The nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict is that a lot of people claim to speak for the Palestinians. In our current moment, that role has lately fallen to Egypt, which has been putting specific conditions on a postwar plan for Gaza.
Egypt opposes, understandably, forced population transfer. And it insists that any postwar plan puts the two sides on track to achieve a two-state solution.
But Egypt also opposes voluntary population transfer—that is, emigration. It doesn’t want Palestinians. Therefore, it opposes any plan that relocates Gazans while rebuilding the Strip out of fear they will land in Egypt (Jordan shares that fear for itself).
Arab countries simply don’t want Palestinians going anywhere. That is not what Palestinians want, as pollster Khalil Shikaki found by actually asking them: “On the eve of October 7, about a third of Gazans and about a fifth of West Bankers said they were considering emigrating from Palestine… The most preferred destination for immigration is Turkey, followed by Germany, Canada, the United States and Qatar.”
And that was before the war.
The more glaring contradiction between the purported spokespersons for the Palestinians and the Palestinians themselves, however, is on the two-state solution. Today the BBC premiered a documentary in which former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert displays the map of a proposed two-state solution he offered Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in 2008. Abbas rejected the offer.
It is not the first time the basic contours of Israel’s 2008 offer of Palestinian statehood have been described—those details came to light about a decade ago. But it is the first time that Olmert’s map itself has been revealed. And the documentary also gives us the reaction from Abbas’s then-chief of staff Rafiq Husseini.
The map was the result of a series of negotiations held between Abbas and Olmert. The two leaders agreed to hold a joint meeting of the their respective map experts the following day. History was, Olmert sensed, being made.
Yet, as Abbas and Husseini drove away that night, “Of course, we laughed,” Husseini says.
Of course they laughed! Nothing is funnier than stringing Israel along to a final deal and then walking away from the altar.
It was not the terms of the deal they thought were funny—the deal was, in fact, everything the Palestinians have ever asked for and more. The funny part, to Husseini, was that Olmert actually believed the Palestinian leadership was sincere about the negotiations at all. Olmert was “a lame duck,” Husseini notes—he was leaving office under a cloud of suspicion and disapproval. Therefore, Husseini says, “we will go nowhere with this.”
This is, of course, nonsense. If Olmert’s approval rating was going to doom the plan, the Palestinians would still come away the big winners by accepting it—or at least not rejecting it—and letting Israel sink it.
No, what Husseini and Abbas feared was that it would work. They could not take the chance that an offer like this would become public in the moment, because then they’d look like liars and maniacs for turning it down. Israel has always said yes, the Palestinians have always said no, and no one expected otherwise.
Except, perhaps, Olmert. Which is why Abbas laughed at him. Olmert wanted a peace deal that created a Palestinian state and guaranteed a sharing of Jerusalem and the evacuation of settlements. Abbas didn’t. What would Abbas do with a Palestinian state? Govern it? Hilarious.
What do the Palestinians want? Everyone seems to want a state for them. Everyone wants them to stay put in Gaza.
The BBC itself falls into this trap, even as it serves as an example of it. The writer, Paul Adams, recalls attending a negotiating summit in 2001 at which a Palestinian official “drew a rough map on a napkin and told me that, for the first time, they were looking at the rough outlines of a viable Palestinian state,” but the talks went nowhere because of the Second Intifada that was already raging.
“The map on the napkin, just like Olmert’s map eight years later, showed what might have been,” Adams writes.
Does it, though? Can we see the napkin? Does it look like the viable Palestinian state that Yasser Arafat had rejected the previous year before launching the Second Intifada? Because Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak offered Arafat more than a napkin. They offered him a state, and Arafat said no and launched a war. The fact that, in the middle of the war that Arafat launched, some Palestinian guy showed Paul Adams a napkin sounds emblematic of the Palestinians’ “of course, we laughed” approach to negotiations with Israel.
Neither Arafat nor Abbas held up a counteroffer. So we never learned what the Palestinians want. We only learned that they didn’t want what they’d always said they wanted.
