weapons from abroad and control its own borders. And those aspects of statehood, the Israeli leader argues, are non-starters for Israelis, and not just Israelis of his own Likud party.

Oh, and he also thinks there is ambiguity about what Palestinians really mean when they say they accept the state of Israel. He thinks they need to accept not just that there will be a country called Israel, but accept that it will be, specifically and eternally, a Jewish state.

The key question is this: Is the difference over what it means to establish a Palestinian state a semantic distinction, or a deep substantive divide? That’s the nub of the matter, and the issue that Obama’s special Middle East peace envoy, George Mitchell, will have to parse out.

The Netanyahu formulation would seem to leave plenty of room to agree to the formation of a self-governing, independent Palestinian entity of some kind. One journalist suggested to a senior Israeli official Tuesday that maybe it’s time to revive a term of art that has been used in the past to describe the goal of talks: formation of a “demilitarized Palestinian state.” The Israeli official nodded knowingly, but didn’t bite on the suggestion.