A bad deal for Palestinians

The White House actually did the Palestinians an inadvertent favor by rejecting the U.N. resolution last month. Beyond the lack of enforcement mechanisms, the proposed plan was a bad deal for the Palestinians, as were previous iterations of the two-state model. Consider, for instance, that for more than 20 years Palestinians have been trying to convince Israel to settle for the land they captured in 1967 — though no existing U.N. resolution recognizes Israeli seizures from the Six-Day War as legitimate (although the proposed legislation implicitly would have). Instead, U.N. actions to date refer to the legal borders established in the 1947 General Assembly resolution, insisting that any territorial changes to that be achieved exclusively through negotiations. The U.N. report preceding the 1947 resolution found that, Palestinians owned more than 94 percent of the property in Britain’s Mandate of Palestine and accounted for two-thirds of its population. Yet the resolution awarded 55 percent of the territory, including prime lands and resources, to Israel. The Palestinians, understandably, rejected this plan.

If Mahmoud Abbas really wants radical change for the Palestinians’ plight, he should dissolve the Palestinian Authority and hand control of the West Bank to Israel.