The Dirty Little Secret About a Palestinian State
No one seems to care or mention that it would not be a democracy. Indeed, quite the opposite.
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This is a guest essay written by Gary Rosenblatt.
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Armenia recently joined Norway, Ireland, and Spain as the latest countries to announce plans to recognize an independent Palestinian state, no doubt signaling their frustration with Israel for its role in the ongoing war with Hamas and the lack of a path to peace.
There are now more than 140 countries that recognize a Palestinian state, a fact that has little practical significance. But it does underscore how irresponsible most of the world’s nations are in supporting a cause without acknowledging its makeup, goals, or system of ruling.
While the desired outcome, presumably, in recognizing Palestine as an independent state is for it to exist alongside Israel in peace, there is every indication this is a pipe dream that, at this stage, would result in a nightmare for Palestinians as well as Israelis.
While many Western college students are chanting “Free Palestine,” and other liberal Westerners see a Palestinian state as a timely solution to the ongoing bloodshed, no one seems to ask what kind of a state it would be. One thing is certain: It will not be free or democratic.
Consider the region, where Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq are ruled by autocratic men. The track record for Arab states that provide full human rights to their citizens is zero.
Even worse, though, are the two terror groups — as designated by the U.S. government — fighting Israel today. Both Hamas, which rules Gaza, and Hezbollah, which in practice controls Lebanon, are radical Islam terrorist groups whose patron is Iran, the leading source of Islamic terrorism in the world.
Far from calling for a two-state solution, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are religious zealots fervently committed to eradicating Jews from Israel and replacing it with a Muslim state.
Do “progressive” Westerners who cherish equality, individual freedoms, and LGBTQ+ rights understand that Islamic fundamentalists reject Arab nationalism, Western culture, democracy, and human rights?
To put it more directly, these groups view every American as an enemy to be killed. How is it that so many of our fellow citizens are eager to support such terror groups pledged to commit genocide against Jews, rather than speak up for the only democracy in the Middle East?
In truth, the prospects are quite dismal for a Palestinian state that would not be simply a next-door base for continued, intense attacks on Israel.
The leaders of Hamas who carried out the barbaric attack on Israeli civilians on October 7th have stated publicly that their goal is to carry out similar attacks every day until the Jewish state is eradicated. Neither Yahya Sinwar (who heads Hamas) nor Hassan Nasrallah (the leader of Hezbollah) is calling for Palestinian statehood. The state they seek is not for living alongside Israel but to replace it.
The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank seeks independent statehood but its leaders have consistently rejected Israeli efforts to reach a peace agreement. Its rule, beginning in the 1990s under Yasser Arafat and, since his death in 2004, under Mahmoud Abbas, has been dictatorial, corrupt, and without basic rights for its citizens.
More than 30 years ago the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians made mention of Palestinian “democratic principles.” But as Elliott Abrams of the Council of Foreign Relations noted in a recent essay, those “democratic principles” were never defined or referred to again.1
Instead, the Palestinian Authority teaches Jew-hatred in its schools, textbooks, and TV programs for small children. It honors martyred terrorists and provides funds for their families. And according to several respected polls, the local population would rather be ruled by Hamas than the “more moderate” Palestinian Authority.
The international community has been so focused on the potential for Middle East peace that it has given the Palestinian Authority a pass on its consistent, major violations of human rights and basic freedoms. The Palestinian Authority has not held elections since 2005, and is led by Abbas, who, at 88, is serving his 18th year of a four-year term.
Even Western leaders who suggest that the Palestinian Authority rules Gaza “the day after” the war acknowledge that it has a long record of corruption and is highly unpopular among its constituents.
U.S. administrations have at times called for the rule of law in the Palestinian Authority but have not made Abbas accountable, all the while contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to Palestinian Authority coffers in the pursuit of a desired pie-in-the-sky peaceful future state. That ideal is a worthy one but it cannot be achieved overnight.
