Brief, lucid, and disturbing, the dispatch grimly assesses not just the familiar immediate barriers to peace - Israel's rightward tack and new foreign minister who, in Kaplan's deft phrase, "makes the right-wing Likud prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, appear like the centrist he isn’t," the intransigence of Hamas and the impotence of Fatah - but a possible structural explanation that might forever forestall a two-state peace:
"New communication technologies allow people to achieve virtual unity without a state, even as new military technologies give stateless groups a lethal capacity that in former decades could be attained only by states. [Johns Hopkins professor Jakub] Grygiel explains that it is now “highly desirable” not to have a state—for a state is a target that can be destroyed or damaged, and hence pressured politically. It was the very quasi-statehood achieved by Hamas in the Gaza Strip that made it easier for Israel to bomb it. A state entails responsibilities that limit a people’s freedom of action...And, as Kaplan notes, allows Hamas to benefit from the license that the world community extends to the terrorist elements of an oppressed and displaced people, but not the violent tendencies of an established state..... the most tempting aspect of statelessness is that it permits a people to savor the pleasures of religious zeal, extremist ideologies, and moral absolutes, without having to make the kinds of messy, mundane compromises that accompany the work of looking after a geographical space."
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