Is It So Bad That Palestinian State Is On The Back Burner?

Arab unrest, the US presidential elections and financial crises in Europe had combined to knock the Palestinian issue off the global agenda more than 18 months after peace talks with Israel broke down in a dispute over settlement building.
Maan News, Fayyad: Palestinians isolated, short of funds

True, the issue of a Palestinian state does seem to be on the back burner--the question is whether that is really such a bad thing.

In the context of the broken promises of the Arab Spring, which have led to anarchy and death in the Muslim world, P David Hornik writes that the time is ripe for Kicking the Palestinian Addiction:

Against this backdrop, it needs to be asked whether creating still another Arab state -- a Palestinian one -- would be either prudent or moral. Indeed, several of the already-existing Arab states were 20th-century Western creations. Of these, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, for instance, have been afflicted with internal strife sometimes escalating to the mass murder of tens of thousands of people. All the 21 sovereign states of the Arab League are dictatorships beset with corruption and poverty. Neither the "Arab Spring" nor the earlier, vaunted democratization project of President George W. Bush has changed this situation, suggesting how deep-seated the pathologies are.

The two already-existing Palestinian entities, of course, exhibit the pathologies. Semisovereign, Hamas-run Gaza is an Islamist dictatorship that fires rockets into Israel. The West Bank Palestinian Authority -- autonomous under ultimate Israeli security control -- is also a dictatorship, torture rampant in its prisons, journalists muzzled. Its corruption is notorious. And like Gaza, the West Bank PA is an incubator of anti-Israeli incitement and hatred. As for internal strife, already in 2007 Hamas and Fatah fought a vicious skirmish in Gaza, throwing each other off tall buildings.

The West still talks about the promises of the Arab Spring, though not nearly as outspokenly as it once did.

Still, the West remains unwilling to own up to the fact that those promises have been replaced with the brutal reality of dictatorships that refuse to let go or extremists determined to rule.

Until they face up to that reality, we have a long ways to go before there will be any admission that the idea of a Palestinian Arab state is a practical idea in and of itself--let alone one that is going to have any sort of positive or stabilizing affect on the Middle East.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Palestine and Hamas and West Bank.