Pope Leo made his much-anticipated trip to Lebanon, and of course coming that close to Israel makes questions about the peace process unavoidable. Leo got the question from the press before his plane was halfway to Beirut. His response was unremarkable.
“We all know that at this time Israel still does not accept that solution, but we see it as the only solution,” the pope said, adding that “we are also friends with Israel and we are seeking to be a mediating voice between the two parties that might help them close in on a solution with justice for everyone.”
That formulation has become routine: As soon as Israel pushes the “Palestinian State Poof” button Bibi Netanyahu apparently keeps on his desk, there will be a fully functioning state living in peace and security alongside the State of Israel. There are no prerequisites for the Palestinians as far as the world is concerned.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s version of this demand reportedly includes a shot clock: Israel must initiate a “time-bound path” to such a denouement.
This is the sort of demand that sounds reasonable—“time-bound” evokes calendars and deadlines and commitments. But in fact there is no such thing as a time-bound path to a Palestinian state. The reason there is a peace process is because there are actions that must be taken, building blocks put in position and in the right order. If a construction crew agrees to a time-bound path to a new apartment building but doesn’t get all the walls finished by the deadline, does the building receive its certificate of occupancy anyway? This new State of Palestine sounds uninsurable.
At the same time, the fact that we’re even having this conversation is the fruit of a genuine diplomatic success: the Trump administration’s triumph in getting the United Nations Security Council to vote to endorse his plan for the end of the war and the reconstruction of Gaza. Some of Netanyahu’s coalition partners didn’t like that the resolution on the plan mentioned a path toward a Palestinian state. But they should take the win: France and the United Kingdom voted to essentially annul their own previous recognition of a Palestinian state by signing on to a document that made clear no such state exists.
There’s something else that Trump’s plan requires the parties to do: work. The president is not an especially patient man. Yet even he is not (so far, anyway) willing to put a sell-by date on his plan. The only way to complete it is to actually physically complete the rebuilding of Gaza, the disarming of Hamas and empowering of a non-Hamas governing entity, and the provision of security for the Gazan people until everything else is checked off the list.
That is why other Mideast states are balking. “The proposed deployment of an international force in Gaza, seen as a crucial feature of President Donald Trump’s plan to bring peace to the enclave, is struggling to get off the ground as countries considered likely to contribute soldiers have grown wary,” reports the Washington Post, naming Indonesia and Azerbaijan as two states whose leaders seem to have developed cold feet.
Why the sudden reluctance? “Concerns are mounting in foreign capitals over whether soldiers could be put in a position where they may be required to use force against Palestinians.”
What exactly did they picture when volunteering to man an international force whose mission is to police a war zone and disarm one of the belligerents? Here again, we have an almost pathological aversion to action. These same countries will grumble about America acting as the world’s police force and Israel clearing out terrorist enclaves in its neighborhood, yet it is crystal clear that they only signed on to an international stabilization force because they expected the U.S. and Israel to do all the actual policing and disarming.
By the same token, they don’t expect the Palestinians to build their own state. They expect America to make Israel do it.
Israel is not going to do that. Donald Trump is not going to do that. Israel’s existence is the result of its own state-building. So, obviously, is America’s. If the Palestinians want to join them in that club, they and their friends should get to work.
