The Case Against a Two-State Solution

Western leaders are obsessed with a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They sound like people who have never heard the arguments against it.

The Pope meets with representatives of Israeli families whose relatives were kidnapped on October 7th. (photo: Israel/X)

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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of Moral Clarity.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

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In a craven surrender to the jihadist thugs who have taken over their cities, some Western countries are planning to reward the unspeakable terrorism of October 7th.

France and Spain are going to recognize a Palestinian state unilaterally. The U.K. is considering it. This betrayal of Israel to pander to antisemitic voters, including by U.S. Democrats, reveals a deep moral stunting.

Moreover, it is nonsense and lunacy to think that this will bring peace.

Middle Eastern politics is played by its own set of rules, which the West does not understand. The cardinal one is strength equals respect. Showing weakness is a terrible idea in a region where despots run, militias have overrun, and religious and tribal allegiances trump all.

In the Middle East, those too weak to defend their land lose it. Syria wanted Lebanon and only gave up its claim in 2008. It has lost the Golan Heights to Israel and is now ravaged by civil war.

Lebanon itself has lost much of its sovereignty to Iran-backed Hezbollah, while Yemen has lost half its territory to the Iran-backed Houthis militia. Jordan and Egypt wanted to carve up Israel and lost control of the West Bank and Gaza. Iraq has become a client state of Iran.

Surrendering land in a region of tyrants and clerical madmen displays weakness — that you are ripe for the taking. A shrinking Israel is a weaker Israel. Islamists see a two-state solution as a stepping stone to destroying Israel, bit by bit.

Shamefully, the West is trying to appease jihadism. It is extraordinary that even after the Second World War, they do not understand that appeasement is folly.

The West, although in secular decline, cannot shake its colonial habits. They should recall that unilateral boundary drawing at the end of the colonial era is what caused many of the Middle East’s problems today. They did not understand the region back then, either.

Patronizingly, they refuse to listen to Palestinians and Israelis, most of whom do not want a two-state solution. Polling from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research shows that 64 percent of Palestinians do not support a two-state solution, while a Pew Research Center survey shows that only 35 percent of Israelis think it can work peacefully.

Western leaders misunderstand the conflict. They think the Palestinians want self-determination, Israel wants security, and that two states are the obvious answer.

Wrong!

As support for Hamas demonstrates, Islamism dominates Palestinian political discourse. This is why the Palestinians have been rejecting a two-state solution since the 1937 Peel Commission. They want to destroy Israel, kill all the Jews, bring down the West, and build a Caliphate.

Israel has been warning for years that Hamas is an ISIS-like group, but the West cannot grasp it. A Palestinian state will not change the jihadists’ goals; it will only bring them closer to achieving them.

Modern Western political thought has no framework to understand Islamism fully. This is why Iran runs diplomatic rings around the West and has succeeded in getting France, Britain, Spain, and others to do its foreign policy bidding.

Likewise, the West fails to grasp that Israel is fighting an existential war. The West’s recent wars — mainly failed ones in the Middle East — have been fought overseas with no threat to their large and defensible homelands, let alone their existence.

Jews are a post-Holocaust people; they know that when people say they want to exterminate Jews, they mean it. Israel wants more than security. It wants to keep existing.

Islamists are already boasting about how the October 7th attacks have removed Israel’s veil of invincibility. They play a long game. They think Israel cannot win wars forever, and the West lacks the spine to keep supporting the region’s only democracy.

Jihadists have broken the West’s resolve.

The corrupt Palestinian Authority is hardly better than Hamas. Its new cabinet, which the U.S. is marketing as “revitalized,” has two members who are documented racist supporters of terror.¹

They have called Jews “apes and pigs” and speak of resisting “75 years of occupation,” — meaning Israel’s existence is the occupation. If Western leaders are supporting such people, then the moral rot has set in deeply. It might be time to panic.

Israel’s enemy is a crazed Islamist death cult that does not want peace, or to defeat Israel in war, or to establish a state. It wants to annihilate Israel, and then move on to the West. What could possibly go wrong giving such people the apparatus of a state right beside their blood enemy?

As such, Western leaders should ask the following:

• Does it make sense for Israelis to give up their land to people who want to murder them?

• Is it sensible for Israel to trade land for peace when doing so has failed for 76 years? (On every occasion Israel has given up its land — in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), Gaza, and Lebanon — more terror has been the result.)

• Is it wise for Israel to bring its enemies closer?

• Would Israel be safer if it had fewer settlements?

• Is it smart for Israel to give up the high land of Judea and Samaria that gives the country vital strategic depth, making it more defensible?

• Is it wise (or even sane) to grant statehood to a radicalized population and expect a thriving, stable democracy to emerge?

• Does the Arab world need another corrupt (and maybe theocratic) dictatorship?

• Would anything stop a Palestinian state from becoming a terror state even bigger than Gaza?

• Does the world want another Islamist terror state?

The answer to all these questions is “no” — and it is delusional to think otherwise. Amid surging antisemitism, the West’s waning support for Israel is a stark reminder of why Israel needs to exist, and why its nuclear deterrent remains essential.

With each new attempt to weaken Israel — reputationally, diplomatically, financially, or militarily — the case for “Greater Israel” strengthens, and the Jewish state’s far-Right strengthens with it.

If the world recognized a Palestinian state tomorrow, nothing would change. The Palestinians will continue their jihadist terror attacks, and Israel will keep fighting back and defending itself. Diplomatic positions will change, but nothing on the ground will. This shows what pathetic grandstanding it is. If peace could be imposed, it would have been done decades ago.

Only a Palestinian cultural change and a willingness to live with Jews can make peace possible, and only direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians can produce a political resolution.

The world must take Israel’s security concerns — and reality — more seriously.

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1. “Two ministers in new Palestinian cabinet have made statements supporting terrorism.” The Times of Israel.