The Palestinian Authority’s president has devoted years to stunts ostensibly aimed at gaining recognition of a Palestinian state, the latest of which is his new plan to sue Britain for issuing the Balfour declaration in 1917. But, Benny Avni writes, he has shown little interest in actually creating such a state:

Abbas has already raised a Palestinian flag at Manhattan’s First Avenue UN headquarters and received blessings for a Palestinian state in places like Geneva, Sweden, Mauritania, and the back pages of U.S. party platforms. Yet he has proved completely useless in creating a state on the West Bank.

And his attempt to pretend that the last century of history—in which Jews created an independent and thriving state—never happened raises suspicions that Abbas never really was all that comfortable with the existence of Israel on lands Arabs consider their own. . . .

So all those who get so exercised about how the two-state solution is represented in American party platforms had better relax. America, Britain, Europe, and even Israel won’t prevent Palestinians from peacefully living and thriving in an independent state. As they always have, only Palestinians will.

As for that other side of the vaunted two-state solution: [Abbas] can’t turn back the clock to 1917, or any other time in history. So Israel will continue to flourish, with or without Palestine by its side.

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.