No to ‘Palestine’
The recognition of a Palestinian state anytime soon would only reward terrorists.
There have been a whole mess of no good, very bad, absolutely awful ideas vis a vis the Israel-Hamas conflict tossed around the media and the internet since October 7 of last year. We’ve had serious arguments that Israel was responsible for the deaths of Jewish civilians on that horrific day, that the whole attack was a false flag meant to gin up antagonism towards Palestinians, that the well-documented atrocities against civilians – including mass rape – did not occur, and that there were no hostages taken into Gaza. On top of these egregious contentions, there has been widespread blame ascribed to Israel for purported war crimes, including destruction of civilian property (used, of course, as Hamas military camouflage), disruption of food and other necessities (basic screening of humanitarian aid that has historically been used to smuggle weapons to Hamas), ethnic cleansing (relocation of civilians outside of combat zones), and even genocide. The last allegation was leveled by South Africa at the International Court of Justice, making it all the more official-sounding, despite its complete fabrication. But these are complete bupkis compared to the new proposals coming out of major Western nations.
Over the past few days, both the British and American governments – ostensibly Israel’s allies – have floated trial balloons for the recognition of a Palestinian state in the immediate aftermath of the current Hamas-Israel war. David Cameron, former British Prime Minister and current Foreign Secretary (somehow a man who is bad at both jobs), has asserted that the UK may just decide to recognize a Palestinian state at the United Nations, so as to make the statehood process “irreversible.” He argues that “most important of all, is to give the Palestinian people a political horizon so that they can see that there is going to be irreversible progress to a two-state solution and crucially the establishment of a Palestinian state.” This would include recognizing Palestine as a state before negotiations commence, rather than doing so as a part of a final negotiated settlement.
The Biden administration has put the idea of near-term Palestinian statehood in the ether as well, hoping for it as a part of a broader Saudi-Israel normalization deal. The Palestinian issue was not part of any prior Israeli-Saudi negotiations, but the Biden team has forced the issue after the attacks of October 7. According to a senior White House official, “some inside the Biden administration believe that unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state should be the first step in talks to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict instead of the last,” dovetailing with the view embraced by Cameron. Of course, this information was promoted in the press by the White House’s chief useful idiot, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. The so-called “Biden doctrine” for the Middle East is replete with pie-in-the-sky idealism – famously something that works so well in the region – and assumptions about Palestinian and Iranian behavior that fly in the face of reality.
But we’re going to focus for now on the push for Palestinian statehood as part of the cliché “two-state solution,” which was, is, and should remain a dead letter. Here’s why.
The idea of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict has roots at the very genesis of the nation of Israel. In the UN’s 1947 partition plan, there was land allotted for both a Jewish and an Arab state in the territory of former British Mandate Palestine. Israeli leaders happily accepted this split, but Palestinian Arabs sought to evict the Jews entirely from the land and claim it for themselves. To do so, they began a massive war, aided by dozens of Arab and Muslim nations in the region, to destroy the nascent state of Israel. As we all know, that was but the first failed attempt at the extirpation of the Jewish state. It was also the first in a long series of examples of Palestinian rejectionism and expansive claims on the whole of the territory of Israel. I have written extensively about this rejectionism before. To sum it up, Palestinian leaders have been offered a nation-state comprising the vast majority of Gaza and the West Bank several times, but have declined every single offer. Oftentimes, the rejection is accompanied by a campaign of terrorism, as was the case in 2000 with the Second Intifada.
For a two-state solution to work, both parties need to be willing to accept it. Clearly, Palestinian leaders do not truly desire a state, or they would already have one. But now, after the terror atrocities of October 7, the Israeli public does not desire a Palestinian state either. Each and every time a two-state solution was on the table, Israel agreed. That will no longer be the case. The events of last October dramatically altered Israeli public sentiment towards the idea of a Palestinian state. In 2012, Gallup found that more than 60% of Israelis favored a two-state solution, as opposed to 30% who did not support it. Now, those numbers have flipped entirely. In a 2023 poll taken after the Hamas attacks, a full 65% of the Israeli public opposes a Palestinian state, while a mere 25% support the idea. Many progressives and liberals here in the West blame one man, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, for the unwillingness of Israel to “make peace” with the Palestinians. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. The peacenik left in Israel is finished for multiple generations; the political contest between Netanyahu’s Likud and its opposition is about who will be tougher on this question, not who will be softer.
