But practically speaking, what they can do as a state is limited by the amount of control Israel exercises over them. For instance, having another country control your coastline (in the case of Gaza) and maintain settlements and roadblocks throughout your territory (in the case of the West Bank) is not something you usually allow if you’re a sovereign state.
It’s not clear to me that nominal statehood in the form of official “recognition” of Palestine by other Arab countries would really count for much as far as “meaningful purposes” go without more Palestinian autonomy in a practical context.
Agreed. I am completely unclear on the exact status between Gaza and Israel: aren’t they formally “at war?” If so, recognition as a state wouldn’t change much: Israel would still maintain the blockade. Perhaps Egypt would change policy and allow much more trade with Gaza. Or maybe not.
Personally, I think of Gaza as a “state” right now, simply since no one else claims the territory, and it has a government that maintains internal order. During the time that Israel occupied them, they weren’t much of anything, but now, they appear to have independence, borders, and a government. They aren’t a province of any other country, so…
Is there a formal indeterminate classification? A “principality” or something? A grand duchy?
Damn those Israeli extremists who refuse to find a compromise between their desire to live and Hamas’ desire to exterminate them all. Why can’t they just compromise at 50% extermination? Maybe Hamas can agree that only the rocks will call out “Here is a Jew, come and kill him” but the trees will stand silent, eh?
But hey, if Dick says he’s sure it’ll happen?
I mean, who’re you gonna trust, Hamas’ statements on what Hamas believes, or Dick’s statements? I mean, obviously, Dick.
The Hamas leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, said on Saturday his government was willing to accept a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.
The Hamas leader spoke at a meeting with 11 European parliamentarians who sailed from Cyprus to the Gaza Strip to protest Israel’s naval blockade of the territory. Haniyeh told his guests Israel rejected his initiative.
Clare Short, who served in the cabinet of former British prime minister Tony Blair, asked Haniyeh to repeat his offer. He said the Hamas government had agreed to accept a Palestinian state that followed the 1967 borders and to offer Israel a long-term hudna, or truce, if Israel recognized the Palestinians’ national rights.
In response to a question about the international community’s impression that there are two Palestinian states, Haniyeh said: “We don’t have a state, neither in Gaza nor in the West Bank. Gaza is under siege and the West Bank is occupied. What we have in the Gaza Strip is not a state, but rather a regime of an elected government. A Palestinian state will not be created at this time except in the territories of 1967.”
The Hamas leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, said on Saturday his government was willing to accept a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.
The Hamas leader spoke at a meeting with 11 European parliamentarians who sailed from Cyprus to the Gaza Strip to protest Israel’s naval blockade of the territory. Haniyeh told his guests Israel rejected his initiative.
Clare Short, who served in the cabinet of former British prime minister Tony Blair, asked Haniyeh to repeat his offer. He said the Hamas government had agreed to accept a Palestinian state that followed the 1967 borders and to offer Israel a long-term hudna, or truce, if Israel recognized the Palestinians’ national rights.
In response to a question about the international community’s impression that there are two Palestinian states, Haniyeh said: “We don’t have a state, neither in Gaza nor in the West Bank. Gaza is under siege and the West Bank is occupied. What we have in the Gaza Strip is not a state, but rather a regime of an elected government. A Palestinian state will not be created at this time except in the territories of 1967.”
Even if they got a 1967 state they still wouldn’t recognise Israel’s right to the rest of the land but exactly what could they do about it? They’re not really in a position to destroy Israel, are they?
That’s cute, Dick, but I trust Dopers in general are able to tell the difference between 2008 and 2013, and can figure out which one represents the most up to date information. (And I can teach you how to use the “quote” function so you’re not endlessly pasting huge blocks of text into the body of your post).
I also trust Dopers will easily spot your bullshit, as you first claimed that Hamas would accept “an eventual political settlement” and your own cite says only that they’d accept a state (megaduh), but not that they’d accept any political settlement. In fact, you are up to your standard games. Haniyeh has been quite explicit that Hamas will never recognize Israel and would still want to capture the entirety of Israel.
Good try though. D+ for effort.
Time for you to put the truth up against your fiction in a public referendum, or perhaps snark about how silly your opponents look, yes?
I pointed out that Hamas will officially never recognise Israel. But so what? In any peace deal there will be people on both sides who will never recognise the other side but will go along with any political settlement. How about the settler parties, the religious parties, or even Israels’ biggest party, the Likud. This year’s Likudnik election intake are the most extreme ever :
MK Yariv Levin advocated a slow but steady de facto annexation of the West Bank, mainly by expanding existing settlements and taking whatever steps were possible to apply laws on Jewish communities beyond the Green Line.
‘In this way, we will try, slowly but surely, to expand the circle of settlements, and to afterwards extend the roads that lead to them, and so forth. At the end of this process, the facts on the ground will be that whatever remains [of the West Bank] will be merely marginal appendages,’ he said.
[…]
Feiglin is a pragmatist and head of the Jewish Leadership bloc in Likud that develops policy on annexing the West Bank…“This is just the beginning,” said Feiglin to Israel’s Channel 10 during the run-up to the election last November, reported the Times of Israel.“We will build the temple on the Temple Mount and fulfill our purpose in this land.”
Guys like this have to be accomodated into any peace deal. If the state backs a peace deal, they have to be prevented from forming terrorist groups to perpetuate violence against the Palestinians or assasinations or attacks on the Israeli government to prevent the peace process. So it’s not just Hamas who are a problem.
In a month or three or a year or so Hamas will make the same peace offer again. And then at some point after that, probably after another attack on Gaza, we’ll get another “no surrender until total victory!” speech to rally the troops. But when push comes to shove they’d take 1967 and would celebrate it as a massive victory for themselves if they got anywhere near it.
Now in any Israeli coalition government you have a bunch of religious nuts who believe as part of their religion that they own all of Palestine, that it’s all theirs. The current governing coalition has a bunch of settler/religious parties quite big enough to pull the plug on any government and prevent the government doing anyrthing they don’t like and that’s been the situation for decades.
They’ll never recognise the right of the Palestinians to own that land which they consider Jewish and given to them by god. But Israeli leaders can say that Israel is quite capable of making peace and wants to make peace even though the people who hold the balance of power in Israeli politics believe as a matter of faith that all the land is theirs.
So, in any political settlement you’ll have people on both sides who will never recognise the right of the other to be where they’re at. So anybody believing that a two-state solution or even a one-state solution is possible has to believe that it’s possible for people diametrically opposed to the other lot can sign onto a peace deal.
Funny, rather than explaining the hole in Dick’s logic, he instead chooses to rant about Israel.
Still no explanation of how he is sure that Hamas will come to a political solution despite the fact that Hamas says it will never compromise on exterminating Israel.
New idea - let them govern themselves. Israel can take appropriate steps to protect its security after pulling out its settlements. Oh, wait - that’s what happened. Oh well.
Speaking solely of Gaza, and not the West Bank, does the phrase “1967 border” mean anything? I thought the boundaries of the Gaza Strip have been firmly established, and didn’t change in '67.
You have this backwards. Egypt refused to accept Gaza back together with the rest of Sinai in the 1979 agreement. Israel was eager to get Gaza off its hands.
Even today Israel would be happy if Egypt would take more responsibility, for instance opening their border for transfer of goods.