Eighty percent of the nations in the world support a Palestinian state, endorsing a vision of Israel and Palestine living in peace, side by side. I share that ultimate goal but view it today as aspirational, as I do the coming of the Messiah. But based on the just-released draft of the Palestinian Authority’s constitution, a detailed plan for a Palestinian state, I think it’s more likely that the Messiah will show up before a two-state solution comes to pass.

The draft should be a must-read for the 157 countries that recognize a Palestinian state. They’ll find that their perception of a future Palestinian democracy ready to accept the state of Israel next door is a fiction. There is no talk of living alongside Israel. Instead, the draft asserts that Jerusalem will be the capital of Palestine and that Islamic and Christian holy sites will be maintained and protected. No mention is made of the Jewish connection to Jerusalem and the land since the days of the Bible; no recognition that Judaism is rooted in the Holy Land and that for thousands of years Jewish prayer has been deeply and inextricably linked to it.

In effect, the 53-page document erases Israel and Jewish history. It proposes a state that rejects “colonial settlement occupation… ethnic cleansing … and continued genocide,” to be governed not by democracy but Islamic Shariah law. It legalizes terror by promising to continue the PA’s “pay-for-slay” policy, calling for providing “protection and care for the families of martyrs, wounded and prisoners, and those released from the occupation prisons and the victims of genocide.” So much for a spirit of compromise or confidence-building required to prepare both Arabs and Jews to live as neighbors.

Reading the draft, with its emphasis on victimhood, I was reminded of Abba Eban’s most oft-quoted comment. Two months after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Eban, as Israel’s UN Ambassador and golden-toned orator, noted that Arab leaders “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” He was referring to frustratingly stalled peace efforts.

More than half a century later, the PA, created by the Oslo Accords three decades ago, continues a long tradition of rejecting attempts at diplomatic solutions to produce an independent state. Made up of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and other terror groups, the PA has consistently rejected Israeli and U.S. peace initiatives, often inciting violence against Israeli citizens, and teaching children from an early age to hate Jews. It has been a highly unpopular failure among its own people politically, financially and lacking in legitimacy. Ninety-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, elected to a four-year term 21 years ago, has not held elections since 1995 because he knows he would lose. He rules by executive decree, cracking down cruelly on critics and dissidents. His government is seen as corrupt on many levels, including nepotism and embezzlement, by more than 80 percent of Palestinians.

The details of the new draft of a PA constitution are particularly problematic at a moment when international calls for a Palestinian state are growing louder. The U.S. and other Western countries, well aware of the PA’s weakness and incompetence, have based their hopes, in part, for resolving the postwar Gaza crisis on bolstering a reformed PA that could have a key role in bringing stability to the area. “Gaza and the West Bank should be reunited under a single governance structure, ultimately under a revitalized Palestinian Authority,” President Biden wrote in The Washington Post in November 2023. But that would mean new elections and a wholesale revamping of the government, leading to more freedom and rights for Palestinians and more security for the region.

The fact that the draft calls for the opposite – more Islamic fundamentalism and refusal to coexist with or even recognize Israel – not only dashes the hopes of solving the Gaza situation but strengthens the Israeli right, which has long insisted that the two-state solution is a fantasy. As Nachum Kaplan, an Israeli-based journalist, wrote in his Substack newsletter, Moral Clarity, “the draft doubles down on erasure, grievance and theological supremacy … It also reveals that the PA has no intention of living peacefully alongside Israel. And anyone who believes otherwise is part of the problem.”

In this latest version of missing an opportunity, the PA has shown its true colors. The only ones who benefit, at least in the short term, from this diplomatic disaster are those in Israel who want to claim Gaza and the West Bank free of Palestinians forever. Or at least until the Messiah arrives.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)