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The Jewish Chronicle

Palestinians don’t want a state

Hatred of Israel outweighs the desire to build a functioning, flourishing nation

May 7, 2009 11:43

By

Miriam Shaviv,

Miriam Shaviv

2 min read

Do the Palestinians really want a state? It seems like a rhetorical question. The Palestinian struggle for self-determination has been a feature of international politics for decades and a Palestinian state has been the ultimate goal of negotiations with Israel since the Madrid Conference in 1991.

Hasn’t it? An article in the April edition of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly suggests otherwise. In it, Robert Kaplan, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, argues that the main reason the Palestinians don’t have a state is that they know, deep down, they are better off without one.

The basis for his assertion is another recent piece, by associate Johns Hopkins professor Jakub Grygiel in Policy Review, about the rise of stateless groups. Grygiel’s thesis is that, for the past three centuries, groups needed state power to organise populations, participate in international relations, defend themselves and gather resources. Not so today. New technologies allow revolutionary groups to mobilise large numbers of people and play a strategic role in international relations; lethal weapons can be attained by small bands relatively cheaply and easily.

Moreover, having a state can actually be a burden. For example, because it is vulnerable to physical attack, a state is vulnerable to political pressure, too. But non-state actors are harder to defeat militarily because they can disperse so easily, as the US has discovered with the Taliban and as Israel found with Hizbollah. Then there is the tedious business of governing, which involves a willingness to compromise.