It's time to admit the Palestinians lost.
The best chance for "Palestine" is to stop trying to destroy Israel.
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This is a guest essay by Ben Koan, who writes the newsletter, “The Thousand-Year View.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
In 2025, Peter Beinart, the Jewish-American columnist and opponent of Zionism, publicly apologized for speaking at Tel Aviv University, declaring that “I let my desire for that conversation override my solidarity with Palestinians, who in the face of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide have asked the world to boycott Israeli institutions that are complicit in their oppression.”
Beinart’s principle is that the most radical Palestinian activists should determine the nature and tactics of the Palestinian national movement. The role of Palestinian sympathizers — especially guilty-by-proxy Jews — is to shut up and listen.
On the contrary, since the Palestinians on their own have been unable to achieve their goals and Palestinian identity is itself a response to Zionism, Jews have a sacred obligation to give them unsolicited advice. After all, Zionists have a better track record of achieving sovereignty than Palestinian nationalists.
If David Ben-Gurion (Israel’s founding prime minister) had led the Palestine Liberation Organization, there would have been a Palestinian state decades ago. Moreover, Jews everywhere are now constantly told to “Free Palestine,” which indicates a personal responsibility for the Palestinians’ fate.
First, let’s take it as a given that, from the radical Palestinian perspective, the ideal scenario is the destruction of Israel, the expulsion (at minimum) of its Jews, and the reconquest of the entire Holy Land for Islam and the Arabs. The rub is that Arab attempts to vanquish Israel on the battlefield during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the 1967 Six-Day War, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War all ended in failure.
The Iranian project to build a “ring of fire” around Israel and defeat it via terrorist proxies is also in shambles. Hamas wreaked havoc in southern Israel for one day on October 7, 2023, but now Gaza is in ruins, Hezbollah has been decimated in Lebanon, and the Iranian regime itself, though still standing, has been weakened by successive Israeli and American strikes.
The radical Palestinian dream is unrealizable in practice. Over the long term, the trend is toward Israel’s regional integration instead.
In 1967, the Arab League formally adopted the “Three No’s" — no peace with Israel, no negotiation with Israel, no recognition of Israel. Since then, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Bahrain have all established ties with Israel; most Arab countries have ended their secondary boycott; and Saudi Arabia has endorsed the prospect of normalization.
Israel has also developed diplomatic relations with non-Arab Muslim countries from Europe to Africa, to the Caucasus and Central Asia. In 2026, for the first time in history, an Arab Muslim nation even fought with Israel against a common foe.
On the other hand, the Palestinians still have cards to play. Their cause has popular, often fanatical backing throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. Because of mass Muslim immigration, that fan club now also extends to the West. Even more significantly, as a result of anger over the war in Gaza and progressive Third Worldism, the Palestinians also have a large non-Arab, non-Muslim constituency.
In 2002, 16 percent of Americans sympathized more with the Palestinians and 51 percent with the Israelis. In 2026, 41 percent of Americans sympathize more with the Palestinians and 36 percent with the Israelis. A record 57 percent of U.S. adults now say they support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
Large majorities in many countries have increasingly negative views of Israel. Popular sentiment has political consequences, as does the rise of Muslims as a significant Western voting bloc. European countries like France, the UK, and Spain (plus Canada and Australia) have symbolically, if meaninglessly, recognized Palestinian statehood.
An increasing number of Democrats are voting against aid and even arms sales to Israel, while refusing money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is becoming a litmus test for the Left. Even authoritarian Saudi Arabia pays attention to public opinion, and is predicating normalization with Israel on an “irreversible pathway” to Palestinian statehood.
But how will the Palestinians play their cards?
Islamists, settler-colonial theorists, and unabashed antisemites favor fighting Israel to the last Palestinian. Former Iranian president Ayatollah Akbar Rafsanjani put this camp’s true nature on display in 2001:
“If one day the Islamic world is reciprocally equipped with the weapons that Israel has, on that day the Arrogance’s strategy will reach a dead end, because the use of one atomic bomb in Israel leaves nothing left, but in the Islamic world, there will only be damage.”