It should be noted that Israel, too, has largely avoided pointing out the Palestinian Authority’s lack of human rights. Jerusalem is far more interested in assuring its own security and recognition of its statehood by the Palestinian leadership than in how those leaders treat their citizens.
The aforementioned Abrams essay cites an observation made by Natan Sharansky in 2000, that: “Israel and the West are too quick to rely on strong leaders for stability. Democracies often prefer to deal with dictators who have full control.”
Israel and the Palestinian Authority have a unique relationship, marked by strong ideological differences — and equally strong, shared practical concerns. The Palestinian Authority opposes Israel’s existence but relies on the IDF to protect it from a Hamas takeover.
And Israel opposes the Palestinian Authority’s tolerance, if not encouragement, of terror activities but benefits from the Palestinian Authority’s cooperation in allowing the IDF to root out terrorists in West Bank enclaves.
Illogical? Yes, but that’s the reality of life in the Middle East.
Based on recent history, Israel has good reason to believe that its voluntary withdrawals from contested areas in the West Bank do not lead to progress. Far from it.
Painfully and at great sacrifice, Israel voluntarily pulled its army and several thousand civilians from Gaza in 2005, only to see Hamas destroy the greenhouses that Israel left as a sign of goodwill. Israelis living in the south, near Gaza, were prepared to greet their new neighbors with amity. Instead they were greeted with rocket attacks that have continued ever since and, ultimately, October 7th.
Similarly, in 2000, Israel voluntarily left Lebanon, vacating a stronghold in southern Lebanon after 18 years. But Hezbollah saw the retreat as a sign of weakness and proceeded to launch several wars in the north.
The 2006 Lebanon War ended when United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 was passed unanimously that summer. It called on Israel to remove its troops from Lebanon and for Hezbollah to end its rocket fire and to deploy its soldiers north of the Litani River. Israel removed its troops but Hezbollah violated both of its obligations, with no punishment for its actions.
The U.S. led numerous attempts to carve out a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians over the last several decades. But in the end, each effort was rejected by the Palestinian side, with no counter-offer, indicating a basic refusal to accept a sovereign Jewish state in the region.
In recent years, “the two-state solution” finally was set aside by would-be peacemakers who came to see the prospect as more an aspiration than a practical development.
How, then, is this unrealistic solution being made a demand now, when Hamas has launched a genocidal war against Israel, and the Palestinian Authority, at best, is too dysfunctional to even manage the West Bank, let alone Gaza?
The international community, in its rush to resolve the current crisis, will be creating a new one if it encourages the Palestinians to pursue a lawless state without civil boundaries.
Recognizing a state without being assured of its honorable mission is to ignore history. As Elliott Abrams concluded in his essay, “the time for … debate about the nature of any Palestinian state is now, not when it is too late to insist on basic principles and practices.”
He noted that one of the lessons of the Oslo Accords was that the world “simply abandoned Palestinian democracy and watched as the West Bank and Gaza both came under autocratic rule and human rights guarantees disappeared.”
Surely, the world does not need another state in the Middle East aggressively committed to wiping out Israel. Unchecked, it would be a launching pad for Iran and its surrogates to complete their core mission. That is a nightmare we cannot allow to happen.
If October 7th has taught us anything, it is that we must never underestimate our enemies, especially those who proclaim their sacred pledge to destroy the Jewish People and our state.
“Democracy and the Two-State Solution.” Council of Foreign Relations.
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All those countries have voted against the Jewish state and voted for the group that wants to annihilate the Jews. As I see it.
Why assume "progressives" actually cherish these things? What they really are, are marxists. The fact that they aim to destroy the only Mideast nation that actually provides these freedoms and human rights and supports the savages who would implement sharia law and throw gays off of rooftops and treat women as chattel tells us all we need to know about so-called "progressives" and their evil intentions.
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"Do “progressive” Westerners who cherish equality, individual freedoms, and LGBTQ+ rights understand that Islamic fundamentalists reject Arab nationalism, Western culture, democracy, and human rights"?