It’s really amazing what you feel entitled to say when you write as an American about the Palestinians. Here’s Robert Kaplan asking if the Palestinians "really want a state." According to Kaplan, the dysfunction of the divided Palestinian leadership could be explained by a new Policy Review essay, "The Power of Statelessness," by Johns Hopkins professor Jakub Grygiel:

Grygiel raises a challenging proposition. If his theory is correct, then the Palestinians may never have a state, because at a deep psychological level, enough of them—or at least the groups that speak in their name—may not really want one. Statehood would mean openly compromising with Israel, and, because of the dictates of geography, living in an intimate political and economic relationship with it. Better the glory of victimhood, combined with the power of radical abstractions! As a stateless people, Palestinians can lob rockets into Israel, but not be wholly blamed in the eyes of the international community. Statehood would, perforce, put an end to such license.

You know what stateless people also get to do? Have their houses and livelihoods destroyed by bulldozers and artillery and missiles; have their freedom of movement restricted by naval blockades and tricky passport situations; and watch as demagogues exploit their misery. All of this means nothing in comparison to the allure of "not be[ing] wholly blamed in the eyes of the international community" for their role in a 60-year asymmetric war, of course, because that’s the secret Palestinian weapon of fighting dirty. So cunning!

Now, in the real world, some 80 percent of Palestinians tell pollsters they want their own state, and they’re frustrated in that goal by a complex and multitiered conundrum of their own misgovernance and lack of strategy; a schizophrenic Israeli approach to the occupation that’s prone to turn violent; its echo within the Arab world that uses the Palestinians as a bloody shirt rather than a people with material needs; and an international community that proves half-hearted, intransigent and divided. But that’s so drearily mundane. No, the Palestinians are the global community’s version of the Baltimore Orioles: underresourced and mismanaged, of course, but the opposing team always just seems to want it more.

Just imagine. Once the early Zionists did the hard work of statebuilding and responsible governance. But now the current intransigent approach embraced by Benjamin Netanyahu is amounts to plunging Israel into the lose-lose proposition of choosing between its Jewish character and its democratic design, since the demography is such that there will soon be more Arabs between the Jordan and the Mediterranean than Jews, meaning it will make sense for Palestinians under occupation to demand their rights as Israelis. One might see that as a compounded failure of Israeli will, prompted by security fears, the impotence of the Israeli left, a U.S. patron that rarely pushes Israel into compromise and a factionalized Palestinian leadership that makes it difficult to achieve meaningful compromise.

Or you could suggest that what Israel really wants is to plunge itself back into the position of victimhood that comes with the loss of the state, since nothing soothes the Jewish soul like being told that it’s heroic and blameless in its impotence. But then you would rightfully be seen as an idiot and a conspiracy theorist who has a thing about Jews that compels him to project his own paranoias onto people rather than, like, talking to them. Funny how that wouldn’t ever get published in the Atlantic.