Western leaders are exacerbating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Only a fundamentally unserious person could consider the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a serious policy.
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This is an essay written by Joshua Hoffman and Nachum Kaplan of Moral Clarity.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Most Western countries’ policies on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have as much substance as the emperor’s new clothes in Hans Christian Anderson’s famous folktale — which is none.
Country after country, and even the corrupt and ineffectual United Nations, has declared their support for the so-called “two-state solution” as though this was a real policy.
It is not.
It is what leaders talk about when they have no idea what they are talking about.
A proposal that has no chance of succeeding is not a policy; it is a fantasy. It is like me calling my dream of winning the 100-meter sprint at the Olympic Games a policy. It is not going to happen no matter how committed I am to it.
Only a fundamentally unserious person could consider the two-state solution a policy. Here is why:
It is based on ego.
International mediation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is driven by ego-inflated diplomats and statesmen who have an irrational, unexplainable, irresistible obsession with solving the conflict.
This is part of a larger Western drawback in which, rather than listening to others and being open-minded about different perspectives and approaches, the West and its institutions are always in “Mr. Fix It” mode — a mode that imposes Western thought and practice on non-Western parts of the world, as well as a mode manifested by exceptionalism, by ego.
One American academic, Alan Richards, said it more aptly: The West is largely comprised of “Puritan Engineers” who believe all problems have solutions, the past and history do not matter, and “our new technology, and our organizational prowess, will always find a solution.”1
To add insult to injury, Western leaders often rush to quick-fix solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, instead of signaling to the Palestinians that Western leaders are interested in and planning to hold Palestinian kleptocrats accountable (one of the key reasons why the Palestinians do not have their own state).
As it stands, Western leaders continue to overlook these uglier aspects of Palestinian society, thus enabling even more Palestinian corruption (as if there was not already enough).
It is based on a flawed premise.
The premise that Jews and Arab Palestinians want their own states is incorrect. The Jews want (and have) a state, but the Palestinians do not want one, which is why they always reject offers of one.
Instead, they want the Jews not to have one and for Israel not to exist. The Palestinians do not want self-determination; they just want to deny it to Jews. Granting Palestinians a state will in no way change or ease the dispute’s fundamentals.
It is based on giving legitimacy to illegitimate things.
Just this week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared, as he has been pining to desperately get Israel and Hamas to agree to a ceasefire: “… what I would say to Hamas and to its leadership is if it genuinely cares about the Palestinian people that it purports to somehow represent, then it will say yes to this agreement, and it will work on clear understandings about how to implement it. Because the single, quickest, best, most effective way to relieve the terrible suffering of the Palestinians that was instigated by Hamas’ attack on October 7th and the war that ensued is to complete this agreement.”
No, you bozo, Hamas does not “genuinely care about the Palestinian people.” An 11-year-old could have told you that. Why are you talking to a genocidal, death-cult terrorist organization like it is some legitimate entity that can be negotiated and compromised with?
Even the notion of a Palestinian state is illegitimate. All premises for “Palestine” are based on some combination of revisionist history, half-truths, distortions, and outright lies. If you give the Palestinians a state based on pure and utter propaganda, there will be tons of unemployed Hollywood writers lining up to concoct more falsified narratives about other groups of people.
The only reason that the world even entertains the Palestinians is not because of who they are, but because of who their self-professed enemy is: the Jews.
I remember a time not long ago when Syrians, Yazidis, and Kurds were actually experiencing a genocide, and Yemeni children were seriously starving. However, I do not remember mob-led demonstrations, obnoxious dissent in the U.S. and European governments, child-like commotion in the United Nations, and fears of effects on elections.
And there are plenty of other groups which are far more deserving of their own state, such as the Kurds, the Catalans, the Basques, the Rohingya, and the Baluchis. Yet we do not hear a peep about them in the media and on social media because, again, their self-professed enemy is not the Jews.
It gives neither side what they want.
Most Israelis and Palestinians do not want a two-state solution.
The Israelis are fine with their single Jewish state (Israel), 20 percent of which includes Arab citizens and residents, whereas the Palestinians want a state in place of Israel without any Jews, much like most of the Middle East.
