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**MAY 13, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

Failed State (Israel) vs. Failed Non-Sovereign State (Palestine)

The current violence in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza should surprise
no one. A house divided against itself, as someone once said, cannot
stand.

The pre-eminent Israeli character trait is willful blindness. A large
number of Israeli Jews have come to believe that yearslong intervals of
relative peace are normal, and that Palestinians won't be as
infuriated and eventually stirred to violence by their lack of
self-determination as Israeli Jews were under the British Mandate, or,
as with the Jews of the 1940s, by their occupiers' routine acts of
abuse and violence against them.

In the current round of violence, neither Israel nor the Palestinians
have what could be considered a legitimate government. Bibi Netanyahu
serves as the Israeli prime minister in a caretaker capacity only, since
after four national elections over the past two years, he has not been
able to form a government; he's only in power because no one else in
Israel has been able to form a government either. As for the Palestinian
Authority, President Mahmoud Abbas is now in the 16th year of his
four-year term, having canceled every national election since 2005.
Neither the state nor the non-sovereign state has a government able to
command the support of a majority of its people.

It's possible that the current upheaval will enable Netanyahu to win
back support to form a government from those right-wing parties that
have thus far opposed him, in which case a harsher and more violent
occupation awaits the Palestinians, which will eventually lead to a more
cataclysmic round of retaliatory violence, and surely to more violence
within Israel itself. If the Israeli right doesn't coalesce, then any
new Israeli government would have to include one or more of the Israeli
Arab parties, which seems unlikely in the current climate, which may
well be the permanent climate unless a two-state solution blossoms forth
(which is itself virtually unimaginable unless the rest of the world
wants to impose it by force, establishing a Green Line border and
evicting Israeli settlers from the West Bank-yet another unimaginable
scenario, which, however, would probably be the least of all evils). And
the idea of one unified, democratic state seems even more unimaginable
today than the two-state solution.

In the meantime, to hark back to that "house divided" line, Israeli
Jews who think the status quo is sustainable sound increasingly like the
white Southerners of 1859. It's only sustainable by blood, both the
Palestinians' and their own.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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