Will Mahmoud Abbas’s Internationalization Strategy Pay Off?

Since 2011, the Palestinian Authority’s president has pursued a strategy of “internationalization,” refusing direct talks with Israel and seeking recognition from various international bodies in the hope this will eventually result in official UN recognition of Palestinian independence. Grant Rumley and Adam Rasgon note that despite short-term successes, this course does not seem likely to achieve meaningful results:

[R]aising a Palestinian flag at Turtle Bay or joining the UN Convention on Biological Diversity has hardly changed the facts on the ground for many Palestinians.

For years, every step of the Palestinian international campaign had a contingency plan. After failing to go [for recognition] to the UN Security Council in 2011, the Palestinians went to the UN General Assembly in 2012. After joining several international organizations in 2014, the Palestinians went back to the Security Council. After they failed to win that vote, Abbas signed the Rome Statute and joined the International Criminal Court (ICC). Now, with the ICC failing to yield the type of returns Abbas had hoped for, the Palestinians are largely without a contingency plan. The French conference [held earlier this month] may lead to another summit and ultimately a push at the Security Council, but such a plan is likely only to antagonize Israel and thus amount to little more than another data point in the Palestinians’ failed diplomatic campaign for statehood.

The strategic goal, ostensibly, is to transform favorable international public opinion into a tangible international framework for statehood. . . . Such a [policy] may [seem] the only option available to a drifting Palestinian leadership, but it has so far proved unsuccessful, has alienated them from the Palestinian public, and angered traditional regional allies. In the grand history of the Palestinian national project, such [an approach] . . . may ultimately amount to nothing more than a diplomatic sideshow.

Read more at Fathom

More about: ICC, Israel & Zionism, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority, United Nations

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