The Inevitable Palestinian Terror State
The West has convinced itself, against all evidence, that the Palestinians are fighting for their own state — and that creating one will bring peace. Spoiler: It won't.
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The recent Group of Seven (G7) meeting of major democratic powers shows the international community remains misguided with its fetish for a so-called “two-state solution” to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
While the G7 issued quite a balanced communique, the group’s reiteration of its commitment to a two-state solution shows Western powers still have not disabused themselves of this awful idea.
Most Israelis oppose it because they know a Palestinian state would be an Iranian client terror state. Most Palestinians oppose it because they want the Jewish state gone.
The West has convinced itself, against all evidence, that the Palestinians are fighting for their own state — and that creating one will bring peace.
Two myths drive this belief.
One is that there is a great divide between “ordinary” Palestinians and Hamas. The other is that the Palestinian Authority is a viable governing body.
New polling shows how absurdly wrong this is. A poll from the respected Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research shows 75 percent of all Palestinians, and 64 percent of those living in Gaza, say they are satisfied with Hamas’ performance during the war, a war that Hamas ignited and that has brought horrible death and destruction to that coastal enclave and its people.1
Only 32 percent of Palestinians support a two-state solution, with a whopping 63 percent supporting “armed intifada.” When asked about how to break the diplomatic stalemate, 22 percent supported abandoning the two-state solution for a one-state solution, while 54 percent of the respondents said the “best means of achieving Palestinian goals in ending the occupation and building an independent state” was through “armed struggle,” with only 25 percent opting for negotiations.
Asked about their level of satisfaction with various regional players, 80 percent said they were satisfied with the Yemen-based Houthis’ performance during the war, while 57 percent said they were satisfied with Hezbollah (two other Iranian terror tentacles).
These poll results show what Israel has been saying for years: that the Jihadist Hamas enjoys widespread support from a radicalized Palestinian body politic.
This is unsurprising. While it is Iran-backed and an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas is a Palestinian organization. It has had 18 years — exactly how long it takes a child to grow up — to indoctrinate a generation of children in Gaza in its twisted Islamist ideology.
The West’s belief that the Palestinian Authority is a viable alternative to govern a Palestinian state is likewise wrong. Some 90 percent of Palestinians want its corrupt 88-year-old leader Mahmoud Abbas to resign.
Why? At least in part because leaked records from a Panamanian law firm showed that he and his two sons went on to use power and influence to control the two major Palestinian economic boards and built a West Bank economic empire worth more than $300 million.
All this while the Palestinian Authority refuses to use its considerable international aid to relocate more than 100,000 Palestinians from Palestinian-controlled refugee camps to residential locations in the territories, preferring to leave them confined under extremely unpleasant conditions.
Of course, the Palestinian Authority is an incarnation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which murdered thousands of civilians and brought terror to Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan.
After the Arab defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War against Israel, PLO guerrillas relocated to Jordan. By 1970, they began calling to overthrow Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy, leading to violent clashes in June of that year.
The following year, the PLO was forced to relocate to Lebanon. There, they became involved in the Lebanese Civil War. In 1976, the Palestinians tried to overthrow the Lebanese government using the same barbaric tactics that Palestinians used on October 7th. At one event in Damour, a Maronite Christian town south of Beirut, they butchered hundreds of Lebanese civilians, raped women, and shot babies in the head from close range.
The Lebanese Christians fought back and thousands of Palestinians left for the Gulf states, including Kuwait. There the Palestinians, who had been treated extraordinarily well, inexplicably supported Iraq’s 1990 invasion into Kuwait, so the Kuwaitis kicked out hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
As the PLO became the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s, it began sponsoring and incentivizing anti-Israel terror by paying stipends to terrorists and their families based on how many Jews they kill. The worse the attack, the more cash they dole out.
Western governments enable this with incessant funding — a proverbial check of the “humanitarian” box to show their local populaces that they care about “the Palestinians” — which only breeds more Jihadism and terrorism.
It is fantastical to think anything other than a terror state is going to emerge given that the Palestinian Authority has rejected multiple peace offers — in 2000, 2008, 2015, and 2016 — since walking away from the 1993 Oslo “peace accords” that created this kleptocratic organization.
It is bewildering how the West can think that creating a state, run by an organization which keeps rejecting peace, is going to bring peace. Like Hamas, the Palestinian Authority wants to annihilate Israel. This will remain its aim whether or not a Palestinian state exists.
The Palestinian Authority and Hamas have not yet reconciled since Hamas drove the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza in 2007 in a civil war that involved throwing Palestinian Authority officials off buildings and dragging their bodies through the streets.
