The time when Israel would allow a Palestinian governing entity to maintain anything resembling a military has come and gone.

It is fitting that the Wall Street Journal chose to illustrate the op-ed by Mahmoud Jabari, an international affairs analyst and Palestinian who presumes to represent the territories from his comfortable perch in Switzerland, with an image of the visibly aged Jabari clan. His is an argument that could have been written all but verbatim 25 years ago. It is reflective of an anachronistic vision of a region eternally at war with the Jewish state — a vision whose time looks to have come and gone.

Jabari landed on the Journal’s opinion pages out of an act of editorial charity in observation of the WSJ’s reporting that the Hebron sheikhs seek a separate peace with Israel in defiance of the Palestinian Authority. Jabari complains about the degree to which his fellow Palestinians are colluding with Israel and contributing to the “fragmentation” of the Palestinian people — a linguistic artifact of the Oslo days.

There is little point in dismantling the dissimulations that populate the op-ed. Correcting the record is, of course, vitally important. And yet, pounding the table in protest over the historically revisionist and cloying arguments that Jabari marshals (tickling academia’s erogenous zones by invoking the “colonial playbook” was a nice touch) is no longer so urgent. The region and the world are rapidly moving on from the stage at which they mattered.

What matters now is how Jabari, a representative of the Arafat-era old guard, defines what “real peace looks like.”

Israel ends the war in Gaza and begins negotiations with a reformed and empowered Palestinian Authority and PLO for a credible and irreversible path to a two-state solution based on the June 6, 1967, borders with land swaps; a resolution to the Palestinian refugee issue based on the 2000 Arab Peace Initiative; robust security arrangements that protect both peoples through cooperation, not domination; and a Marshall Plan-style investment program that builds the Palestinian economy from the ground up, including in Gaza.

Is that all?

Jabari laughably mourns the degree to which the Palestinian Authority has “tolerated corruption,” become “disconnected from the people,” and failed its young people, “most of whom have never had an opportunity to vote in a Palestinian election.” And yet, “the answer isn’t to replace one flawed system with something worse.” What Jabari defines as “worse” is, we must presume, the emerging regional status quo in which Israel enjoys normalized relations with its neighbors. That could soon include willing Palestinians, whose familial and community associations are far deeper than their coerced commitments to the PA, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.

The Palestinians had their shot at sovereign statehood. In his 2003 book, Terror and Liberalism, New York Times columnist Paul Berman described the deal that was before the Palestinians in 2000:

[Bill] Clinton’s principal negotiator, Dennis Ross, has explained that, in the offer to Arafat, the new Palestinian state was going to be entirely contiguous, except for the Gaza Strip. And even Gaza, in its faraway corner on the Mediterranean, was going to be connected to the West Bank by means of an elevated highway and railroad across Israel – an imaginative touch – to allow Palestinians to commute back and forth, free of the humiliation of Israeli checkpoints. The Israeli settlements of the past twenty years or so in the occupied territories, most of them, were going to be, at least, evacuated. . . . It conceded to the Palestinians all but a very small portion of what Arafat had vociferously demanded for many years, and even that small portion was to be compensated with other lands. The offer gave the Palestinians a capital in shared Jerusalem. The Israelis had never wanted to share Jerusalem before. This was not a low point for Palestinian national aspirations.

Berman, a good liberal whose excellent book is peppered with apologies for his own inimitable candor, could not honestly pretend that the deal Arafat turned down was a bad one. As Clinton himself admitted to Arafat after finding himself on the receiving end of some dishonest flattery, “I’m a colossal failure, and you made me one.”

The status quo that pertained in 2000 is a distant memory. Palestinian society is already “fragmented,” but not by Israel or the peace processors. Its territories are noncontiguous and had (before October 7, 2023) distinct governing entities, economies, and foreign policies. The various factions that rule over the Palestinian people chose war not just with Israel but also with one another. And, for a time, their foreign sponsors supported those campaigns.

The sponsors have fallen away one by one, either via diplomatic engagement with Israel or exhaustion on the battlefield. Some remain, but the deep pockets that bankrolled suicide terrorism are gone. Jabari complains that the seditious neighborhood in the West Bank that has abandoned the cause is one of several that are controlled not by the PA but by Israeli security forces. This, he insists, is untenable. The sheikhs in that very neighborhood, who are suing for peace with Israel, might disagree.

“We’re asking for the right to choose them ourselves, to shape our own future, to live as a free people in our own land,” Jabari insists. Benjamin Netanyahu agrees. “I think Palestinians should have all the powers to govern themselves, but none of the powers to threaten us,” the prime minister said in a familiar locution when asked by a reporter about the prospects for Palestinian statehood. “That means that certain powers, like overall security, will always remain in our hands.”

In other words, the time when Israel would allow a Palestinian governing entity to maintain anything resembling a military has come and gone. “Now people will say, ‘It’s not a complete state, it’s not a state,’” Netanyahu observed. “We don’t care.” Call it callous if you like, but this is what happens when you wage war and lose — the victor gets to dictate terms. It seems increasingly as though the Palestinians’ Arab allies are willing to accept those terms, with or without the consent of the decrepit intifada-generation diaspora.