Israeli Press
An Israeli ex-officer argues recognition alone cannot build a Palestinian state
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The wave of European and Commonwealth recognitions has produced a diplomatic fact and not a governing one, Dr. Moshe Elad wrote Friday in the Israeli news site Ynet, answering a colleague who had declared that the State of Palestine already exists.
Elad was replying to Prof. Daniel Friedmann, who argued in the same forum that recognition by scores of governments, and the treatment of Palestine as a state by international institutions, has settled the question — leaving Israel only the problem of how to live with an accomplished fact.
Not so, in Elad's telling. "A state is first and foremost a mechanism capable of ruling," he wrote: holding its territory, enforcing law, providing security, collecting taxes and keeping a monopoly on force. Recognition confers diplomatic standing, he added, but it does not build institutions, create civil society or determine who controls the weapons.
He listed what he sees as missing — a single command over armed force, with Hamas operating on its own; institutions he calls weak; the political and geographic split between Gaza and the West Bank; and a national movement he says has not made the passage from struggle to statecraft.
Elad writes from a particular chair. He is a retired Israeli officer who served as military governor of Jenin and of Bethlehem and later ran security coordination with the Palestinian Authority — a career spent inside the apparatus that set the limits on Palestinian governing capacity he now measures.
The exchange marks where the Israeli argument has moved. A year ago the debate in these pages was whether recognition would come; now it is over what recognition is worth, and the answer offered to Israeli readers is that a state can be acknowledged everywhere and still be prevented from functioning.