Needless to say, nuking Tel Aviv would also annihilate Ramallah. Similarly, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar thought Israel might use nuclear weapons in response to October 7th, but proceeded with the attack anyway.
But what are Palestinian lives compared with the glory of the Islamic world?
The actual track record of anti-Zionist intransigence is one of escalating Palestinian loss. Their leadership rejected the 1922 Legislative Council proposal, which would have given them a representative body under British imperial authority; the 1937 Peel Commission, which would have given them approximately 80 percent of the Holy Land; the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan, which would have given them approximately 43 percent; and even alternative proposals for a Palestinian state “from the River to the Sea” with Jewish autonomy.
Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) and Gaza — the current Arab-majority Palestinian territories — only fell under Israeli control because Jordan and Egypt, which previously controlled them, attacked Israel in 1967.
But let’s be fair to the Arabs. From their perspective, it was reasonable to wager, in turn, that the nascent Zionist enterprise would fail, that five Arab armies could annihilate fewer than a million Jews in the 1940s, and that Soviet backing would win them their revenge in the 1960s and 1970s.
History, however, proved wrong the prophecy of Arab League Secretary-General Azzam Pasha: that the defeat of Israel would be “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.” Since the Arab defeats, Israel has grown in economic, military, geopolitical, and demographic stature. Only fanatical Iran and its terrorist proxies still have the appetite to wage open warfare on the Jewish state, while the Soviet Union has disappeared as a superpower benefactor.
At the same time, Israel’s very strength has helped shape an image of Palestinian “victimhood.” When the dominant framing was the “Arab–Israeli conflict,” Israel played the plucky David against the Goliath of hostile Arab states.
But since Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, along with their sizable Arab populations, the “Arab–Israeli conflict” gradually transformed into the “Israeli–Palestinian conflict.” Now Israel is seen as Goliath, and the Palestinians as David, even though, in reality, the Palestinians still claim the allegiance of vast Arab and Muslim populations. The Palestinians cannot defeat Israel on the battlefield, but they can help delegitimize it in the eyes of much of the world.
Or they could make an offer.
The Palestinians cannot rely on the fickle sympathy of their Western admirers to last forever. The war in Gaza is over, and other conflicts will inevitably grab the world’s attention, just as Gaza itself stole the spotlight from the war in Ukraine. Who, after all, speaks today of the Tibetan Freedom Concerts? Or remembers the Zapatistas?
Having achieved peak “victimhood” and temporarily captured Greta Thunberg’s attention, now is the perfect time for Palestinians to cash in their chips.
In 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas a state covering Gaza and more than 94 percent of the West Bank, with territorial swaps making up the difference, and a capital in East Jerusalem. This followed previous Israeli offers of Palestinian statehood in 2000 and 2001.
In large part due to rampant Palestinian terror and rejectionism, the Israeli public has turned against the idea of territorial withdrawals in exchange for peace.
But the Palestinians also have more to offer than they did in previous decades. Palestinian buy-in could expand the Abraham Accords to include, per the Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative, the entire Arab League and beyond, with transformative implications for Israel’s economy and security.
A resolution to the Palestinian issue would also delegitimize anti-Zionists in the West, who would be put in the absurd position of going against the wishes of the people they claim to represent. In contrast to Peter Beinart, a Palestinian leader should lead the charge by promising that a Palestinian state would not only oppose BDS, but actively broker ties between Israel and the Arab and Muslim worlds.
To assuage Israeli security fears and for its own survival, this pragmatic Palestinian state would need help to maintain order and avoid a terrorist takeover. Fortunately, a neighboring country has a proven track record of both crushing Palestinian militants and governing a Palestinian majority while maintaining peaceful ties with Israel: Jordan (i.e., historical Eastern Palestine).
The confederation of the West Bank and Gaza with Jordan (i.e., the reunification of the West Bank and East Bank) would provide plentiful land for refugee resettlement, fulfill the vision of Palestinian icon Yasser Arafat, and re-create the proven political structure that existed prior to 1967.
