Why Hasn’t the Israel-Hamas War Escalated? Just Wait
There are some worrying signs that the conflict in Gaza could entangle more combatants, including Iran, says Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution in a conversation.
The Palestinian flag flies in Qatar.
Photographer: Karim Jaafar/AFP/Getty Images
Diplomatic circumlocutions are a deeply established art form. For a real doozy, consider this chicken-and-egg proposal shared among the US delegation at the Paris peace conference of 1919: “It will be the policy of the League of Nations to recognize Palestine as a Jewish state, as soon as it is a Jewish state in fact.” (No wonder Woodrow Wilson got canceled by my alma mater.) The document also included this pro tip: “Palestine would obviously need wise and firm guidance. Its population ... could easily become distracted by fanaticism and bitter religious development.”
Yet the Holy Land remained under a British mandate for the next 29 years: The West’s sagest minds/colonialist overlords (your choice of term) recognized the potential of a Jewish homeland to destabilize the entire Middle East, which they were busy carving into artificial states under somewhat randomly selected Arab leaders.