’s decision, for he had one thing Arafat did not: the lesson of Arafat’s failure. Abbas understood the wages of inflexibility, he knew the price of rejection and that the Palestinians would pay it in blood. In declining Olmert’s blueprint, he condemned his own people to decades of dispossession. He didn’t just deny them a state, he stole the Palestinians’ future. That is not a tragedy, it is treason….
The 7 October massacre has brought down upon Palestinian heads a ferocious Israeli retaliation and reliably sympathetic western governments are under threat from right-wing populists who harbour more affinity for Israel. The transfer of Palestinians out of the land, once a fringe prescription promoted by the likes of Meir Kahane, is now advocated by the president of the United States. Israel has shifted rightwards and any appetite for the sort of territorial division proposed by Ehud Olmert is limited to a depleted and moribund left. If the Palestinians ever return to the negotiating table they will find themselves negotiating over much less than before.
Mahmoud Abbas is another Palestinian leader who chose self-sabotage over self-determination and the Olmert map is a symbol of his inexcusable folly.
It's long been clear that the Palestinians have never been interested in a two-state solution: what they really want is the destruction of Israel. They've been encouraged in this head-in-the-sand attitude to a great extent by the beneficence of UNRWA, which for 75 years or so has catered to their fantasy that they are and always will be refugees – until the time of Israel's inevitable disappearance – while pouring money into schools which teach them that their goal in life is to kill Jews. Also, the Arabs are never held to account for their violence against Israel. After each defeat they just start back again, building up for the next attack.
Will it be different this time? The Israelis are certainly at the end of their patience, but it's not clear that the Palestinians themselves are any nearer to some kind of accommodation. The great tragedy is that the world at large seems more pro-Palestinian than ever – helped along by distorted reporting from the likes of the BBC.
It's also not helped by the framing of this by western media as solely a territorial political conflict, while determinedly ignoring the clear and dominant Islamic doctrines driving Iran and Hamas.
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