It is peculiar that the world thinks the solution is something that neither side wants.
It will not achieve peace.
Even if two states were agreed, it would not bring peace. At best, Palestinian factions such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which are opposed to long-term, sustainable peace on any terms, would continue terror campaigns against Israel.
At worst, the entire Palestinian state would become a full-blown terror state, with the proof of concept being present-day Gaza. Civil war between rival factions wanting to rule a Palestinian state is probable, if not inevitable.
Or, as Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of one of Hamas’ founders, put it:
“There is no ‘Palestinians.’ There are tribes — the tribe of Hamas, the tribe of Islamic Jihad, the tribe of Khalil, the tribe of Nablus — and each one has different interests. And all of them are conflicted. If they did not have Israel as the common enemy, they would kill each other. This is the reality of what is so-called ‘Palestine.’”2
A Palestinian state would not be economically viable.
Ever since the United Nation’s 1947 partition plan that prescribed two states in British-era Palestine — one for the Jews and one for the Palestinians — which the Palestinian Arabs rejected in favor of endless war and terror, it has been known that Israel and a Palestinian state would need to be economically intertwined.
Even under the 1990s Oslo Accords peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, Jerusalem was to collect import taxes and duties for the Palestinian Authority, as well as income taxes on Palestinians working in Israel, and many other economic integration measures.
Two states would require such a high degree of interdependence that it makes the whole idea pointless. Bureaucrats would be the only beneficiaries.
It has failed as an approach for nearly a century.
Why so many governments persist with an approach that has failed for almost a century is as mysterious as quantum mechanics. The Palestinians rejected two-state solutions in 1937 (the Peel Commission), in 1947 (the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine), in 1967 (the end of the Six-Day War), in 1993 and 1995 (the Oslo Accords), in 2000 (the Camp David Summit), in 2005 (Israel’s unilateral pullout from Gaza), and in 2008 (under then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert) — and this is just off the top my head.
Why, given that it is not a real policy, do countries continue to insist the two-state solution is?
It is because it serves many governments and politicians’ self-serving political goals.
For example, the two state-solution enables leaders to sound reasonable. What can be fairer than dividing the land? This denudes the dispute of its enormous complexity, allowing politicians to turn it into sound bites and talking points. It enables leaders to repeat the same thing over and over like it is some sort of anxiety-coping mechanism.
As a career journalist and media strategist for some of the world’s biggest companies, I can tell you that having “talking points” for leaders to return to whenever they can is a cornerstone technique. Banging on about two states, self-determination, and Palestinian dignity are easy messages.
Messages are not solutions, though. They are just noise to serve the speaker, not solve the problem.
The two state-solution is also a risk-free position, keeping in mind that politicians fear two things: facts and risk. Supporting two states puts a leader in sync with most other countries, so it requires no courage. It will not make a leader a pariah. It is the fraidy cat’s position.
What is more, the two state-solution does not require any work. Developing a new framework for Israelis and Palestinians to live together peacefully is astonishingly difficult. It will require years of hard and new thinking. It is much easier to pretend that it is not necessary and just repeat the hollow two-state mantra.
The two-state solution also allows for easy virtue signaling. Left-leaning governments, in particular, need only criticize Israel and call for a two-state solution to have “Woke” clowns, Marxists, and their sicko Islamist friends singing their praises. Such attention is irresistible for many leaders who were ignored as kids because they came 25th in a class of 28 at school.
Western leaders also stick to the two-state non-policy because they think that the only alternatives are two states or continuous war. This is untrue and unimaginative. There are all kinds of single state and confederate models, of varying merit, and no doubt many more that have not yet been conceived.
It is depressing that for all the diplomatic outrage and misleading headlines produced, the international community has no real policy on how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. It is fugazi.
The first step on the long path to new and clear thinking about the dispute is to admit that the emperor has no clothes, no less that the emperor does not even have a beach body.
“American Thinking About Violence in the Middle East.” UC Santa Cruz: Center for Global, International and Regional Studies.
“Dr. Phil Primetime.” Merit Street Media.
You mean "exacerbating", not "exasperating".
The solution is simple. Everyone else just get the hell out of the way and let Israel handle its own business.