Why a Palestinian State Cannot Happen

Abbas '2 state solution' video address to the UN last week (BBC)

Listening to an interview of Emmanuel Macron last week about his rationale for recognizing a Palestinian state and his plan for going forward, one could hardly disagree with what he proposed.

If I understand correctly, Macron believes that all the hostages must first be released; that Hamas must give up any control in Gaza and any further aspirations of doing so; that a consortium of Arab states will govern Gaza; and that a multinational security force — comprised of personnel subject to Israeli approval — will act as a buffer between Gaza and Israel – providing security for both sides. Only then, he argues, can a Palestinian state become a reality.

He believes that the Palestinian people have a right to self-determination and that once they are given full sovereignty over a country of their own, we will finally have the long-sought after peace in the region that has been so elusive over the 77 years since Israel declared statehood.

As if on cue, PA President Mahmoud Abbas addressed the UN with a similar, if not identical, plan. Even President Trump came out with a plan that, although not immediately recognizing a Palestinian state, did not rule one out eventually; he did, however, rule out Israeli annexation of Judea and Samaria.

There are a few more details I didn’t mention, some discrepancies between the various plans, and some details I may not have stated exactly. What is relevant is the commonality between them: they all seem to require the release of the hostages and the complete elimination of Hamas or any other jihadist group as prerequisites for lasting peace and security for Palestinians and Israelis.

Who in their right mind wouldn’t agree to such a plan? Who would not want to see ‘peace in our time’ in the Middle East. A region finally free of terrorism and bloodshed, a region where each people can focus on building up its own nation in peace and security?

Predictably, Prime Minister Netanyahu rejected one of the key components of these plans: the creation of a Palestinian state. As did the vast majority (about 90%) of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.

How, one may ask, could anybody not be willing to allow a peace-loving Palestinian people to have their own state if it would mean the ultimate peace and security that the Jewish people have longed for?

Sadly, the answer is all too easy to understand for anyone with the slightest bit of knowledge about the history of the 2 peoples in the region. And nobody spelled it out better than Jonathan Tobin did last week when describing the president’s plan. It is sad that even people of good will do not understand this: Tobin’s detailed comments – which follow - explain why the creation of a Palestinian state, under current conditions, would be folly:

The problem is that the basic premise of this plan is all wrong.

It is rooted in the idea that foreign funding, along with the creation of a Palestinian Arab governing body and security force committed to peace, will tap into a broad constituency for coexistence and pivot away from terrorism in Gaza, as well as in Judea and Samaria. The assumption is that Hamas and other extreme Islamist groups remain obstacles to the implementation of the will for rationality on the part of the people they purport to represent.

There is no evidence that this is true. On the contrary, everything that has happened in the conflict since the 1993 Oslo Accords that created the Palestinian Authority teaches that the political and even social culture of the Palestinians is fundamentally opposed to the idea of coexistence, two states or any sort of peace other than one built on the destruction of Israel and the genocide of the Jews.

P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas may have mildly censured the Oct. 7 atrocities as “actions that don’t represent the Palestinian people” in his U.N. rant delivered remotely from Ramallah (the Trump administration rightly denied him entry to the United States). Still, in the past two years, he has never actually condemned it to his own people in Arabic. How could he when the P.A. still pays pensions and salaries to terrorists—like those who took part in the orgy of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction on Oct. 7?

Then there is the fact that a great many of those who participated in those massacres were Palestinian civilians, not Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives. The Palestinian people—both backers of Hamas and those who stand with Abbas’s corrupt Fatah—support the same goal of destroying Israel and shedding Jewish blood.

That seems like madness to well-intentioned Western peacemakers. It is something they simply refuse to acknowledge or factor into their peace proposals for statehood, and even Trump’s scheme for something less than statehood.

Much as most Americans, Europeans and even many Israelis would prefer to deny it, the war is not only one against Hamas but against the Palestinian people. And until they give up their faith in Israel’s elimination, no amount of foreign investment or diplomatic acrobatics will make any difference. (Read more here) 

I would argue that Tobin’s argument against a Palestinian state is irrefutable.  The obvious question then becomes, what’s next? How can we hope to ever achieve peace between two peoples when one them has for generations been indoctrinated from cradle to grave to believe that Jews have stolen their land? A people determined to never give up their goal of getting it all back? A people that believes that all attempts at doing including acts of terror that in some cases end up involve horrific massacres of innocent Jews - are valid in pursuit of that goal?

As is often the case, I don’t know the answers. The only thing I am certain of is that Netanyahu and the vast majority of the Israeli people are right: A Palestinian state is not one of them.