Do Palestinians Want a State?

Robert Kaplan writes in the Altantic Monthly that it could be likely that the Palestinians are stateless because they want to remain stateless. Citing a "brilliant essay" by Jakub Gygiel Kaplan writes:

Grygiel raises a challenging proposition. If his theory is correct, then the Palestinians may never have a state, because at a deep psychological level, enough of them—or at least the groups that speak in their name—may not really want one. Statehood would mean openly compromising with Israel, and, because of the dictates of geography, living in an intimate political and economic relationship with it. Better the glory of victimhood, combined with the power of radical abstractions! As a stateless people, Palestinians can lob rockets into Israel, but not be wholly blamed in the eyes of the international community. Statehood would, perforce, put an end to such license.

Grygiel isn't actually talking about the Palestinians per se, because if he was I would suggest that he, like Kaplan, appear to be confused about the historical circumstances of Palestinian statelessness.

Kaplan, in his article, cites Hamas and Hezbollah's unwillingness to govern Gaza and Lebanon respectively as evidence that their "power" has been derived from statelessness. That they thrive as political entities because of their statelessness, not in spite of it. This argument proves confusing to anyone with rudimentary knowledge of both Hamas' and Hezbollah's organizational history. Both groups have been responsible for governance in areas that remain ungoverned by the "state" of Kaplan's imaginings. Hamas and Hezbollah run hospitals and schools, they have set up judicial hearings and local political institutions and while you may disagree with the ideological or religious basis on which these institutions are founded, they are the institutions of governance.

Of course, this is one point of many that one could make against Kaplan's totalizing effort to ascribe a generalized psychology to as disparate a community as "the Palestinians". No doubt that there are Palestinians who have taken advantage of their statelessness, just as there were Jews who took advantage of Nazi genocide, or Tibetans aiding Beijing's occupation. but this could only be a legitimate argument if there has ever been an occasion where a fair resolution - a "peace" - between Israelis and Palestinians has been on the negotiating table. Kaplan knows this. He even states that Israel's settlement expansion has continued unabated throughout the so called "peace negotiations". But since Israel has never made a serious attempt to negotiate a peace, the Palestinians have never been given a serious opportunity to govern (in the limited way Kaplan understands governance).

So here's how we should test the thesis: End the Occupation of Palestine.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200904u/palestinian-statelessness