No matter the outcome of the statehood bid for the Palestinian Authority, the only sure loser in this scenario is an Israeli government that has once again allowed itself to react to events, rather than dictating them. The price for defeating the statehood bid is almost certain to be more concessions. Whether Abbas gets his UN vote or gets blocked at the gate by Obama, he can still count on more Israeli territory extracted under pressure.

The terrorist game has always been fairly simple, create a crisis and force Israel to react, and then collect their winnings. The Israeli game has been to point at the terrorism and lawbreaking on the enemy side and expect the world to finally acknowledge that the Palestinian Authority has lost its credibility and force it to negotiate honestly. After decades of terror and lies this clearly isn't going to happen, but that hasn't stopped the Israeli government from playing that one card over and over again.

Netanyahu's second outing has been marked by a grand economic vision and no security or foreign policy vision to speak of. Instead Israel has gone into reactive mode with disastrous results, allowing itself to be panicked by the flotilla and now by the statehood bid into putting all its energies into campaigns that play directly into the hands of its enemies.

Netanyahu's failure to address Hamas in Gaza has led to the Free Gilad Shalit movement at home and the international flotilla movement abroad-- two contrasting movements, both led by the left, both taking advantage of Israel's passivity. The blockade of Gaza and the Separation Barrier have become symbols of Israeli inaction portrayed as vicious cruelty by anti-Israel movements that understand how to exploit the moment.

Add Iron Dome to the tally, a hyper-expensive brilliantly conceived defense system that fails to solve the problem, but ties a complex Gordian knot around it, that the vicious Islamist thugs will cut through with another low tech solution.

Israel is full of engineers and generals all pointed at the wrong goal, and easily undermined by a shift of terrain that once again forces them to make concessions to enemies that are dumber than them, but who  take the initiative.

Over and over again, the enemy counts on provoking an Israeli reaction and leading it into another lose-lose scenario. Passivity allows the enemy to claim victory and a last minute overreaction forces Israel to write more checks in the form of concessions.

The statehood bid has been effective at sending Israeli diplomats desperately scrambling for a solution to a problem they should have headed off long ago. Instead like the flotilla, Israel has been caught flatfooted by its own inaction and its reaction is once again putting it deep in debt to the likes of Obama, who will be sure to call in that debt with interest.

The goal of the pro-Palestinian cause is attention. That attention is the oxygen of its movement. When its activists barge into Jewish events and disrupt them, they measure their success in the attention that they garner for it, both negative and positive. Their ability to disrupt is their power.

In the Middle East the terrorists have gained power from their disruptive abilities-- the more they sabotage, kill, maim, hijack, or otherwise command attention, the more they create a process where their disruption becomes a form of blackmail. Give us what we want or we'll do it again.

Playing this game reactively makes it easy for the disrupters to stay one step ahead. The larger the reaction, the more effective the disruption. Israeli leaders and advocates have become convinced that the only way to win is by winning the war of ideas-- but the more you debate a disruptive force, the more the disruptive force wins. Witness the Israel Philharmonic concert at the Royal Albert Hall where a booing match ended in victory for the disrupters even though they were outnumbered.

Terrorists don't have to win on points, their very ability to disrupt is already a victory.

The statehood bid is more of the same-- a political disruption which has already succeeded because of the disruption it has caused. The Palestinian Authority has nothing to lose and everything to gain from disruption. Abbas, an unelected leader supported by Western money has more in common with the fallen regimes of the Arab Spring than with the revolutionary movements he is trying to pose as.

Statehood is a feint that will either buy him another six months or destroy him. But it's better than doing nothing. That is something that Abbas understands, but Netanyahu doesn’t.

Netanyahu and Israel have much more to lose, but Israel has been steadily losing since Oslo-- if it doesn't come up with a decisive plan then it is likely to lose everything. The mantra of defensible borders and defensible demographics that has seduced so many politicians and generals is another excuse for doing nothing against the enemy while drawing up plans to expel hundreds of thousands of Israelis from their homes in the hopes that somehow that will fix everything.

Israel made the mistake of paying too much attention to its image problems and not enough to its military ones. It hasn't won the image war and it's rapidly losing the military one. No Muslim army ever succeeded in cutting Israel in half, even during the Yom Kippur War, but it is on the verge of allowing itself to be pressured into creating a contiguous Palestinian state that will cut it in half.

No Muslim army has managed to seize half of Jerusalem since 1967, but that too is now on the table. The negotiations and concessions have already cost Israel more territory than any war since 1948 when it was low on weapons, lacked a proper army, and was also on the edge of civil war.


The American and European foreign policy establishments can't let go of Israel, but they can't stop torturing it either.
Yet when you talk to Israeli generals, the one thing they have on their mind is the image problem. Gone is the Oom Shmoom attitude, replaced by a need to fight political wars in which no one gets hurt too badly, but enough force is displayed to let the terrorists know who is stronger. This has ended in massacres of Israeli civilians and the flotilla disaster. It has cost the lives of countless soldiers and unsurprisingly the image war is still being lost.

Israel has an image problem because it has a terrorist problem. The longer the situation drags on, the more material its enemies have to work with, and the more they can make this seem like a raw bloody wound that has to be solved for the sake of regional and world peace.

The American and European foreign policy establishments can't let go of Israel, but they can't stop torturing it either. It's a powerful piece in a game that they don't dare commit to, and in the game of half-measures that they play, it's a piece that does more harm than good. The Israeli government is playing that same game of half-measures. Everyone wants to keep their options open, to take the high road and kiss the olive branch-- but that road leads down to the abyss.

The peace is not winnable, the war is, and only war can bring about some kind of manageable peace. As long as Israel holds on to the belief that passive defenses, barriers and blockades and bar lev lines will maintain a viable status quo, its position will keep on degrading until it is at risk of being unsalvageable.

Israel has trapped itself in a lose-lose scenario, it needs a strategy that doesn't depend on the failures of the other side finally becoming apparent or on tinkering with the status quo so it doesn't hurt so much. It needs to plan for victory, rather than looking for ways to manage defeat.