According to Haaretz, Erekat also said in the interview that: “Our position is that the key to direct negotiations is in the hand of Mr. Netanyahu … The minute he stops settlement activities including natural growth in Jerusalem, the minute he agrees to go to permanent status talks, where we left them in December 2008, we’ll have direct talks … The Israelis have a choice, settlements or peace. They can’t have both”. These remarks are reported here.

But, what is actually happening?

Now, it has been seized upon — largely for its lurid appeal (it’s sensational, runs against official positions, appears to be based on deep insights, and, it sells) to propagandists — by some of the Israeli and pro-Israeli media crowd.

Do Palestinians (at least those in the West Bank) really want a State?

Now, one writer in the Jerusalem Post (he’s Shmuel Rosner, based in Washington), has written — reviewing articles written in recent months — that the question of the moment is: “Do Palestinians really want a state”. And the answer, he wrote, is this: “In sum, two years ago, an open question, more recently, no, no and no“.

Rosner then went on to mock a comment by Ed Abington, former US Consul General in Jerusalem and former adviser to the Palestinian Authority, who, Rosner wrote: ” has commented yesterday on my link to these new articles with this sarcastic massage: “I’m sure Kaplan and Grygiel are right; most Palestinians would prefer to live under Israeli occupation forever than accept responsibility for running their own affairs. Duh“.

Yes, Duh. Because the Palestinians do want a state. The question for them is, what kind? And, of course, there is no real debate on the Palestinian political scene that might illuminate the issues on there side — they are too busy looking over their shoulders, worrying about what their enemies and rivals would say. So, instead of hashing out the issues amongst themselves, the Palestinians are just developing their critique of Israel.

There have been no real intellectual advances, of course.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian stasis is calling their wish to have a state into question.

Rosner summed up the arguments — most recent first, and which, as it can be seen, all involve some form of mocking and/or disparagement of the Palestinians — in his two postings here and here. Here are his references (with additional excerpts added by myself):

Robert Kaplan in the Atlantic:
The statelessness of Palestinian Arabs has been a principal feature of world politics for more than half a century. It is the signature issue of our time. The inability of Israelis and Palestinians to reach an accord of mutual recognition and land-for-peace has helped infect the globe with violence and radicalism—and has long been a bane of American foreign policy … Obviously, part of the problem has been Israeli intransigence. Despite seeming to submit to territorial concessions, one Israeli government after another has quietly continued to bolster illegal settlements in the occupied territories. The new Israeli government may be the worst yet … The prospects for peace under this government are fundamentally bleak. And yet this Israeli government faithfully represents the Israeli electorate, which is in utter despair over the impossibility of finding credible partners on the Palestinian side with which to negotiate … But there is a deeper structural and philosophical reason why the Palestinians remain stateless—a reason more profound than the political narrative would indicate … [Then, Kaplan builds on an argument developed in an essay by someone else, which was not specifically about the Palestinians, and goes on to postulate that]: “Instead of actively seeking statehood to address their weakness, as Zionist Jews did in an earlier phase of history, groups like the Palestinians now embrace their statelessness as a source of power … [A] state is a target that can be destroyed or damaged, and hence pressured politically. It was the very quasi-statehood achieved by Hamas in the Gaza Strip that made it easier for Israel to bomb it. A state entails responsibilities that limit a people’s freedom of action. A group like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the author notes, could probably take over the Lebanese state today, but why would it want to? Why would it want responsibility for providing safety and services to all Lebanese? Why would it want to provide the Israelis with so many tempting targets of reprisal? Statelessness offers a level of ‘impunity’ from retaliation”. This article can be read in full here.