The contours of the grand bargain are as follows: Israel receives regional normalization and an internationally backed security arrangement in exchange for territorial withdrawal, following the precedent of Sinai under the Egypt–Israel peace treaty. (The involvement of a responsible state actor is to avoid the precedent of Gaza, which fell to Hamas after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal.)
The Palestinians receive political separation from Israel and additional land in exchange for renouncing irredentist claims and pledging fealty to King Abdullah II. And Jordan receives its own demographic and territorial expansion, including a Mediterranean outlet via Gaza, in exchange for helping to resolve the Palestinian issue.
Ample Gulf Arab funding could help underwrite the logistics and grease the wheels. After all, regional stability (and access to Israeli arms, technology, and capital) is in their own self-interest. Notably, Emirati-based Jordanian-Palestinian billionaire Hasan Ismaik and influential Saudi operative Ali Shihabi already endorse the idea of a Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine.
Jordan formally renounced its claims to the West Bank in 1988, recognizing the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Thus the re-engagement of Jordan would require petitioning by the Palestinians themselves. The 1948 Jericho Conference, during which Palestinian notables formally requested Jordanian annexation of the West Bank, provides historical precedent.
Trilateral negotiations between the Palestinians, Jordan, and Israel could then establish a pathway for an eventual Jordanian-Palestinian confederation. This pathway should include confidence-building measures to ensure that the new state does not descend into chaos or fall under Islamist control (though the existing presence of American bases in Jordan is a good backstop).
For example, Israel could gradually relinquish security control over the West Bank to joint Jordanian-Palestinian forces. At the same time, Jordan could begin providing West Bank Palestinians with citizenship and parliamentary representation, as was the case from 1950 to 1988, to legitimize its security role. Jewish settlements would be presented with the choice of either accepting Jordanian-Palestinian suzerainty or being dismantled.
As with earlier peace negotiations, this arrangement presupposes land swaps that allow Israel to keep contiguous settlement blocs while compensating the Palestinians with equivalent territory. Eventually, the Jordanian-Palestinian confederation would also assume responsibility for rebuilding the Gaza Strip and disempowering its former Hamas rulers. Significantly, Jordan has already outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, a ban that would extend to its Palestinian branch.
The Palestinians will not get all their desired land in this scenario, but they will get get all their desired land in any plausible scenario. They can comfort themselves with the knowledge that they have tried every violent, maximalist alternative, culminating in the futile massacre of October 7th, and have more than earned the right to cut their losses against a superior (and nuclear-armed) foe. Mexico is not getting California back, Germany is not getting East Prussia back, Serbia is not getting Kosovo back, and the Arabs are not getting all of Israel back.
Nor will the children of displaced Hindus be returning to Pakistan, displaced Greeks be returning to Turkey, displaced Jews be returning to the Arab world, or displaced Arabs be returning to Israel.
As recently as 2023, over 100,000 ethnic Armenians were expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh when Azerbaijan conquered the region. Yet Armenia has accepted its defeat, absorbed the refugees, and is discussing peace with Azerbaijan, which would also entail normalizing ties with Turkey.
The Palestinians, despite losing every war they have ever started, still have the chance to peacefully gain land they could never take by force of arms. Indeed, through a confederation with Jordan, they could claim more than 80 percent of the original British Mandate of Palestine, instead of just a micro-state in the West Bank and Gaza. The Tamils, Kurds, and Tibetans would thrill at the chance for sovereignty over even parts of their homelands.
Make your play, Palestine, while the world is still in love with you.
There is no ‘Palestine’ and there are no ‘Palestinians’. They are Arabs from Egypt, Jordan, Syria and other surrounding countries who came to Ottoman controlled Palestine when the returning Jews started to cultivate the land make it a success. ‘Palestinianism’ is an ideology that was created by the KGB and Arafat in 1964. Stop treating a fake people as if they are legitimate!
The Palestinians do not want a land. They just don't want Jews to have a land. It's that simple. The rest is commentary.