The Peril of a Palestinian State
Hamas’s gruesome terror attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 and Israel’s defensive response have brought renewed calls for a Palestinian state, including the suggestion that such a state ought to be imposed by the international community. The United Nations and more than 140 countries, most of them in the Third World, have already recognized a “State of Palestine,” and a growing number of European states are currently moving to do so.
These calls and moves are deeply harmful because a Palestinian state would almost certainly become a launchpad for even worse aggression against Israel. The reason for this dire prediction: most Palestinians continue their refusal to share the land with the hated Jews and are culturally committed to terroristic violence against Israel.
The Persistent Palestinian Refusal to Share the Land with the Jews
The unwillingness of the Arabs of Palestine to share the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea with the Jews has been demonstrated again and again.
In 1937, the Arabs rejected the Peel Commission’s proposal to partition Palestine, then under British control, into a Jewish and an Arab state. In 1947, they rejected the similar partition proposal by the United Nations and soon thereafter—in concert with the regular armies of several Arab states—launched a war of extermination to wipe out the nascent Jewish state.
In 2000, Yassir Arafat, the leader of the Palestinians (formerly the Arabs of Palestine)—not only rejected Israel’s offer of a Palestinian state on 95% of the West Bank, all of East Jerusalem, all of Gaza, and additional land ceded by Israel, but soon thereafter launched the Second Intifada, a major wave of deadly terror attacks against Israel, which dashed the hopes for peaceful coexistence that had arisen from the preceding Oslo peace process. Nonetheless, in 2006-2008, Israel made yet another offer of statehood that would have given the Palestinians 94% of the West Bank, all of East Jerusalem, all of the Gaza Strip, and additional land ceded by Israel, which the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas rejected again.
Thus, it has been the Arabs who have prevented the creation of Palestinian state because of their refusal to live side by side with a Jewish state.
The Cultural Causes of Palestinian Terror
In opinion poll after opinion poll, around 70% of Palestinians in the West Bank, where they enjoy their own civil administration, endorse “resistance”—their euphemistic term for terror attacks—against Israel, including the unspeakable atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7. This enduring support for terroristic violence rests on several, deeply engrained cultural facts.
There is a profound sense of grievance among Palestinians nourished by the “Palestinian narrative,” which tells of supposed injustices suffered at the hands of Israel in a thick web of propaganda lies that are fervently believed by almost all Arabs, as well as most Muslims. This web of lies is insulated from enlightenment by an abiding distrust of heterodox ideas coming from the West, as well as by fear of conspiracies by “world Jewry,” and it keeps being spun from a widespread view among Palestinians that distorting the facts in favor of their cause is justified.
Then there is the deep conviction among Arabs that injuries and humiliations, such as those allegedly inflicted by the Jews, ought to be met with violent vengeance to restore their honor and dignity. This antagonistic conviction is made worse by the low regard for life in Arab culture and a ready acceptance of cruel behavior towards foes as well as fellow Arabs. It is thus that Arab fathers are capable of stabbing to death their daughters for having “dishonored” them.
Then there is the Muslim dogma that non-Muslims must not rule over lands claimed by Islam by right of its 7th-century conquests, which encompass contemporary Israel. This dogma is exacerbated by the further Muslim creed that violence against and deception of infidels are righteous and, indeed, glorious.
Then there is the abiding Jew hatred among Palestinians, which has roots in the Quran, was made virulent by antisemitic imports from Nazi Germany in the 1940s, and has been fostered ever since by antisemitic statements, books, newspaper writings, and popular TV shows in the Arab media.
And there is a lack of realistic foresight that enables most Palestinians to hope and, indeed, believe that enough terror will somehow—“God willing”—destroy Israel.
It is these cultural traits that make most Palestinians eager to continue the terroristic violence against the hated Jews and blind them to the rational benefits of making peace with Israel.
The Enduring Palestinian Quest to Destroy Israel
Given the Palestinians’ persistent refusal to share the land with the Jews and their culturally-rooted support of terroristic aggression against Israel, the claim of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to have recognized Israel’s existence and renounced terrorism in 1993 is not to be trusted.
