No one is prepared for a Palestinian state.
Not the Palestinians and their various leadership groups, not the Israelis, not the Middle East and North Africa, not the United Nations, not even the U.S. and the European Union. No one.
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Some 20 years ago, the three “Quartet Principles” for Palestinians to achieve statehood — embraced by the United States, United Nations, Russia, and European Union — were: nonviolence, recognition of the Jewish state of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements.
Now, Hamas (which rampantly espouses violence, does not recognize the Jewish state of Israel, and has zero regard for any version of international laws or conventions) is vying to join the Palestinian Authority in a new Gaza government that would presumably pave the way for a so-called two-state solution.
This report came just a few days before the news broke that the U.S. and “several Arab partners” are preparing a detailed plan for a “comprehensive peace deal” between Israel and the Palestinians, which includes a “firm timeline” for a Palestinian state.1
The proposed plan includes steps that Israel has previously refused, including the evacuation of many West Bank settlements (I am referring to the perfectly legal ones), a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, and a combined security apparatus and government for the West Bank and Gaza.
But let’s say, for argument’s sake, that Israel decides to accept all of the aforementioned. There is still one tiny, insignificant problem: No one is prepared for a Palestinian state.
Not the Palestinians and their various leadership groups, not the Israelis, not the Middle East and North Africa, not the United Nations, not even the U.S. and the European Union. No one.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas just said that the PA is prepared to fulfill its responsibilities towards the Gaza Strip “immediately upon cessation of aggression against our people. We have been and continue to be responsible for Gaza, and we will remain so.”2
This is the same Palestinian Authority that:
Was violently excommunicated from Gaza by Hamas, nearly 20 years go
Is wildly unpopular in the minds of Palestinians across both Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank, and
Has refused to use its considerable international aid to relocate more than 100,000 West Bank Palestinians from Palestinian-controlled refugee camps to residential locations, preferring to leave them confined under extremely unpleasant conditions, because Palestinian victimhood is good for the business (more hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid!) of “the Palestinian plight”
Abbas also said: “We’ve had several meetings with top U.S. officials, and they’ve assured us of their commitment to the two-state solution and supporting peace efforts based on international law.”
Yet Palestinian leaders have, for decades, been in perpetual violation of “international law.” For example — and this is just one of countless examples — Abbas’ Palestinian Authority, which is considered to be the more “moderate” governing body compared to Hamas, has legislation and allocations of monthly salaries and benefits that reward imprisoned and released terrorists, as well as the families of “Martyrs,” amounting to $300 million annually at one point.3
Abbas went on to lament the absence of an “Israeli partner” for peace, claiming that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, became a “hindrance” to the peace process.
Meanwhile, the Palestinians have turned down multiple permanent peace deals with Israel since 2000, when Abbas’ predecessor, Yasser Arafat, walked away from the Camp David Summit between Israel and the Palestinians, refused to make any counter offer, and unleashed the Second Intifada (a violent Palestinian uprising) against the Jewish state, resulting in more than a thousand Israeli deaths, at the time the most casualties since Israel’s War of Independence in 1948.
In recent years, with the 88-year-old Abbas being not just old but also a complete kleptocrat, Marwan Barghouti has emerged as “the most popular Palestinian leader alive,” renowned pollster Khalil Shikaki told The Guardian. Barghouti is especially favored by younger Palestinian generations, who perceive him as untainted by the Palestinian Authority’s corruption.
Mind you, Barghouti is currently sitting in an Israeli prison, serving five life terms for planning three terror attacks during the Second Intifada that killed five Israelis. He has recently been placed in solitary confinement, according to Israeli Channel 13, because Barghouti was using his contacts and influence to encourage the outbreak of a third intifada in the West Bank. Naturally, Barghouti is at the top of Hamas’ list of Palestinian criminals who the terror group wants Israel to release as part of a hostage deal.
Do you know who else is not prepared for a Palestinian state? The Arab world. I could not help but notice that it was the Washington Post — and not a news outlet from the Middle East or North Africa — which reported this “comprehensive peace deal.”
This is because the Americans (and perhaps the Europeans) are primarily pushing for it, while countries like Egypt, Morocco, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Bahrain remain largely quiet.
These Arab countries know one thing that it appears far-away politicians and bureaucrats in Paris, London, Berlin, and Washington, D.C. do not: They are eager for Hamas to be resoundingly defeated and eradicated from Gaza, not part of a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority, because removing Hamas from power is not just good for Israel’s national security, but for the entire region.