Polls are not only useful in understanding Israeli sentiment, but also the feelings of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. And boy, are those polls pretty stunning. According to data from late 2023, the vast majority of Palestinians support Hamas and the barbaric actions of October 7. In the West Bank, a staggering 81% of respondents agreed with the Hamas attacks, while even 57% of Gazans – despite their bearing the brunt of the Israeli response due to Hamas cowardice – responded positively to the events of 10/7. Even more absurdly, only 10% of Palestinians polled believed that Hamas committed war crimes during its massacre, which is totally at odds with the reality of Hamas gunmen recording and publicizing their brutal actions. The polls showed that the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas – the supposed technocratic governing institution that the US would trust with running a Palestinian state – was deeply unpopular, with 88% of Palestinians pushing for Abbas’s resignation and 60% saying the PA should be dissolved entirely. Hamas, on the other hand, has gained significant popularity since October, rising to near-majority overall approval in both Palestinian enclaves. Good luck building a peaceful, demilitarized state with a population in thrall to a terrorist death cult!
In fact, we don’t even need polling to understand how disastrous a Palestinian state would be for Israeli, regional, and global security. We have a real-life example of a self-governing Palestinian territory: Gaza. In 2005, Israel withdrew entirely from the Strip, leaving not a single Jew behind. They did, however, leave behind millions of dollars’ worth of civilian infrastructure – which was promptly destroyed in an orgy of riotous celebration by Gazan civilians. This was a sign of things to come. Elections were held the next year and they were won by Hamas, who proceeded to torture and murder its Fatah (the PA’s ruling party) rivals. Since 2006, Hamas has ruled Gaza with an iron fist, cracking down on dissent, stealing billions of dollars in international aid to enrich its leaders, committing mass acts of terrorism, and redirecting monies to the procurement of weaponry and the creation of military infrastructure. There have been several wars of varying intensity, all sparked by Hamas aggression and supported by the Gazan population. The apotheosis of Hamas rule came on October 7, when they used years’ worth of international aid and political power to murder, maim, torture, and kidnap thousands of innocent Israeli civilians. If you believe that the Gazan experience wouldn’t be the case for a Palestinian state, you might be interested in a bridge I have for sale in Brooklyn.
Besides those obvious problems, we need to touch on a couple of other issues with the so-called Biden doctrine on Israel/Palestine.
First, I certainly recall the liberal freakout about unilateral American action interfering with incredibly complex issues of Israeli/Palestinian negotiation back in 2017, when former President Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. According to a representative CNN article from the time, “a unilateral decision would break with international consensus and prejudge an issue that was supposed to be left to negotiations.” Recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was essentially a pro-forma move given the fact that the city hosts the nation’s government bodies and was always going to be Israel’s capital after any two-state negotiations. Yet this was treated as though it was the breaking of a sacrosanct seal, ultimately dooming any two-state solution. In reality, it did nothing of the sort and became an afterthought even amongst Palestinian activists within a year. Unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian state would be far more damaging to any negotiated solution, as it quite literally gives the game away. But the Biden administration and the UK government both seem to think it’s really no big deal.
What is most definitely a big deal is the fact that promoting the idea of a Palestinian state in the direct aftermath of a terror war against Israeli civilians proves Hamas’s case. They argue that only armed resistance and terrorism will achieve Palestinian statehood – at the expense of Israelis, naturally. Their 1988 charter calls for the annihilation of the Jews and the completion of the Holocaust (which, oddly enough, they also deny). They take every possible opportunity to bring this despicable ideal into the real world, as we saw last year. And now the White House and Downing Street want to reward them for it. The perverse incentives created here would redound to our disadvantage across the world. Anti-Western terrorists would ramp up their violence in order to influence governments to give in to their malign aims. It has been an epic disaster to pay off the Iranians for their belligerence and antagonism – just look at the actions of their proxies in the past months, from Yemen and Gaza to Iraq and Syria, for the proof of that contention. Giving Hamas a state would be worse by an order of magnitude and would endanger Israel’s very existence. If the British and Americans seek to de-escalate regional conflict, this is perhaps the worst possible thing they could do. So, of course, they look primed to do just that.
Thankfully, the US/UK plan is dead on arrival in the region for at least a generation. And rightfully so. It is clear as day that Palestinians don’t want to create a state; they seek instead to destroy one. There’s a reason that “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is their slogan. They will never be satisfied with anything but total control of all of former Mandate Palestine and the ability to cleanse the region entirely of Jews. This is clear from public polling, history, Palestinian rhetoric, and the actions of their leaders. There is no appetite for a two-state solution: Palestinians have never wanted one and, after October 7, Israelis will not accept one.
The only people who still believe in this fantasy are the braindead morons who run American and British foreign policy. The stated policy of those two nations has long been to never negotiate with terrorists. The men in charge of policy in London and Washington seem to be following the letter of that law, but surely not its spirit. They aren’t negotiating with the terrorists who run Palestinian affairs, they’re simply granting their most fervent wish, free of charge. And Hamas couldn’t be happier. Which is exactly why Palestinian statehood should be resolutely opposed.