Representatives from dozens of countries descended on New York City this week for a conference about the two-state solution led by France and Saudi Arabia. “We must ensure that it does not become another exercise in well-meaning rhetoric,” U.N. secretary-general António Guterres informed the gathered delegates.
“It” referred to the conference rather than to the two-state solution, but in either case, Guterres’s aspirations will not bear out. Like many of the other attempts at a two-state solution, this conference brought together a bevy of international officials to browbeat Israel. But it will not produce much of value because it does not take seriously the aspirations of the people residing in the West Bank and Gaza. The only state they can get is one they don’t want, so the bloodshed will continue.
Britain and France generated most of the headlines at this conference. Emmanuel Macron said just before it began that France will officially recognize “Palestine” in September. This week, Sir Keir Starmer threatened to follow Macron’s lead unless Israel halts its anti-Hamas campaign in Gaza. Canada’s Mark Carney followed suit on Wednesday, pending some actions by the Palestinians.
Donald Trump was not impressed. He pointed out “what [Macron] says doesn’t matter” on the ground and rejected the campaign to pressure Israel, since “if you do that, you really are rewarding Hamas. And I’m not about to do that.”
The president is right about the Europeans’ strategic ineptitude. Hamas’s deceased Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar told his lieutenants that he initiated the October 7 attack to stop the “Saudi-Zionist normalization agreement” that would “open the door for the majority of Arab and Islamic countries to follow the same path.” He succeeded, and the conference granted Hamas a notable propaganda victory. In London, Ottawa, and Paris, terrorism works.
The well-meaning Europeans counter that their plan is the only way to, over the long term, stop terrorism against Israel. In their view, most of the Palestinians just want an internationally recognized state. The major obstacle is in Israel, where a combination of anti-Arab racism, stupidity, and paranoia—reinforced by a legitimate fear of terrorism—creates a political culture that cannot accept these legitimate claims.
Endless war is the easily foreseeable result. The only way they see to break the logjam is to pressure Israel into accepting Palestinian statehood, which will ultimately redound to its benefit by satisfying the Palestinians and ending the fighting.
They also feel somewhat responsible for the conflict and thus for ending it. They think Israel exists because of the 1947 U.N. General Assembly resolution to partition the British imperial Mandate for Palestine, and so the voting nations ought to unite and create “Palestine.”
A quick comparison of the dueling national movements shows why this won’t work. David Ben-Gurion and the Zionists were willing to accept nearly any agreement that offered them a state, because they prioritized having one. Even before the British left, they built the institutions needed to govern Israel and defend it from Arab attacks. The Jews made their state—they didn’t demand someone else hand it to them.
Rather than build a state, the Palestinian Arabs based their national identity on resistance to Zionism. Accordingly, they have rejected every offer to settle their dispute with the Jews.
This has not worked out well for them: Their Arab neighbors occupied them after 1947, then Israel moved in after the Six-Day War. No national construction project could start in earnest until after the 1993 Oslo Accords, and for the past three decades, the Palestinian Authority has failed. It cannot subdue Hamas, and apart from the favored constituencies to whom it parcels out international aid, it has improved the fortunes of few Palestinians.
The peace deal on the table keeps getting worse, too. Because the Israelis cannot trust them and are strong enough to veto certain outcomes, the Palestinians can only reasonably expect to receive a bifurcated, demilitarized statelet that only partly controls its own borders and airspace. And its boundaries shrink with every new offer.
This is not much of a change from the way things are, and few Palestinians think it is worth any significant concessions. The ones who do are unlikely to beat the actuarial tables if they sign a deal with Israel. The others content themselves with stoking violence, eliciting an Israeli counterattack, and using the resulting suffering for propaganda campaigns against the Jews. This does nothing to improve the lives of the residents of the West Bank and Gaza, but that’s the point.
Western friends of the Palestinians—at least the ones who mean well—should help them develop a positive vision for their society rather than encourage them to travel further down this path. We can see the endpoint: Palestinians committing demonic acts against innocent Israelis, and Gaza in ruins.
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