Yet here come the Americans, from all the way across the vast Atlantic Ocean, trying to impose their “Western conventional wisdom” on the Middle East, as if their past habitual missteps and gross incompetence in the region, spanning decades, never happened.
I am genuinely trying to understand why Biden’s administration is so overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian and acting like Palestinian statehood is painstakingly urgent, just four months after literally thousands of Palestinians invaded Israel and unleashed the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Wouldn’t this kind of be like Israel insisting the U.S. to accept an Al Qaeda-run state on one of America’s borders just a few months after 9/11?
If anything, Palestinian leaders have caused the U.S. more harm than help by refusing to make a true, lasting peace with Israel, one of America’s greatest allies who regularly contributes to a more stable Middle East. (Israel has made peace with every Arab country that has desired it.) Not to mention, the Jewish state historically and continuously makes great contributions to America’s military, defense, intelligence, technology, and academia.
And wouldn’t it make far more sense if Middle Eastern and North African countries were leading this charge, since it is in their backyard, as opposed to a country so isolated from the region?
The only plausible explanation for why the U.S. is trying to force this unilateral “peace” initiative, is to appease much-needed Arab American and Muslim American voters in the “battleground state” of Michigan, ahead of November’s U.S. presidential election. That, or President Joe Biden and his administration still have not grasped the sheer magnitude of October 7th.
Many people claim Biden has been doing what is in Israel’s best interests, but if Biden is in the short term supplying Israel with significant military equipment, while in the long term forcing down Israel’s throat a Palestinian state that would so obviously be an existential national security threat to the Jewish state, is this not a golden cage?
Most everyone in Israel — who are not so naive as others might be — knows that, at the present time, a Palestinian state is nothing short of a massive reward for the Palestinian terror attacks on October 7th, and quite possibly the single-greatest prize for attempted genocide in human history, thus encouraging extremist Palestinians (and there are many of them) to engage in more virulent terrorism against Israel.
At the same time, many folks in Israel (myself included) are not generally opposed to a Palestinian state that follows the three “Quartet Principles” — mainly nonviolence and recognition of the Jewish state — but these principles must be proven through continuous and consistent actions, over a prolonged period of time, not just via words and signatures.
Until that transpires, I cannot stress this enough: It is unbelievably delusional to expect that the Palestinians are just going to flip the switch a few short months after what many of them consider their greatest achievement against Israel — October 7th.
Just look at their historical leadership: They sided with the Turks in World War I, the Nazis in World War II, the Soviets in the Cold War, Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, the jihadists after 9/11 and, most disastrously for them, with the “anti-Zionists” in the Arab-Jewish conflict.
“The ideology, instincts, and reasoning of Palestinian leaders have always favored the wrong side, the losing side, the anti-democratic, anti-Western, anti-humane side,” wrote Douglas Feith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “This has been a problem for the Israelis, but a calamity for the Palestinians.”4
It is also incredibly ignorant to think that the Palestinians are suddenly going to accept and sustain democracy and democratic values, as if they were born just yesterday. No political movement in the Arab world during the last several hundred years has survived to become a freedom-fighting democracy in any of the region’s countries and territories.
Why? Because all Arab political movements have “military wings” (you know, terror groups) and thus terrorism has been the default method by which Arab leaders rise to and maintain power over their subordinates.
This is the reality that Israel has been facing for decades, and why there will probably never be a Palestinian state which would stay unarmed, no less nonviolent against the Jewish state. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” is not some cute, innocent rhyme like many folks think others will stupidly believe. Scores of Palestinians believe in this genocidal slogan, want it, and are willing to die for it.
So, as long as enough Palestinians are determined to murder their Jewish neighbors (or support others who do so) — then no, they do not have a right to “self-determination” or statehood or anything else that would empower their genocidal ambitions. The Palestinians have every right to govern themselves and no right to attack the sovereign State of Israel.
If they bitch and scream about “liberation” while raping teenage girls, beheading babies, mutilating bodies, and burning whole families alive (or sympathize with those who do) — then no, the Israelis are not chiefly to blame for “the Palestinian plight”; rather, the Palestinians are responsible for their own doings and their own fate, and faulting the Jews for their behaviors and actions is precisely pure antisemitism.
If the Palestinians want a state, they should be tasked with proving they deserve one over the course of many months, even years. Groups should never be awarded with statehood after massacring another people, a sick and ill-conceived logic that no one in their right mind, if they were living in the massacred country, would remotely support. Otherwise they would be a suicidal masochist, or have a grave mental illness.
