Good op-ed. He's quite right that the Palestinian leadership does not want a Palestinian state, but sees it as the booby prize being forced upon them:
Interesting Times: Freezing the conflict
By SAUL SINGER
I am a supportive critic of disengagement. I wish it had been done differently in many ways. For all the many words that have been spilt on it, however, almost no attention has been paid to its greatest significance: disengagement is at once Oslo's greatest advance and its exact opposite.
What Oslo danced around and indirectly envisioned, disengagement does. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is not only creating a Palestinian state, he is doing so against the Palestinians' will.
The dirty little secret is that Israel wants a Palestinian state more than Yasser Arafat did, and more than the current Palestinian leadership does. Indeed, we will know that Arafatism is finally dead when Palestinian leaders emerge who will do anything to build their own state, including making peace and working with Israel.
Accordingly, when Israel and the US say disengagement is in tune with the road map and with Oslo's two-state vision, they are not lying. And yet in another sense the withdrawal plan is at direct odds with Oslo's method of bringing this about.
Under Oslo, two states were to emerge, phoenix like, from a negotiating table that was all set, ready for the participants to sign a peace treaty at almost any moment. Time and again we heard that everyone knows the outlines of such a treaty; all that remains was for the stars to line up and permit its signature.
This climax of this paradigm was, of course, the failed 2000 Camp David summit, in which Ehud Barak, Bill Clinton, and Yasser Arafat were supposed to have been exactly that star-struck dream team.
The four years of terror that followed, ironically, has only redoubled the faith of some in the Oslo paradigm. Now the parties are exhausted. The Israeli Right has come around. The Palestinians have had their "war of independence" that would not be denied them by the rational stroke of a pen – so goes this line of thinking.
In June 2002, Yossi Beilin said in a campaign speech: "I cannot prove it, but I am convinced that had we offered the Palestinians at Camp David in July 2000 what we were willing to offer them in the midst of the intifada, in Taba 2001, there would already have been a peace agreement ... and the situation would have been completely different between us."
In the Oslo paradigm, the important thing was to rope the Palestinians into establishing a state in the West Bank and Gaza on almost any terms. Israel could compromise or concede on borders, Jerusalem, refugees – almost anything was worth the establishment of a Palestinian state that would sign an "end of conflict" agreement with Israel.
This way of thinking is not necessarily as naive as it is made out to be. You can make a hard-boiled argument that the greatest threat to Israel is becoming a pariah "apartheid" state, and that it is better to be in conflict with a belligerent Palestinian state than for our political legitimacy to be constantly eroded without one.
But three things have come to modify the Oslo paradigm since that agreement's collapse: 9/11, the Bush Doctrine, and disengagement. The emergence of a global anti-Western jihad has subsumed the Arab-Israeli conflict; the Bush Doctrine has targeted the entire region for democratization; and disengagement attempts to transform the conflict into a cold war, allowing Israel to wait and see how all of this plays out.
More than that, in the classic tradition of Ben-Gurion's Mapai that Sharon springs from, disengagement attempts to forge Israel's permanent borders on the ground, ahead of final-status talks. As much as it delays a negotiation, it attempts to shape that negotiation's outcome.
Whether all of this is smart depends greatly on whose side time is on. The Beilin school has not only always been in a hurry, but operating under the desperate notion that Israel's legitimacy problem is a time bomb. Before the three new, post-Oslo factors kicked in, the time bomb theory had much greater legs. But now?
Rushing to final status now means betting that the power of radical regimes and movements in this region will only increase, so the longer we wait the worse the deal we will eventually have to cut. It is a bet that America will lose its war against militant Islamism.
The Bush-Sharon paradigm, by contrast, is to set the Palestinian problem aside while the US picks off or tames the rogue regimes for its own reasons, incidentally taking the wind out of the rejectionist camp facing Israel.
If there is a wrinkle in this, it is that Bush and Sharon's paradigms are more in parallel than they are in sync. Sharon is neither a realist nor a neocon; he's a Mapainik, meaning he has an agenda that he doggedly advances on the ground. He is not overly concerned with democratic niceties here, even less so on the Palestinian side.
There is a problem, however, with a division of labor in which Bush worries about the region and Sharon tries to cool down the situation here. The trouble is that freezing the Palestinian problem in a pre-9/11 framework is harmful to Israel's struggle for legitimacy.
Sharon should be constantly saying that the Arab jihad against Israel is the oldest and most virulent manifestation of the current Islamist jihad against the West. The war against Israel was not the cause, but the unheeded harbinger of the wider jihad. Accordingly, the West cannot adopt a post-9/11 intolerance of Arab support for terror while maintaining a pre-9/11 tolerance for Arab rejection of, not to mention terror against, Israel.
It doesn't work for George Bush to care more about Palestinian and Arab democracy than Ariel Sharon does. It's not enough to put our conflict in "formaldehyde," as Sharon's top aide famously explained. If we do not make the case that a flourishing Israel is central to defeating the global jihad, who will?
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