Hamas knows it enjoys significant popular support, so it will not accept an imposed Palestinian Authority-run Palestinian state. A bigger civil war would be inevitable, including in Judea and Samaria.
The West’s belief that the Palestinian Authority is more moderate than Hamas does not withstand scrutiny either. This is like trying to convince people to do ecstasy instead of oxycodone because the former is slightly less addictive.
Like Hamas, the Palestinian Authority indoctrinates children to hate and commit violence towards Jews in the name of Islamic martyrdom. It is insane to think such people should run a state — unless you want another iteration of the Islamic Republic of Iran, one of the most repressive regimes on this planet.
Over in Lebanon, we are already witnessing what a Palestinian state would look like. Their terrorist friends Hezbollah have effectively hijacked that country, using Lebanon’s international airport in Beirut to store large quantities of Iranian weapons.2
After Israel has been making similar claims for years, Lebanese airport workers described the control of Hezbollah operatives there — and how Iranian missiles and weapons arrive there on flights and are stored there despite the real danger to civilians traveling through the airport. If you care about civilians, you should care about this as well.
Let’s recall the August 2020 mega-blast in Beirut from a large amount of ammonium nitrate stored at the Port of Beirut exploded, causing at least 218 deaths, 7,000 injuries, and leaving an estimated 300,000 people homeless.
Following the explosion, there were suspicions regarding Hezbollah’s involvement due to allegations that the explosion occurred at a site storing Hezbollah’s weapons. Hezbollah denied these allegations but has been actively involved in demonstrations against the investigation into the explosion.
And yet the West is desperate to give the Iranians’ other terror tentacle — the Palestinians — a state because “Western conventional wisdom” blinds them from these Islamist realities of the Middle East.
Whether we want to admit it or not, Israeli far-Right-wingers’ forecasts about Gaza were spot on. Protesting Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and the dismantling of Jewish settlements there in 2006, they predicted Jihadists would take over within a year. Actually, they were half-right — because it only took six months. There is no reason to think anything would play out differently in a so-called Palestinian state.
The further idea that such a state should be along the “1967 borders” is also deeply flawed. The Egyptians and Jordanians had 1967 borders — Gaza was under Egypt’s reign and the West Bank and East Jerusalem under that of Jordan between 1948 and the 1967 Six-Day War — but they refused to accept them, started the aforementioned war, and lost. Then they said they wanted these borders back, refused every time Israel offered them, and responded with more wars.
Now, after the heinous October 7th pogrom, they say they want those borders after all. This is literally the entire story of the so-called “Palestinians” — a people who refuse everything that is in their benefit because “F*ck the Jews,” and who choose antisemitic terrorism instead, get killed for it, and then cry about their missteps to gullible, history-illiterate Westerners, claiming that the bulldog bit them after the owner said that the dog tends to bite if you smack it.
Enough already.
The two-state conception is a fairy-tale figment of some distorted imagination that no one wants. The international community’s insistence that it is the solution shows how moribund thinking about the conflict has become. Israel is right to stubbornly reject it, continue destroying Hamas’ military and governing apparatus in Gaza, and explore viable replacements not named the Palestinian Authority.
Why? Because the reality is simple (yet difficult to digest for folks overly obsessed with peace): There is no negotiating with the genocidal terrorist organization Hamas, and there is no relying on the Palestinian Authority to do anything of meaning or value for the Palestinians.
And here we were told that Israel is primarily the impediment to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Palestinian poll shows Hamas widely supported in Gaza, West Bank - analysis.” The Jerusalem Post.
“Beirut airport bosses deny it is being used to store Hezbollah weapons.” The Telegraph.
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Finally, at Torah Study at our Reconstructionist Synagogue in Pacific Palisades, our Rabbi started ranting about our country’s problems brought on by the Progressives on the far left! There have been no discussions for 8 months! What has been happening here? I sent her many articles and pod casts. I will say she is very consumed with the large congregation. Everyone is very worried as they continue to read The NY Times and listen to NPR. I tried to say something about the media here being biased 8 months ago. No one picked up on it. I tried to talk about the changes in curriculum in the last 30 years (I was a curriculum developer before that time) no one picked up on it. People have their heads in the sand or just don’t care. How anyone could want another state filled with terrorists is beyond me. Thank you for continuing to make us smarter, don’t give up.
Again, your joint analysis is right on the mark. It seems that the leaders of global community are handicapped by a severe case of uncurable, cognitive dissonance. The facts on the ground don't matter. Only short term, self-serving political expediency, appeasement, ignorance and topped off with a good dose of anti-Semitism.