For if the Palestinians were truly seeking peaceful coexistence with Israel, why would Yassir Arafat, the leader of the PLO, have launched the Second Intifada in 2000, when, thanks to the preceding Oslo process, peace had the very best chance of becoming a reality? Why would the Palestinians in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have given Hamas, which openly seeks the destruction of Israel, the majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council in the 2006 election?
Why would the Palestinians hand out sweets and dance in the streets when their terrorists succeed at murdering Jews? Why would they teach their children that Jews are evil, that terroristic “resistance” is admirable, and that terrorists who die during their attacks are “martyrs” gone to heaven?
Why would the Palestinian Authority (the civil-administrative arm of the PLO) incentivize young men to become terrorists by glorifying the most successful ones in heroic murals, by naming streets after them, and by paying sizeable allowances to the more than 30,000 families of terrorists who died or were wounded during their attacks?
Why would the Palestinian Authority pay terrorists serving time in Israeli prisons hefty monthly “salaries” in proportion to years served and thus the severity of their attacks, promote them to high civil and military service ranks, cover the living expenses of their families, and give released prisoners huge stipends and government jobs?
And why would the Palestinian Authority repeatedly fail to arrest terrorists wanted by Israel, as promised in the Oslo Accords, permit members of its “security forces” to join terrorist organizations and carry out attacks against Israel, and boast of having more than 2,000 such “martyrs”?
It is because neither the Palestinians nor the PLO/Palestinian Authority have given up on terroristic violence in pursuit of their dream of destroying Israel, eliminating the Jews, and having all of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea for themselves. For what else do they mean when they shout, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”?
A Palestinian State Would Be a Terror Base
The terror against Israel that has emanated from the Gaza Strip for decades by means of mortars, missiles, incendiary balloons, terror tunnels, and the cataclysmic invasion of October 7 clearly demonstrates what can—indeed, what is likely to—happen when the Palestinians govern an independent entity of their own. To now give the Palestinians a state in the wake of the atrocities of October 7 is an altogether preposterous idea because it would be understood by them as proof that terror works and thus would lead to even worse attacks against Israel.
Above all, if Israel’s security control over the Palestinian areas of the West Bank were lifted, which it would have to be if a sovereign Palestinian state came into being, then Hamas—sworn to Israel’s destruction—would readily overthrow the unpopular regime of Mahmoud Abbas, which survives due to Israel’s suppression of Hamas in the West Bank and to some extent cooperates with Israel against Hamas terrorists to maintain its rule. Free to import ever more deadly weaponry and supported by the Jew-hating and terror-loving majority, Hamas would then turn the West Bank into an even more powerful terror base against Israel in close proximity to its densely populated heartland and, moreover, provide Iran with an even better forward base for its unceasing efforts to destroy the Jewish state.
This is a risk that most Israelis have realized they cannot possibly accept, and that its few friends in the world, especially the United States, must not force Israel to accept.
The Dangerous Illusion of the “Two-State Solution”
Many in the West believe that a Palestinian state existing side-by-side with Israel would bring peace because it would satisfy the Palestinians’ desire for self-determination. This faith in the “two-state solution” is a dangerous illusion because most Palestinians would continue their support for the destruction of Israel even if they had a state of their own.
This fact may be hard to grasp for Western minds attuned to the liberal creed that all human beings are rational seekers of peace and prosperity, willing to respect others if they are respected in turn. But most Palestinians do not hold to such liberal ideas, culturally steeped as they are in the falsehoods of the “Palestinian narrative,” the righteousness of violence, vengeance, and cruelty, a Nazi-style Jew hatred, and Islam’s hostile injunctions against non-Muslims. Consequently, they would persist in their violent quest to eliminate Israel and the Jews “from the river to the sea” after having been given the respect of a sovereign Palestinian state.
Further, as long as the Palestinians remain in the grip of their deeply illiberal culture—which they will for many years to come—and thus continue their terroristic struggle to destroy Israel, there can be no peaceful solution to their conflict with the Jewish state. The best that can realistically be done is to continue the current mode of governance of the Palestinian areas of the West Bank, whereby the Palestinians live under the civil administration of the Palestinian Authority, and Israel intervenes militarily to suppress the chronically arising Palestinian terror. And given the fact that most Palestinians of the Gaza Strip hate Jews and support terrorism as much as—if not even more than—their brethren in the West Bank, this kind of governance ought to be extended to Gaza as well.