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Is Palestinian Statehood Inevitable?

(Washington Times) Zalman Shoval - President Bush's proposed three-year timeline leading to Palestinian statehood is a target date that will remain hypothetical unless the preconditions clearly set out in his speech are met. In other words, the clock isn't ticking yet, and the countdown to Palestinian statehood isn't about to start until there is an absolute end to terror and violence, the dismantling of the terrorist infrastructure, and a new and changed Palestinian leadership. Though Mr. Bush's vision is one of a "democratic, stable, peaceful, viable and credible" Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel - like Canada bordering on the United States - there is always the possibility, some would say the probability, that a future Palestinian state, right there in Israel's backyard, would turn out to be another brutal, corrupt, undemocratic rogue state - like so many others in the Arab Middle East. No less problematic is the term "viable" as applied to a future Palestinian state. Palestinian society has never been able to constitute well-functioning institutions of any sort - not under the British mandate and not after "Oslo." This is contrary to the Zionist movement which, under far worse initial conditions, successfully created a virtual "state-within-a-state" long before achieving independence in 1948. Perhaps this is so because, until quite recently, most Arabs living in the country quite simply didn't see themselves as a people apart. Or maybe, as the recent U.N.-sponsored "Arab Human Development Report" makes clear, not even the existing Arab states, whether Islamist or secular, have been able to become part of the modern world.
2002-08-06 00:00:00
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