It is admirable that so much of the world is prepared to help the Palestinians achieve statehood, but at the end of the day, it depends squarely on the Palestinian people and their leaders. If they energetically take the path of substantial reform, the benefits can be quick and plentiful. If Palestinians adopt democracy, dispose of belligerent kleptocracy and corruption, and firmly reject terror, they can count on American and other countries’ support.
Dr. Einat Wilf, a leftist former Israeli politician, summed it up another way:
“Dear President Biden,” she wrote on Twitter. “As you consider recognizing a Palestinian state, how about asking Palestinians (leaders, intellectuals, NGOs, people in the street in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, London) a few preliminary questions, such as:
Since the American purpose in recognizing a Palestinian state is to promote a vision of peace by means of a two state solution, do you accept that the other state — Israel — is and will remain Jewish?
Do you understand that within this recognized state you are not and cannot be considered “refugees from Palestine?”
Do you understand that this means that you do not possess a “right of return” into the sovereign territory of the state of Israel?
Dear President, if the answers to all three is not a resound yes, it would be wise to wait. Palestinians deserve the respect of being acknowledged for their determined and persistent commitment to the century-long goal of no Jewish state in any part of the land.
Sincerely, a long-term peace activist who actually wants peace and understands that you cannot force Palestinians to want something — a Palestinian state in part of the land with the other part of the land belonging to the Jewish state — that they have never wanted for themselves.”
For now, I will defer to former Israeli diplomat Danny Danon, who so aptly and succinctly put it: “We will never allow the establishment of a terrorist state in our backyard.”5
Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, was a tad more cynical, writing: “After decades of supporting a two-state solution, I finally see the truth: Palestine will be a terrorist state. The burden on you is to prove otherwise.”6
Regrettably, this must be uncomfortable for overly liberal folks who are convinced that history and precedent do not matter, or who know little of it so as to have a credible, worthwhile opinion on the Jewish-Arab saga. But should we Israelis be effectively forced to choose between making people feel superficially uncomfortable, or us being murdered in cold blood, count us in for the former.
If you think this is “right-wing Israel” talking, it is not. I have never opted for a right-wing party in Israel in the six elections that I have voted, during the last decade of living in Israel. What I am describing is simply (and unfortunately) the reality between Israel and the Palestinians, with the sample size of more than a century.
“If there was still a substantial minority among us who clung to the two-state promise against the evidence of the Second Intifada and everything that followed, that minority has shrunk considerably since October 7th,” wrote Israeli historian and author Gadi Taub.7
And if for whatever reason you are unable or unwilling to grasp this reality, like many people in Biden’s administration and others, that’s too bad. In Israel, we now know exactly what our would-be neighbors envision for us. We see that the majority of Palestinians support Hamas, view October 7th as inspiration, and its perpetrators as role models.
“A misconception that I face when I deal with international media,” said Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesman, “is they don’t understand how united Israeli society is around this war. They think perhaps it’s an element of choice.”8
“They don’t understand that we view this as existential and necessary, and we understand that there simply is no future for the State of Israel or the Jewish People in a world in which an army of terror reduces whole families to the sort of human ash we haven’t seen since Auschwitz — and get away with it,” added Levy. “They don’t understand it simply is not an option for us to simply abandon the hostages in the hands of terrorists, who we fear are starving and torturing and executing them in the terror dungeons.”
To offer statehood to the Palestinians, right now, would mean that “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” (Hamas’ term for October 7th) was stupendously successful. What happens when the new Palestinian state launches an even larger, more lethal attack?
“But there might be an upside to this,” said one Twitter user. “The upside could be that once they have a state, they have state responsibilities, and as state actors, they, too, could be asked to account for their actions at the International Court of Justice.”9
So the upside is the heavily biased-against-Israel World Court, which is run by the even more biased-against-Israel United Nations, while the downside is an even more expansive Islamic jihad fortress and launching pad to finish the genocidal job that Palestinians started on October 7th. Seems so very assuring, doesn’t it?
Of course, many Americans and others will point to the “security assurances” that the U.S. is apparently including in this “comprehensive peace deal” — but frankly, as well-intentioned as I am sure these assurances are, they are meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Presidential administrations turn over, policies change, and recency bias often prevails.
Plus, I do not think many Israelis are too comfortable with putting their eggs in the basket of a country that refused to bomb Nazi Germany’s train tracks while knowing full stop that they were being used to transport millions of Jews and others to systematic death.
