If the Palestinians had a state, would Iran have abandoned its nuclear ambitions? Would it have stopped financing Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis? Would Tehran cease threatening the Sunni Arab states? Would the Muslim Brotherhood disappear? Most important, would a Palestinian state have prevented Oct. 7?
The answer to every question is almost certainly no. Yet listening to the chorus demanding a Palestinian state, one might think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the source of every problem in the Middle East and that creating another Arab state would magically bring peace to the region.
History apparently means nothing to these people. When the PLO, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and Iran declare their intention to destroy Israel—and act on those declarations—why are they not taken seriously? Why are the threats of Israel’s enemies dismissed while the assurances of its critics are treated as gospel?
After Oct. 7, it should be inconceivable that anyone would demand Israel accept a potentially hostile Palestinian state on its borders. Instead, the massacre seems to have strengthened the determination of Israel’s critics to force precisely that outcome. The victims have been forgotten, the lessons ignored, and Israel is expected to risk national suicide to satisfy the consciences of Western virtue-signalers who will never have to live with the consequences.
The way advocates of a two-state solution squawk, one would think they had discovered some revolutionary idea or that peace was simply a matter of drawing a line on a map. What makes them believe a Palestinian state is any more achievable today than when Arab leaders rejected partition in 1937?
What magic formula have they discovered that eluded the architects of the Rogers Plan, Reagan Plan, Madrid Conference, Oslo Accords, Camp David negotiations, Road Map for Peace, Ehud Olmert peace offer, Obama administration initiatives and U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term “Deal of the Century”?
The two-staters never explain what has changed to make success more likely. They repeat the same mantra, as though saying “two states” often enough will make the obstacles disappear.
Peace cannot be imposed by outsiders who refuse to acknowledge the facts on the ground or both parties’ responsibilities.
Consider the four final-status issues, starting with Jerusalem. It is Israel’s capital, the center of Jewish history and identity, and it will not be divided again. Conceivably, the Palestinians could establish their capital in Abu Dis, where a parliament building constructed for that purpose sits unused and deteriorating. Palestinian leaders once entertained the idea but abandoned it long ago. Instead, they continue demanding sovereignty over eastern Jerusalem, including the Old City and its holy sites. No foreseeable Israeli government will agree.
Then there are the settlements, routinely denounced as the principal obstacle to peace, as though their inhabitants could be erased from the map. More than 500,000 Jews live in Judea and Samaria. What exactly do the critics propose to do with them? Are the same people who falsely accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing demanding that a Palestinian state be Judenrein, as Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has suggested? Apparently, for some advocates of Palestinian statehood, the presence of Jews is an obstacle to peace, while the demand for their removal is not.
Negotiators have long assumed Israel would annex the major settlement blocs near the 1949 armistice line, while settlers living elsewhere would relocate to those blocs or within the Green Line. That formula was difficult enough when the settler population was much smaller. Today, roughly 370,000 Jews live in the principal settlement blocs, leaving more than 130,000 outside them.
Do the two-staters seriously imagine an Israeli government bulldozing their homes and forcibly evacuating them? Israel’s withdrawal of approximately 8,000 settlers from Gaza in 2005 nearly tore the country apart. What politician would attempt an operation more than 10 times larger?
And what of the roughly 350,000 Jews living in eastern Jerusalem whom the international community also labels “settlers”? Are they to be expelled as well? The advocates of partition never say.
The Palestinian demand for a “right of return” is equally nonnegotiable. Israel will not agree to admit millions of Palestinians claiming refugee status into the Jewish state. UNRWA may count nearly 6 million Palestinians as refugees, but the number that left between 1947 and 1949, and who are still alive, probably number no more than a few thousand elderly people. Furthermore, the fact is that roughly 75% of Palestinians live in what had been Palestine before 1922, and most of the remainder are not refugees by any definition.
The purpose of demanding a right of return for millions is to transform the world’s only Jewish state into another Arab-majority country. Palestinians understand this. Israelis understand it. Yet the two-staters pretend it is a minor technical issue that can be resolved through creative diplomacy. They should know that Israel will not sign away its Jewish identity any more than it will surrender its security.
The fourth final-status issue is borders. Palestinians insist that negotiations begin with the pre-June 1967 lines, which Abba Eban famously characterized as “Auschwitz borders.” Even before Oct. 7, Israelis had ample reason to question whether those lines could be defended. After watching Hamas terrorists pour across the Gaza border to murder, rape, kidnap and terrorize civilians, the notion that Israel should relinquish strategically vital territory on the promise of peaceful coexistence has become even less credible.
