Palestine is Passe

President Bush called Prime Minister Olmert’s unilateral West Bank disengagement plan “bold.” But if Mr. Olmert was bold in discussing the security implications of realignment (which he said Israel could manage, and perhaps it can), neither he nor the President was quite bold enough to address the political reality of 2006. “Palestine” as a defined geographic entity is rapidly becoming passe.

President Bush called Prime Minister Olmert’s unilateral West Bank disengagement plan “bold.” But if Mr. Olmert was bold in discussing the security implications of realignment (which he said Israel could manage, and perhaps it can), neither he nor the President was quite bold enough to address the political reality of 2006. “Palestine” as a defined geographic entity is rapidly becoming passe.

Mr. Olmert explained that absent a “partner for peace,” unilateral Israeli action to secure the country and its citizens is the only option. The President didn’t disagree, but still expressed his preference for a negotiated “two-state solution” under the never-implemented Road Map and the failed, corrupt, repudiated-at-the-polls Abu Mazen. Both men hoped a “partner” might yet emerge to recognize Israel’s “right to exist,” but both acknowledged that Israel might end up defining the borders of Palestine without Palestinian input.

President Bush and PM Olmert treated Hamas as if it is a nationalist Palestinian leadership for which “statehood” is important – as if the violent Islamic movement we fight in places as disparate as Indonesia and Iraq had not landed among the Palestinians. As if Israel’s war in its own space is different from the Western civilizational war.

Both made the mistake the Palestinian leadership has made since 1948: missing the moment. Time only moves forward and yesterday’s political options are gone. The Palestinians, claiming the so-called “right of return” (ascribed to equally by Fatah and Hamas), insist the creation of Israel was a “mistake” and demand that it be uncreated. Too late. And too late for thinking of Palestine as a state-in-waiting whose birth and life will solve a problem. Notional Palestine, not physical Palestine, is part of Islamist thinking.

Hamas is an international Islamist movement, and a Palestinian “state” of any dimension is only a step toward the larger goal – Islamist governments in Jordan, Egypt, and the Gulf and the overthrow of Saudi Arabia. It threatens American interests now and the threat will only get worse as Hamas digs into the Palestinian state infrastructure in Gaza and makes its moves on the West Bank.

With Israeli plans to realign backward, the Islamists will advance under the banner of Hamas “steadfastness” and jihad. Islamists have their Brezhnev Doctrine, and their firm belief that any place they control is theirs forever has to be the basis of any future American thinking about “Palestine” within any (temporary) borders. Even nationalist Palestinian leaders couldn’t come to grips with the legitimacy of Israeli sovereignty, and most Arab states don’t either. Thinking the Islamist ones will begs incredulity.

With no desire to contradict Mr. Olmert on his maiden voyage or to undermine a democratic leader with whose country we have much in common, Mr. Bush wasn’t about to dump on the idea of a future Israeli realignment and neither are we. But U.S. support for any Israeli policy has to be grounded in American security requirements and an understanding of the stakes for all of us.