Expat Scott M, over at Pedantry blog makes an interesting point in his post on the Israel-Palestine impasse (note that he’s wrong, but nonetheless gives us an interesting way to look at things).

He says:

There is a very simple notion in political science, one that goes back to Max Weber: A state possesses, by definition, a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, and it protects that monopoly. When a state is unable to protect that monopoly, it isn’t a state. There is no Palestinian state, and a non-existent state can not have a monopoly on violence. There is no possibility of anti-Israeli terrorism ending until there is a genuine Palestinian state with a monopoly on legitimate violence to protect. Any decision not to negotiate or make concessions until the violence abates is nothing but a cheap rationalisation for maintaining the status quo indefinitely.

[Update: Just found Donald Sensing’s post on the same subject…]

Continued…Here he’s quoting Weber who says, in Politics As a Vocation:

‘Every state is founded on force,’ said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of ‘state’ would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as ‘anarchy,’ in the specific sense of this word. Of course, force is certainly not the normal or the only means of the state–nobody says that–but force is a means specific to the state. Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions–beginning with the sib–have known the use of physical force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

Scott misses last part of the same paragraph, in which Weber makes a key distinction:

Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the “right” to use violence. Hence, “politics” for us means striving to share power, either among states or among groups within a state.

To Scott, the unassailable fact that the PA cannot control sub-entities within the territory means that they, unlike Israel, cannot be held accountable for the actions of Hamas et al, and that Israel should ignore the provocations of other groups.

To me, it has the opposite sense; what standing does the PA have to negotiate as a state if they can’t act as a state and control “the “right” to use violence”?

I’ll suggest that we have a different problem to solve, which suggests a different set of solutions.

The typical path to statehood is tribe – nation – state.

What we have in Palestine is an attempt to create an artificial state directly from a set of tribes. It worked in Israel, because most of the Israeli immigrants came from established states, so the superstructure of a state was familiar to them.

It isn’t so familiar to the people who live in the West Bank and Gaza. This isn’t some racist argument that they can’t create or live in a state; it is just that they haven’t – ever. And to expect them to suddenly develop democratic institutions and accept the rule of law because we want them to – without having formed a nation, or any of the other intermediate stages of political development – is to engage in the worst kind of wishful thinking.

And when we assume that the forms of diplomacy and politics that work between states can work between a state and a non-state, we’re wishing as well.