Trump’s peace plan was a two-state solution that tried to break the mold, rendering it both the most realistic and the most unrealistic proposal ever advanced.
It was realistic because, unlike previous initiatives, it took Israel’s security requirements seriously, acknowledged Jewish historical claims to Judea and Samaria, and recognized that hundreds of thousands of settlers could not simply be uprooted. It was unrealistic because meeting those requirements meant rejecting demands Palestinian leaders have insisted on for decades as nonnegotiable.
Ways to break the mold
More importantly, Trump’s plan did something the two-state evangelists generally avoid: It demanded meaningful concessions from the Palestinians.
Under the plan, the Palestinians would have to:
1. Recognize Israel as the Jewish state and declare an end to the conflict and all outstanding claims.
2. Abandon the demand for a right of return to Israel.
3. Accept a demilitarized state subject to overriding Israeli security requirements.
4. Accept Israeli sovereignty over designated settlements and the Jordan Valley.
5. Relinquish claims to most of Jerusalem, including Israeli sovereignty over the Old City and Temple Mount.
6. Disarm Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist organizations.
7. End payments to imprisoned terrorists and the families of deceased terrorists.
8. End incitement against Israel and reform Palestinian education.
9. Abandon international legal campaigns against Israel.
10. Implement democratic, economic and institutional reforms as prerequisites for statehood.
These were not arbitrary demands designed to humiliate the Palestinians. They addressed the very issues that have made peace impossible. A Palestinian state that refuses to recognize Israel’s legitimacy, glorifies terrorism, educates children to hate Jews and insists on the eventual elimination of the Jewish state is not a formula for peace. It is a formula for another war.
Yet Palestinian leaders rejected the plan rather than negotiate its provisions. That rejection should have forced the international community to confront a fundamental question: If Palestinian leaders will not accept the conditions necessary to ensure that a state lives peacefully alongside Israel, why should Israel be expected to accept the risks of creating one?
The two-staters have no convincing answer. Instead, they cling to the fantasy that the only missing ingredient is sufficient American pressure on Israel. Their solution is not to persuade Palestinians to compromise but to use American political, economic and diplomatic leverage to force Israel to capitulate.
This approach is gaining adherents among Democrats increasingly hostile to Israel. Its advocates may be counting on the election of an anti-Israel president in 2028 who will be willing to employ sanctions, withhold military assistance or otherwise punish Israel until it accepts Palestinian demands.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be contemplating such a future. His remarks about using cryptocurrency to circumvent sanctions suggested a government surrendering to the antisemites and critics of Israel, and preparing for economic isolation rather than confronting the political challenge. Economists and the Bank of Israel dismissed the idea as an ineffective way to evade sanctions. More troubling was the impression that Netanyahu was conceding the inevitability of international pressure and looking for ways to survive it rather than defeat it.
A change of government in Israel might alter some policies. A new prime minister could suspend the E-1 project, halt settlement expansion or adopt a less confrontational diplomatic posture. Such steps are unlikely to appease critics or resolve the core issues.
Most importantly, the trauma of Oct. 7 would not disappear with Netanyahu. Israelis across the political spectrum have seen what happens when terrorists control territory adjacent to their communities. They know that Hamas turned the territory Israel evacuated in 2005 into a base for rocket attacks, tunnels, and ultimately the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Why should they believe that withdrawing from Judea and Samaria would produce a different result? What guarantees could the international community extend that would be more credible than the promises that followed Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip?
The two-staters rarely address these questions because the answers undermine their preferred solution.
None of this means that Israel should abandon the hope of peace. It means peace cannot be imposed by outsiders who refuse to acknowledge the facts on the ground or both parties’ responsibilities. Palestinian statehood cannot be a reward for terrorism, a substitute for recognition of Israel or a mechanism for creating another Iranian-backed threat on Israel’s border.
The fundamental problem is not that Israelis have failed to hear the arguments for a Palestinian state. They have heard them for generations. They have negotiated, offered concessions, withdrawn from territory and paid a terrible price for the belief that territorial compromise would bring peace. They have not given up on the hope for peace, but they will not gamble their children’s lives and their country’s existence to satisfy people who will bear none of the consequences if the gamble fails.
No amount of diplomatic pressure, economic coercion or moral blackmail will persuade Israelis that national suicide is the price they must pay for peace.
