How Israel Won the War and Defeated the Palestinian Dream - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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The title ("How Israel Won the War and Defeated the Palestinian Dream") doesn't mean to flatter Israel but to express disappointed and frustration for a life long emotive cause that failed to deliver ("Both Hamas and its secular rival Fatah run their territories like police states"). This cause shaped entire Western generation. The BDS failed "Foreign investments in Israel have more than tripled in the decade since the BDS movement began. Exports to the European Union, its largest trading partner, have grown by more than 30 percent."

Now with the Palestinization of Europe things will be different. The West couldn't care less about Palestine when they become one. Next week, Egypt will end its blockade and hundreds of thousands "Palestinians" from the open prison of Gaza will join the hijra to Europe.

http://www.newsweek.com/israel-palestin ... two-656304

ANALYSIS
HOW ISRAEL WON THE WAR AND DEFEATED THE PALESTINIAN DREAM
BY GREGG CARLSTROM ON 8/29/17 AT 7:24 AM

The Palestinians, living under occupation or scattered across the diaspora, have long been the weaker party in the conflict with Israel. For decades, though, they were able to put up a costly fight. In the years after the Six-Day War in 1967, they did so from exile in Beirut, Amman and Tunis, a militant campaign that caused chaos across the Arab world and even spilled into Europe. The climax came in the late 1980s, with the start of the first intifada, a homegrown movement of mass protests. Israel responded with brute force, killing and wounding thousands of demonstrators—what then–Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin called its "broken bones" policy. This drew sharp criticism from abroad and helped spur a diplomatic process that culminated in the mid-1990s with the Oslo Accords, which granted the Palestinians a measure of self-governance.

Instead, the Palestinians have spent the past 10 years fighting among themselves. Both Hamas and its secular rival Fatah run their territories like police states, harassing and jailing journalists, activists and even ordinary citizens who post messages critical of them on Facebook. (Most of the Palestinians interviewed for this story asked for anonymity—because they fear their own governments.) A decade after their mandates to rule expired, neither side wants to hold elections. Far from achieving a two-state solution, they have created a three-state reality: two dilapidated statelets dominated by a strong, prosperous Israel.

And though in the very long term, Israel’s status as a Jewish and democratic state is still imperiled, five decades after the occupation began, the Palestinian national movement has been largely defeated. “I find it hard to say as a Palestinian, but we haven’t achieved any of our national goals,” says Mkhaimer Abu Saada, a political analyst in Gaza. “Our leadership has failed to achieve anything.”

A growing number of Gazans, however, don’t feel liberated. In private conversations, the anger they once directed at Israel and Egypt is now aimed at their own leaders. They often have these conversations in the dark, owing to the lack of electricity. Tap water, when it is available, is undrinkable, brackish and polluted. About half of the population, and more than 60 percent of young people, are unemployed—the highest rate anywhere, according to the World Bank. More than 70 percent of Gazans rely on international aid to survive. In a courtyard outside Azhar University, recent graduates peddle cheap snacks and cigarettes to current students, who offer bleak predictions about their own futures: "I'll be here with my own cart next year," said one young man, a computer science student.

For older Palestinians, the goal is still to create a Palestinian state along the pre-1967 borders. The younger generation sees this idea as hopelessly outdated. Decades of struggle, on the battlefield and around the negotiating table, failed to deliver a state. Last year, for the first time, Shikaki found that support for the two-state solution had dipped below 50 percent. "Fatah has tried diplomacy for 35 years, and here we have the so-called resistance movement," says one young man from Shuja'iya, a neighborhood in eastern Gaza that was hit hard during the 2014 war. "And what do we have? Nothing."

Instead, many now see their struggle as a civil rights movement: “Give us Israeli passports,” they argue, “and let us work in Tel Aviv and fly abroad from Ben-Gurion airport.” Even Palestinians who are committed to two states acknowledge that the idea has an expiration date. "The two-state solution is not a Palestinian demand," says Husam Zumlot, the Palestinian ambassador in Washington. "It's a Palestinian offer."

By many estimates, Palestinians are now the majority between the river and the sea. A civil rights struggle would have unmistakable echoes of the fight against apartheid. And a single state would likely never have a Jewish majority—an argument the Israeli center-left uses to push for a two-state solution. But their warnings have done little to move public opinion.

In the United States, on the other hand, there are already signs of such a shift. In a 2014 poll by the Brookings Institution, 38 percent of Americans supported sanctioning Israel over its illegal settlements. Two years later, the number jumped to 46 percent. Within those figures was a striking partisan gap. Democratic support for sanctions grew by a quarter, from 48 percent to 60 percent, while Republican support stayed basically flat. A majority of Democrats now believe Israel has too much influence over U.S. policy. Less than 25 percent of Republicans agree, and the number has dipped over the past few years.

And Israel has no replacement for its "unbreakable alliance" with the United States. Though its new allies in Africa and Asia are useful trade partners, they cannot offer a reliable Security Council veto, nor the billions in annual military aid that have preserved Israel’s military edge over its neighbors.

For all its tactical brilliance, Israel has always struggled with strategic thinking. It helped nurture Hamas in the late 1980s, for example, because it saw the Islamist group as a useful counterweight to its secular enemies. In doing so, it helped create an intractable foe. Netanyahu likes to boast that his administration "manages the conflict." Though his long tenure may be coming to an end, as graft investigations swirl, his probable successors will likely take a similar approach—one that could be similarly shortsighted and, in the long run, pose enormous risk for Israel.

Even if Israel's strategy is ultimately counterproductive, the day of reckoning seems far off. By one 2014 estimate, BDS shaved just $30 million off Israel's annual gross domestic product, less than one-hundredth of a percent—52 minutes' worth of economic activity. Foreign investments in Israel have more than tripled in the decade since the BDS movement began. Exports to the European Union, its largest trading partner, have grown by more than 30 percent. Israel can offer cutting-edge agricultural technology to African states and high-tech opportunities to Asia. Neither of them care much about the occupation or the BDS movement, which they regard as a curiosity, a fad on Western college campuses.

The Palestinians have little to offer their allies. After 50 years of occupation, their aid-dependent economy produces almost nothing of value. They would be of little help against the Islamic State militant group, or in the regional cold war with Iran. Western policymakers once promoted a theory of "linkage," the idea that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would bring peace to the Middle East. No one believes that anymore, not with the entire region in flames. Quite the opposite: Even Arab states, from Egypt to the Gulf, are eager to establish closer ties with Israel, which they see as a useful partner in the fight against both terrorism and Iran. Israeli politicians like to criticize Qatar because the tiny Gulf emirate hosts the leadership of Hamas. Yet the tens of millions of dollars in aid Qatar provides to Gaza have helped to stave off another war—and preserve the status quo. To an unprecedented degree, the Palestinians are alone.

"We're no longer the main issue," says Abu Saada, the Gazan political analyst. "We're not in a good position. We don't have good cards to play against Israel…and we can only hope that the next generation will bring some new ideas."

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