Why the Palestinian Arabs don’t 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 the Arab standards economy, established political parties, recognized police force, government’s infrastructure from education to courts, and substantial control over their territory.

Palestinians would need some political equilibristic in proclaiming statehood, as they have to strike a balance between nationalist aspirations (the entire Palestine including Israel) and precluding Israeli invasion if their hostile intents are announced. Still, they can settle for weasel wording, such as declaring their right to the entire Palestine but recognizing Israel.

Independent Palestinian state risks Israeli blockade or at least the cessation of 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 already in the 1919 after the Balfour Declaration, but even in the 1948 many Jews doubted the 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 need to betray up to three million of their kinsmen who harbor for four generations a hope of return. 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 lost 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 by Israel, that shallow egg laid by Arafat would crack open. For the Palestinian guerrillas, independence spells the descent from the 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 the hatreds on Jews.

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

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

Nothing precludes Palestinians from grabbing their independence immediately. Israeli government agreed to abandon Judea and Samaria to Arabs, destroy small Jewish villages and exchange the larger Jewish towns for equal tracts of land, partition Jerusalem and give Arabs its most sacred area, 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 the Palestinian independence.