Rosner, who (being in the US, might be more aware of this) wrote that the question is, “Do the Palestinians really want a state?”, summarized Bradley Burston in Haaretz as writing: “rather than just the flag they already have and the representative at the United Nations they already have, and the righteous indignation that they have in spades”? But, Burston also wrote this, significantly blaming the Palestinians alone for the Second Intifada, and therefore (his argument says) for turning the entire Israeli political scene so bitter and demanding): “Do Palestinians really want a State? At first blush, the question seems preposterous. The Palestinian people have voiced their acute desire for an independent state since the day, whatever it may have been, that they became the Palestinian people. In fact, until recently it seemed that nearly the whole world, Eastern and Western Europe, the entirety of Asia and Africa, many of the nations of the Americas – everyone, that is, except for the United States and Israel – wanted there to be an independent Palestine. In time, even Israel and Washington came around. In a surreal turn, Ariel Sharon, the mantra of whose ashram had long been “Jordan is [the real] Palestine,” announced his support in 2003 for the U.S.-sponsored road map peace plan, which provided for, though would fail to deliver, an independent Palestinian state by 2005. But even as Sharon rammed the road map through the cabinet, the cause of Palestinian statehood was being undermined – by the Palestinians themselves … As Arafat stood by, losing his place in history even as he sought to keep his place among the Palestinians, bomb after bomb after bomb distanced Palestinians from the state they nearly had, could already have had, should have had, by the end of the last decade. The Palestinians, still shrouded in the self-pitying, self-adoring arrogance of the truly humiliated – the same arrogance they so fiercely hate in the Jews – are still busy proving what a victory the Intifada was. Yet the real proof of the outcome of the Intifada lies in the change in Hamas declarations. For the first time, they have begun to speak of a demand for an Israeli return to the 1967 borders, as opposed to a Jewish withdrawal to the Mediterranean and beyond. If nothing else, the reference to the 1967 borders demonstrates the danger to the Palestinians that the world will come to accept the Sharon-Bush vision of West Bank settlement blocs as part of Israel. Thanks to the Intifada, Palestine is shrinking before the Palestinians’ very eyes … Today, the question of whether the Palestinians can take the steps necessary to maintain a state – that is to say, whether they really do want a state, rather than just the flag they already have and the representative at the United Nations they already have, and the righteous indignation that they have in spades – remains an open question. If they would rather demand the right of return until the end of time, rather than accepting some formula that amounts to a lesser gain, and with it, a Palestinian state, then the question is answered. If they would rather insist on the right to violent resistance against Israel – allying themselves in the minds of others, if not in their own, with terrorist movements that bedevil civilized countries worldwide – rather than a renunciation of armed struggle and entrance into the community of nations, then we have their answer. If they insist on a one-state solution, then it is a one-state solution that they will get, and that state will be Israel. Today the question of what the Palestinians really want, and whether what they really want at this point is a state, is being asked more and more … Do the Palestinians really want a state? What they have told us in deed and in word is ‘Yes, but on our own terms’. They either mean that or they don’t. If they do, I’ll wager that they’ll have themselves some form of a state by somewhere around 2028. Forty years bumbling and blustering and procrastinating their way through the wilderness. My guess is that they’re smarter than that, though. They’ll do as Lenny Bruce once bitterly quipped: ‘Be a man – sell out’. They’ll do what we do. Lie to themselves, swallow the compromises they can’t disguise with feints of word and gesture. I wish them luck. They’re going to need a lot more of it than they’ve had ’til now”. This can be read in full here.

Josef Joffe in The Wall Street Journal – this, not surprisingly, is a sophisticated and well-written argument based on the premises of the Israeli right-wing, particularly the Likud, but also including Kadima. Joffe says the problem is that Palestinians elected Hamas (the obvious flaw in this point is that voters in the West Bank also elected Hamas, but never mind) in the wake of Israel’s (in his view) entirely benevolent “disengagement” from Gaza, which (in his view) offered the Gazans, at least, a chance of having their own state (despite Israel’s continuing control over Gazan sovereignty). But, according to Jaffe’s argument, the real and main issue is Iran — and, like the Israeli political echelon, he exhibits no sense of perspective, he does not view Israeli intents to suppress any effort of Iran to assert regional leadership as part of the problem. No, Iran is completely to blame. Joffe writes: “It was Kassam time, with Hamas firing the missiles and Israel tightening the blockade. This is known, in the media vernacular, as a “spiral of violence.” But if the missiles were the answer to the blockade, why did Hamas target the border passages and the power plant next door that supplied Gaza with electricity? So much irrationality makes perfect sense if we posit a different strategic game. Hamas’s object is provoking Israel to prove that it doesn’t care about the consequences. Indeed, it wants bad things to happen to its own people. This will mobilize the ‘Arab street’ and the world’s media against Israel while demonstrating its absolute imperviousness to pain and threats of more. ‘Bring it on’, is great for Hamas’s credibility, pride and honor, but for the purpose of statehood, it would behave very differently. It would wheel and deal, cajole and dissimulate. It would play quid pro quo, not Kassams against F-16s … [But] double-statehood is not their No. 1 priority. They want it all, and if they can’t get it, they would rather nurse their honor, pride and sense of righteous victimhood than engage in the sordid business of compromise. At any rate, the simple two-state solution is now off the table. Most Israelis (minus the settlers and their supporters) have come around to two states. But never again will Israel vacate territory (as in Gaza) without making sure that it won’t turn into a strategic springboard against the heartland. Never again will Israel relinquish control over a border like the Philadelphi Corridor that served as entry point for Iranian missiles into Gaza. It will insist on a strategic presence in the Jordan Valley. Nor can Israel yield military control over the West Bank. What a twist of fate. Today, it is the Israeli Defense Force that guarantees the survival of Fatah and President Mahmoud Abbas against Hamas, Jihad and their Iranian sponsors. Here is the bitter irony. Fatah might want to make peace, but doesn’t have the power to deliver; Hamas has the power, but it doesn’t want peace, dreaming about a ‘final solution’ that wipes Israel off this part of the map … The upside is that today Palestine is less than ever the ‘core’ of the Middle East conflict. The real issue is Iran and its reach for regional hegemony. The conventional wisdom has it that peace for Palestine would weaken Tehran’s mischief potential, robbing it of a rallying point for the Arab masses. Actually, it is the other way round. Iran will use its power, through its proxies, to demolish whatever deal might be hashed out by Israel and the Palestinian Authority. For Iran’s game is not a two-state solution, let alone peace. Rather, its object is to intimidate America’s Arab supporters and to eliminate Israel as America’s strongest regional ally. So for the Obama administration, Israel/Palestine has become an intractable sideshow on a vastly enlarged stage that extends from Haifa to Herat”…This argument can be read in full here.

“We’re also standing against the forces of extremism in the Holy Land, where we have new cause for hope. Palestinians have elected a president [actually, the Palestinian presidential election was in January 2005, and the next one should be at the beginning of 2009e...] who recognizes that confronting terror is essential to achieving a state where his people can live in dignity and at peace with Israel.  Israelis have leaders who recognize that a peaceful, democratic Palestinian state will be a source of lasting security.  This month in Ramallah and Jerusalem, I assured leaders from both sides that America will do, and I will do, everything we can to help them achieve a peace agreement that defines a Palestinian state by the end of this year. The time has come for a Holy Land where a democratic Israel
and a democratic Palestine live side by side in peace”. (Applause.)

The Palestinian Delegation to the Madrid Peace Conference had to be officially part of the Jordanian delegation, because at that time Israel refused to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO, and the Palestinian team insisted they owed their alliegance to the PLO.

Dr. Haider Abdul Shafi’s speech, nonetheless, can be found on the website of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs here.

The Associated Press reported drily from Jerusalem today that “The Palestinians are pushing for a detailed agreement, while Israel wants a more vague document that would give it flexibility. The Palestinians also want a deadline for establishing a Palestinian state, even though earlier deadlines have been set and ignored”. AP’s report from Jerusalem is here.

A Palestinian State has been an unrealized legal possibility for more than 85 years. On at least four occasions during that lapse of time, Palestinians have prepared to declare a Palestinian State in Palestine: in 1948, in 1988, in 1999, and in 2000.

Each attempt was blocked.

In 1948, neighboring Arab states had conflicting interests. Palestinians still watch closely the positions of their Arab neighbors.

Subsequently, Israel and the United States were powerful opponents. The PLO agreed on a Declaration of Independence in Tunis in 1988, during the first Palestinian Intifada (uprising) in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (singular). At that time, the PLO made plans to ask for a seat – even though they were willing to leave it symbolically empty – in the United Nations, for the State of Palestine that they had proclaimed, on the basis of UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), that called for the creation of two states in Palestine : one Jewish and one Arab. This plan was dropped, after international diplomatic consultations.

The Madrid Peace Conference convened in 1991 stalled. Secret contacts between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), facilitated by Norway, resulted in an exchange of mutual recognition in September 1993, which led to subsequent direct negotiation of a series of interim agreements between Israel and the PLO known as the Oslo Accords. On 13 September, the two parties signed a Declaration of Principles (DOP), and shook hands in a ceremony that was the epitome of a photo-op, on the White House lawn in Washington, D.C. The U.S. and the Russian Federation also signed the DOP, and the diplomatic corps accredited to the U.S. was invited to witness the ceremony, which was televised as a Live Event.

The Oslo Accords – a series of agreements on interim arrangements intended to build mutual confidence before final status negotiations – defined the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as: “as a single territorial unit, whose integrity will be preserved during the interim period”. For this reason, the United Nations refers to these areas in the singular, as Occupied Palestinian Territory. (This terminology was then adopted by the International Court of Justice in its 2004 Advisory Opinion on The Wall.)

The Oslo Accords were concluded, according to their preambles, “within the framework of the Middle East peace process initiated at Madrid in October 1991″.

U.S. President Bill Clinton convened a meeting of the Israeli and Palestinian leadership in Camp David in the second half of July 2000. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak made what were called “historic concessions”. The idea may have been to rush through a final status agreement before significant opposition could be mobilized. In any case, the U.S. and Israel blamed PLO leader Yasser Arafat for the failure of these talks. From what is now known of these Camp David II talks, the two main stumbling blocks were identified as the questions of the Palestinian refugees, and of East Jerusalem.

A second and much more violent Intifada erupted in the Occupied Palestinian Territory in September 2000, and as the Israeli military repression increased, there was an increase in Palestinian suicide bombings in cities in Israel. The Israeli Defense Forces reoccupied Palestinian cities in the West Bank in 2002.

The military force used by Israel in the Second Intifada in effect brought West Beirut, which was besieged in 1982 by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on the orders of then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, to the West Bank and Gaza. The population there had experienced years of occupation, and thought that they had it bad, but they had never been exposed to a full Israeli military onslaught of the kind experienced by the PLO in Lebanon.

The Oslo Accords had allowed Palestinian fighters to return from exile in camps in remote locations in the Arab world to serve in the Palestinian Authority’s security forces; new members could also be recruited – but Israel required a list of their names. The Palestinian [National] Authority’s security forces were armed, but as per the Oslo accords, they were only police forces. When they fired at the IDF in the Second Intifada, Israel re-defined the situation as one of “armed conflict”, and of “war”.

Then, in 2002 (in the build-up toward the invasion of Iraq), U.S. President George Bush changed the discourse and called for a two-state solution.

The Road Map, drafted by the U.S. and adopted by the Quartet (U.S., Russian Federation, European Union, and the United Nations Secretary General) envisaged the creation of a Palestinian State at the end of Phase II — which was supposed to end in 2005.

The Roadmap was endorsed by the UN Security Council in Resolution 1515 of 19 November 2003, which called on the parties “to fulfil their obligations under the Roadmap in cooperation with the Quartet and to achieve the vision of two States living side by side in peace and security”.

On 19 May 2004, the UN Security Council expressed grave concern after the large-scale destruction of Palestinian homes in Rafah, and insisted on Israel’s «obligation not to undertake demolition of homes contrary to that [international humanitarian] law”; the Security Council also called on Israel and the Palestinians “ to immediately implement their obligations under the Road Map in Resolution 1544”.

Dr. Azmi Bishara, who was until recently an Israeli-Arab member of the Israeli Knesset, wrote at the end of 2004, the creation of a Palestinian State is becoming an “Israeli demand” — as new Israeli fears that a future “demographic” imbalance would engulf them, and demands grew for separation as a solution. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan for Gaza “Disengagement”. was presented in this light — it would reduce the number of Palestinians that Israel had any “responsibility” for. It has also since been explained as a kind of test to see if the Palestinians were ready for a state of their own. The answer, Israelis say now, is No — and there is open talk that Gaza should be given back to Egypt, which occupied it in May 1948, just after the Proclamation of the Establishment of the State of Israel.

On her last trip to the region in late October this year, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said in Ramallah, in what the Associated Press is describing as one of her most forceful statements yet, that ” ‘Frankly, it’s time for the establishment of a Palestinian state … I wanted to say in my own voice to be able to say to as many people as possible that the United States sees the establishment of a Palestinian state and a two-state solution as absolutely essential for the future, not just of Palestinians and Israelis but also for the Middle East and indeed to American interests’, she said”. See “Rice is Up Against The Wall” in UN-Truth.com here.

To put this all in perspective, here is an excerpt from a book review written by Akiva Eldar in Haaretz, about a then-newly-published biography of Shimon Peres “Ke’of hakhol, Shimon Peres, habiografia” (“Phoenix: Shimon Peres, a Political Biography”) by Michael Bar Zohar. Eldar recounts that “Yitzhak Rabin died in November 1995 without accepting the establishment of a Palestinian state. Peres continued to amuse himself with ‘creative’ solutions that skirted the issue of Palestinian sovereignty. Former absorption minister Yair Tsaban relates that a few days after the Rabin assassination he and his Meretz colleagues asked Peres to incorporate the Palestinian right of self-definition as a basic component of government policy. Peres glared at the delegation of leftists and asked: ‘You realize what that means, don’t you?’ ‘Yes, of course’, his visitors replied, ‘It means establishing a Palestinian state’. Peres’ response left them openmouthed. ‘And who told you I support a Palestinian state?’ the new prime minister shot back. ‘I’m in favor of a functional solution’.”
[Akiva Eldar's book review, “Long Distance Runner” published in Haaretz on 10 February 2006, can be found here.]