A win-win strategy for the Palestinians

To understand how this seemingly doomed effort is designed to work, one has to recognize the strategic game Abbas is playing. Abbas knows that time and public opinion are on his side. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can denounce the move, President Obama can end it, those opposed to it can call it foolish and self-defeating. But world reaction to Abbas' request has been overwhelmingly positive and will become increasingly so with every move by Israel and the U.S. to block it.

The Palestinians are playing a long-term bargaining game, and any move toward the goal of statehood has to be considered a victory. Statehood will not come immediately, or when a vote is taken in the Security Council. What will happen is that support for it will slowly and surely increase among average citizens around the world. The extreme positions of Israel and the United States — their refusal to pursue real efforts to allow Palestinians to rule themselves and be free of military occupation — will be increasingly revealed, and tolerance for these positions, even among Israelis and Americans, will decline. Going to the Security Council knowing the bid will be publicly and persistently rejected, therefore, is an inspired strategy. Palestinians appear peaceful and reasonable. Israel and the United States do not.

In any bargaining game, the key to success is leverage. The Palestinian Authority has two broad sources of leverage. It can implicitly condone violence under the assumption that the more costly the conflict, the more likely Israel is to make concessions. Or it can pursue a nonviolent strategy mixing protest and diplomatic pressure.

For more than five years, the Palestinian Authority has pursued a disciplined nonviolent strategy against Israel. It has focused on building a state within the West Bank and rebuilding the infrastructure that was destroyed in the second intifada. The Palestinians have engaged in security cooperation with Israel to root out terrorists, and their security forces have been U.S. trained and supported. Certainly, the Palestinians have work to do. They still need to figure out their relationship to Hamas, as well as the Palestinian Authority's willingness to tolerate violence. But Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad are as good as they get. These West Bank Palestinians are the long-hoped-for partners that Israel needs to have a secure and lasting peace.

The nonviolent strategy, however has failed to generate sufficient leverage against Israel to motivate concessions. Many Israelis attribute the current lack of violence to the wall they constructed to fence off the West Bank, ignoring the equally important shift in the Palestinian Authority's strategy. Believing that the security problem has been solved by concrete and barbed wire, most mainstream Israelis feel no real need to negotiate. With the center demobilized, Israeli hard-liners have a clear field. The result is that Israeli maximalist dreams about ruling indirectly over a quiescent Palestinian population — or even better, gradually easing them off to Jordan — go uncontested because of the lack of urgency.