Why don’t the Palestinian Arabs proclaim a state? Nominally they declared independence twenty years ago at the PLO meeting in Algeria, but have never followed it through with real state-building. Palestinians have all the pre-requisites for a de facto state: foreign exchange through transfers and aid, decent by Arab economic standards, established political parties, a recognized police force, government infrastructure from education to courts, and substantial control over their territory.

Palestinians would need some political equilibrium to proclaim statehood, as they have to strike a balance between nationalist aspirations (all of Palestine including Israel) and precluding Israeli invasion if their hostile intentions were announced. Still, they can settle for weasel wording, such as declaring their right to all of Palestine but recognizing Israel.

An Independent Palestinian state risks an Israeli blockade, or at least the cessation of the power and water supply; but in such a case Egypt and Saudi Arabia would supply free oil for Gaza’s power station. Drilling and water desalination can alleviate water shortages. Israel may close her borders to Palestinian labor, but Gaza is thus closed for seven years anyway. Independent Palestine will no longer receive UNRWA subsidies, but drug revenues can substitute for the lost aid.

Jews, too, hesitated to proclaim our state. Jews could have declared independence as early as 1919 after the Balfour Declaration, but even in 1948 many Jews had doubts about independence. Ben Gurion’s declaration of independence came in the last moments of the window of legal opportunity the UN resolution offered the Jews.

As if taking responsibility for the nation were not enough, independence poses severe moral problems for Palestinian leaders. They would need to betray up to three million of their kinsmen who have harbored for four generations a hope of return. A Palestinian state would be economically unable to absorb the refugees or even to resettle them. The relatively affluent West Bank Palestinians resent the influx of their compatriots from Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza who long ago lost their work skills and evolved into a truly lawless bunch. The influx of refugees would be a real catastrophe for the West Bank Arab society.

Palestinians are also afraid of Jordan, a petty state which appealed to the US and Israel for protection against Syria, but plays an imperial power with the West Bank. Fatah has its own reason for avoiding independence: without being propped up by Israel, that shallow egg laid by Arafat would crack open. For the Palestinian guerrillas, independence spells a descent from their gun-toting social status into unemployment. Arab governments want the Palestinian issue smoldering, both as an excuse for themselves to refuse recognition to Israel, and for their subjects to vent their hatreds on Jews.

The Israeli establishment pays the Palestinian leaders to avoid independence. From Israeli oligarchs who derive huge incomes from their trade monopoly with Palestine to Israeli religious demagogues who speak of Jewish Judea so long as it remains under nominal Israeli occupation, to the Israeli government, which needs a low-intensity conflict to keep the Jewish population obedient, to Israeli security services which use the West Bank for a training ground—every influential stratum of Israeli society resists de jure Palestinian independence.

Arafat miraculously refused independence in 2000 when the Palestinians were on the brink of it. Abbas similarly rejected independence ahead of the Annapolis conference even though the Israeli government only wanted him to minimally rein in the Palestinian guerrillas.

Nothing precludes the Palestinians from grabbing their independence immediately. The Israeli government agreed to abandon Judea and Samaria to the Arabs, destroy small Jewish villages and exchange the larger Jewish towns for equal tracts of land, partition Jerusalem and give Arabs its most sacred areas, and hinted at its readiness to aid the Palestinian state in absorbing the refugees.

The West’s left refuse to recognize an evident thing: there are no willful takers for Palestinian independence.