The Election That Didn’t Happen Matters More than the One That Did

While Israelis were voting last week, the fact that the Palestinian Authority has not held elections in ten years was hardly lost on many Palestinians. Evelyn Gordon argues that—contrary to the declarations of the liberal Western media—the lack of Palestinian democracy is a much bigger obstacle to peace than the choices made by Israel’s democracy:

[A]side from the fact that [the PA’s] denial of basic civil rights is bad in general, it has real implications for the peace process. . . . If Israelis see a chance for peace and consider their own prime minister an obstacle to it, they can unseat him—an option they’ve in fact exercised in the past. Palestinians have no such option.

But the problem goes deeper than that: [Mahmoud] Abbas, now in the eleventh year of his four-year term, also lacks the democratic legitimacy needed to make the kind of concessions any peace agreement would entail. Palestinian human-rights activist Bassem Eid summed up the issue bluntly . . . : Abbas, he told his shocked audience, will never be able to make peace with Israel, because he currently represents nobody except himself, his wife, and his two sons. . . .

[I]f Western leaders are serious about wanting Israeli-Palestinian peace, working to rectify the lack of Palestinian democracy would be far more productive than wringing their hands over the choices made by Israel’s democracy. For precisely because Israelis can always change their minds again in a few years, the Palestinian democracy deficit is far more detrimental to the prospects for peace than the outcome of any Israeli election ever could be.

Read more at Evelyn Gordon

More about: Israel & Zionism, Israeli democracy, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian statehood, Peace Process

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF