When Rabbis Futilely Oversimplify
"There is a magic formula for peace in the Middle East. That's all it takes."
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Rabbi David Wolpe is truly one of the Jewish world’s best.
Taking in his father’s rabbinical footsteps, Wolpe led Sinai Temple in Los Angeles for 26 years. He has been named the Most Influential Rabbi in America by Newsweek and one of the 50 Most Influential Jews in the World by The Jerusalem Post.
Wolpe is incredibly literate about Jewish, Israeli, and world affairs, regularly writing for top outlets and appearing on popular podcasts. He is also the author of several books.
But this week, Wolpe made a mistake that far too many people make when thinking and talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He tried to oversimplify the saga, posting on Twitter:
“There is a magic formula for peace in the Middle East: ‘We accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state, will never seek to destroy it, and wish to live in peace with our Israeli neighbors.’ Worked for Egypt. Worked for Jordan. That’s all it takes.”
If only that’s all it really took.
The Palestinians are not the Egyptians — who actually have a rich and storied history — and they are not, despite sharing many recent ancestors, the Jordanians. Both of those countries had their own self-sovereign states when they finally normalized relations with Israel, Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994. Forget the fact that there is no Palestinian state; I’m not even sure they want one.
In the 1980s, the idea of statehood was injected into the Palestinian story, with the declaration of a State of Palestine taking place in Algiers in 1988, while the First Intifada raged on. As a result of this declaration, the United Nations General Assembly convened, inviting Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), to give an address.
The UN General Assembly then adopted Resolution 43/177, “acknowledging the proclamation of the State of Palestine by the Palestine National Council.” It was also decided that “the designation ‘Palestine’ should be used in place of the designation ‘Palestine Liberation Organization’ in the United Nations system.”
Within four months of the declaration, 93 states recognized “Palestine.” But, unlike the Jews in 1948, the Palestinians never followed through with their declaration of a state. At the time, the PLO did not exercise control over any territory, even though they designated Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine (which is Israel’s capital).
Today, Palestinian factions control two extensive territories, but their do-nothingness for their people remains the same. If anything, Palestinian leaders have used these territories and their control of them to engage in some of the world’s most belligerent kleptocracy and nepotism. These practices are, after all, at the heart of the Palestinian legacy, dating back to the 1960s, and perhaps prior.
The PLO was the largest, wealthiest, and most politically connected terrorist organization in the world. It used drug trafficking, arms smuggling, money laundering, and counterfeiting to amass a fortune estimated to be $10 billion by the early 1990s (nearly $25 billion if adjusted for inflation today) and collaborated with international criminal organizations, drug cartels, other terror groups, and rogue states such as Libya, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Sudan.
Then, in the 1990s, when the Israelis and Palestinians signed two peace accords in Oslo and the Palestinians were supposed to “grow up,” Palestinian corruption didn’t subside. It intensified.
“Since the signing of the Oslo Accords,” said Hasan Khreishah, the deputy speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, “we have had 12 Palestinian governments. Each government has at least 24 ministers. This means we have had 228 ministers, in addition to advisors. All receive high salaries and luxurious vehicles.”1
During the 1990s, U.S. President Bill Clinton’s administration invited Yasser Arafat to the White House 13 times, more times than any other foreign visitor — and you can be sure that among the many possible subjects being discussed, his personal corruption did not appear on the list.
“That was a very damaging position for our country to take, for it just encouraged even more corruption,” according to Elliott Abrams, a Senior Fellow for the Middle Eastern Studies Council on Foreign Relations. “It signaled to Palestinians who were disgusted with public corruption that we were not interested and were not going to hold Arafat to account.”2
After the 2000 Camp David Summit in the U.S. failed to produce meaningful progress toward a two-state solution, the Second Intifada (a violent Palestinian uprising) immediately ensued, resulting in more than a thousand Israeli deaths, at the time the worst result since Israel’s War of Independence in 1948.
It was at this time that the Palestinian Authority (a formality of the PLO following the Oslo Accords) underwent another change: incorporating Islam into its political rhetoric and adding jihad to its agenda. As a result, the Palestinian Authority gained even more support financially and politically within the Arab and Muslim worlds.
According to a report from 2001, the amount of money officially donated to the Palestinian Authority during the Second Intifada jumped 80 percent, from $555 million to more than $1 billion.3
Toward the Second Intifada’s end, Arafat died and Mahmoud Abbas replaced him. Abbas outwardly seemed like a “better partner for peace,” but leaked records from a Panamanian law firm showed that he and his two sons went on to use power and influence to control the two major Palestinian economic boards and built a West Bank economic empire worth more than $300 million.
All this while the Palestinian Authority refused to use its considerable international aid to relocate more than 100,000 Palestinians from Palestinian-controlled refugee camps to residential locations in the territories, preferring to leave them confined under extremely unpleasant conditions.
The international community’s refusal or incompetence in not holding Abbas and the Palestinian Authority accountable for nepotism and corruption drove Gazan Palestinians into the open arms of Hamas, the terror group which promised them reform. But reform they did not get.
Hamas used Gaza to take kleptocracy and nepotism to unimaginable new heights, making the Palestinian Authority look rather innocent. Since violently assuming power of the strip in 2007, some 1,700 senior Hamas officials have become millionaires, and a handful billionaires.4
While the average Gazan reportedly lives on a dollar a day, estimates of Hamas’ annual “military” budget — really, its terrorism budget — range from $100 million to $350 million, including major financing from the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This is all to say that, while the entire world desperately wants the Palestinians to have their own state, the Palestinians (or, at least, Palestinian leaders) do not. Money, land, resources — you name it — are not a problem. In reality, the problem is a warped Palestinian mindset that Israel is to blame for all their woes. At any given moment, it is more important to the Palestinians that the Jews won’t have a safe state than it is for them to develop a successful, prosperous country alongside one for the Jews.
To make matters worse, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas can’t even get along, with multiple rumors over the years suggesting that Hamas has tried to assassinate the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.
In 2018, Abbas accused Hamas of orchestrating an “assassination attempt” on then-Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah as his convoy entered the Gaza Strip. Analysts said the attack was intended to put a strain on a Palestinian Authority-Hamas reconciliation agreement signed the previous year, which was supposed to end a decade of division between two parallel governments operating in Gaza and the West Bank.
In response to Abbas’ accusations of an assassination attempt, Hamas called for general elections, including presidential, parliamentary, and national council elections, “so that the Palestinian people can choose their leadership.” Both parties agreed in 2020 to new elections, but they were postponed “indefinitely” by Abbas.
It is common knowledge that if an election was held today, Abbas — the “Mayor of Ramallah,” since that’s all he really controls — would easily lose to Hamas. As such, he is in the 18th year of a four-year term.
But even if the Palestinians seriously desired their own state, there are many questions that did not exist when Israel entered into peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt, such as:
How do you connect the West Bank with Gaza, two physically unconnected territories?
What happens to the Jews living in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank)?
Who will govern the Palestinians?
Will the Palestinians be allowed to have their own military?
What happens if the Palestinians violate Israeli sovereignty?
Which currency will the Palestinians use for their economy? (They are currently using the Israeli shekel. Suffice to say that no other country would allow the Palestinians to use their currency, since they would instantly devalue it.)
After unleashing the worst single-day attack on Israeli soil ever, notice how Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad did not make any demands for a Palestinian state. It was largely the Americans who came strolling in with the idea that the Palestinians need their own state — as if that is going to keep Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from continuing to pursue their fascist, genocidal ambitions. Let alone the rampant nepotism and kleptocracy that are practically synonymous with the term Palestinian nowadays.
This pressing need to solve every problem on Earth is part of Western culture’s obsession with “happy endings” and “peace on Earth” — but neither microcosm of wishful thinking has any connection with reality, not today and not ever. It’s time we accept that some situations won’t end happily, and “peace on Earth” only makes for a cute mug or bumper sticker.
One American academic, Alan Richards, said it more aptly: The West is largely comprised of “Puritan Engineers” who believe all problems have solutions, the past and history don’t matter, and “our new technology, and our organizational prowess, will always find a solution.”5
Social media, a Western invention, compounds these problems to make them exponentially worse. Users think they are subject-matter experts after spending a few minutes scrolling performative social media platforms, while “influencers” play tricks on convoluted algorithms so more people will hopefully see their posts, which are neatly packed with well-organized words in order to arrogantly make it seem like they so obviously know how to resolve thorny issues.
Users get excited because they believe that following the right “influencers” will help them deeply understand and intelligently articulate complex topics. Politicians, both elected and those in the running, join the circus with empty cliches, trendy hashtags, and decorative emojis. Sometimes companies and organizations feel a pressing need to chime in on the latest stories that have nothing to do with them.
And all it takes is the tap of a “share” button to make people feel as though they are highly knowledgable and incredibly engaged “world citizens” who have a keen comprehension of regions they have never visited.
Ultimately, real problems never get solved.
“Terrorists & Kleptocrats: How Corruption is Eating the Palestinians Alive.” The Tower.
“Chronic Kleptocracy: Corruption Within the Palestinian Political Establishment.” Council on Foreign Relations.
“Palestinian Foreign Aid: Where Does the Aid Money Go?” Jewish Virtual Library.
“Far from Gaza hardships, Hamas chief and family enjoy easy life in Qatar.” The Times of Israel.
“American Thinking About Violence in the Middle East.” UC Santa Cruz: Center for Global, International and Regional Studies.
Thinking about it historically, Israel used to have the 1967 borders. Which, as I understand it, would be Israel without the borders of a Palestinian state. Israel was content with 1967 borders. The Arabs wanted war. Seems very unlikely that returning that land will make anyone happier than they were pre-1967.
The disengagement from Gaza did not produce peace or even the end of terrorism.
Hard to explain what would happen to make Palestinians happy with a state. There is no precedent for Palestinians happily accepting anything ever. There’s no rational reason to believe it would happen in the future.
I read accounts of the early Palestinian mandate in which the British and others concluded that neither the Arab or Jewish Palestinians were at all ready for their respective nations. By 1947, they had given up on the Mandate and proposed a partition, that would hopefully lead to a two state solution.
Of course, there were no distinct Palestinian Arabs at the time, and the Arab world utterly rejected the entire concept of a Palestinian state. After 1967, the Arab world and the UN wanted the Palestinian refugees to return to a mythical lost homeland, mostly to keep them contained and dependent on the UN and hating Israel for the UN and Arab world's manipulation and broken promises. So, as you wrote, a Palestinian "national identity" was created, with the help of the KGB, in the 1980s to continue the charade and keep the region in turmoil.
Nut the "Palestinian People" were no more capable of self-government, given the tremendous influences, competitions, and factions of the Arab League, Russia, Iran, etc., than it was in 1920's.
The Palestinian territory governance was never up to Palestinians, but followed the traditional cleptocratic, clan-based and tribal, and corrupt franchise model of the Caliphates, suvordinate to its major sponsors and arms suppliers, who were often at war with each other.
Thus, the kind of Palestinian statehood that could emerge was never one that could live alongside of Israel. It is inconceivable that it could become a sovereign state and conduct relations with the West on its own. The UN embedded itself in the region so that it, too, became a major tool for the Arab nations seeking to dominate it.
The deranged notion of the UN and the West, that Fatah could govern all Palestinian territories in the interests of the Palestinian people was the same wholly unreasonable and culturally ignorant and arrogant fantasy that led to the mass destruction of the Middle East, the Arab Spring, and the rise of Islamic States and Iranian proxies.
By analogy, and in no way referring to Palestinian people or Muslims, the Pit Bull may not be inherently violent and unmanageable species. However, if it is systemically abused and deprived, the result is predictable.
People can be systemically abused, deceived, and manipulated, also. It doesn't matter whether the abuse comes from its friends, it enemies, or the United Nations. European and other nations have been sucking up to the Arab world and Islam, for many generations, compering with each
other for deals and advantages. The excessively complex nature of the Middle East is beyond the West's understanding, even if they were all on the same page and Russia and China weren't striving to destabilize it all.
Congratulations to Joshua Hoffman for tackling the big issues we are all facing due to the gross oversimplifications that pass as wisdom and critical thinking these days.