As the leftist Yitzhak Rabin, the fifth Israeli prime minister, said:
“Israel has an important principle: It is only Israel that is responsible for our security.”
And, honestly, can the Americans and their “several Arab partners” really be trusted with producing a Palestinian state? Progress is never linear, and American foreign policy decision-makers have demonstrated countless times just how quickly they abandon ship or dangerously detour when the going gets tough.
Then there are the Arabs, who have historically never done what is in the best interest of the Palestinians, while using them as pawns in their own geopolitical chess games. Hence, why should we believe that everyone — the Palestinians, the Americans, and the Arabs — are promptly going to act totally opposite to how they have operated for decades?
Perhaps the Palestinians, Americans, and Arabs have not heard that being a “frier” (Hebrew for a “sucker”) is one of the most frowned-upon attributes amid Israeli society. Good luck trying to turn the Israelis into something they gushingly resent.
And what about all the United Nations organizations that funnel billions of dollars every year to the Palestinian territories in the name of so-called Palestinian refugees? Will these organizations be phased out now that Palestinians, with bonafide statehood, surely cannot claim refugee status in their own country, can they? What happens to the thousands of terrorists … I mean staff members … they employ in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian West Bank, and East Jerusalem?
And, how will the Palestinians — who have for decades heavily relied on billions in financial aid to support their social services, so their leaders can get filthy rich and spend more money on terrorism — suddenly build an economy that can sustain adequate social services? Or will the Palestinians forever be the double-standard darlings of the UN, even after they have their own (terrorist) state?
And do not even get me started about the 27-nation European Union, the world’s largest provider of financial aid to the Palestinians. All while the EU is either profoundly incompetent or does not care to perform ample due diligence or oversight about how this money is being spent.
In their own commission, the EU just admitted that a total of 8 million euros ($8.75 million) may have been used to incite hate speech and glorify terrorism. (For those less gullible in the crowd, we can only imagine how much more EU financial aid has been funneled to Palestinian terrorists.) And two years ago, Israel provided the EU with intelligence that six prominent Palestinian NGOs were being used as cover for funding terrorism.
Finally, it should be noted that the timing of an announcement by the U.S. and several Arab partners for this “comprehensive peace deal” is largely dependent on Israel and Hamas being willing to reach a hostage deal and pause the fighting in Gaza.
In practical terms, this means that the U.S could very well be prolonging the conflict and endangering the remaining hostages by essentially disincentivizing Israel to agree to a break in the war.
Why? Because, if a pause in the fighting is just going to lead to this “comprehensive peace deal” — which at the moment would be disastrous for Israel and is thus very unpopular amongst Israelis — why in the hell would Israel agree to a pause in the fighting? The same way that Biden does not want to commit political suicide in Michigan, I am sure that Netanyahu is not so foolish to do the same. I doubt that you or I would act differently.
As for the Palestinians, if one is so driven to quench their inordinate sympathy for one of the many stateless peoples of the world, perhaps they can start with the Kurds, the Catalans, the Basques, the Rohingya, the Baluchis, or any of one of dozens of subnational groups — none of whom appear likely to achieve their goals of statehood anytime soon.
“After all, it took nearly 2,000 years for the Jews to succeed in refounding their state,” wrote Gadi Taub. “If the Palestinians are determined to kill us on the road to replacing us, then presumably they can wait, too.”
“U.S., Arab nations plan for postwar Gaza, timeline for Palestinian state.” The Washington Post.
Asharq al-Awsat (Saudi newspaper)
“Incentivizing Terrorism: Palestinian Authority Allocations to Terrorists and their Families.” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
“Horrific war may produce better Palestinian leadership.” JNS.
Danny Danon on X
Mark Dubowitz on X
“Sorry, but There Is No Two-State Solution.” Tablet.
Eylon Levy on Instagram
Jenni Frazer on X
Liars will nod and say ok, we accept your terms, then pick up where they left off. I say believe their actions not their ability to play the game of politics. When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. Do not give them the benefit of the doubt. There is nothing to doubt. It is all clear as daylight. Israel is surrounded by bloodthirsty hounds, sharks, hyenas, vultures all just hungry and conscienceless. Treat them as such. They don't see the humanity in Israel, and provoke hatred all over the world. It's time for a clean break from this on-going toxic relationship.
Kol hakavod. You have addressed all of the salient points in your analysis.