There Never Will Be a Palestinian State. So What’s Next?
By Elliott AbramsOctober 7 was not Palestine’s independence day, but the final nail in the two-state solution’s coffin. Is confederation with Jordan all that remains?
Late this month, and exquisitely timed to coincide with Rosh Hashanah, the United Nations General Assembly will meet and, addressing it, the president of France will recognize “Palestine” as a state. France will be the 148th country (by most counts) to recognize a state that does not exist and never will—a “state” with no borders, no government, no economy, and no control over its claimed territory. Norway, Spain, Ireland, and Slovenia recognized Palestine in May 2024 in a clear reward for the Hamas terrorist onslaught in October 2023. The United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia will join the French, as may a dozen or more other countries. These acts of “recognition” do nothing to help Palestinians. Their effect and their usual objective is to harm Israel, both by blaming it for the Gaza war and by making an end to that war more difficult to achieve. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in August, “Talks with Hamas fell apart on the day Macron made the unilateral decision that he’s going to recognize the Palestinian state.”
President Emmanuel Macron’s move, and those of Prime Ministers Keir Starmer of the UK and Anthony Albanese of Australia, are largely domestic policy matters—responses to low approval ratings and large Muslim populations. It seems to have escaped their attention that they are contributing to a Palestinian conclusion that only brutal violence will produce a path forward. In an effort to defend himself from such criticism, Macron stated “there is no alternative” to Palestinian statehood and announced in July that, “in light of the commitments made to me by the president of the Palestinian Authority, I have written to him to express my determination to move forward.”
What were the Palestinian Authority’s solemn commitments to the president of France? “To fulfilling all its governance responsibilities in all Palestinian territories, including Gaza, to reforming fundamentally, [and] to organizing presidential and general elections in 2026 in order to enhance its credibility and its authority over the future Palestinian state.” Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney told CNN that “Canada intends to recognize the state of Palestine . . . because the Palestinian Authority has committed to lead much-needed reform.” Albanese talked of “major new commitments from the Palestinian Authority” and proclaimed that the “president of the Palestinian Authority has reaffirmed these commitments directly to the Australian Government.” Similarly, while the so-called “New York Declaration,” adopted on July 30 by the entire Arab League, the European Union, and more than a dozen other countries usefully condemns the October 7 attacks and calls for Hamas’s removal from power, it calls for a Palestinian state under a reformed Palestinian Authority (PA) that will “continue implementing its credible reform agenda.”
It is difficult not to laugh at all those “commitments” to a “credible reform agenda” by the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, who has made them and others like them over and over again during his nearly twenty years as head of Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the Palestinian Authority. The PA is no closer to ruling Gaza than it has been since June 2007 when it was expelled from there by Hamas, nor any closer to fundamental reform. Macron also stated that “we must build the state of Palestine (and) guarantee its viability,” and it apparently never occurred to him to suggest that Palestinians must “build the state of Palestine and guarantee its viability.”
Why, after 80 years of efforts to partition the Holy Land, has a Palestinian state never been created? Why am I persuaded that this objective will never be achieved? Scores of new countries have been created since the Second World War. What is unique about the struggle for “Palestine” that has doomed it, and what are the alternatives? While my particular focus here is on the West Bank, most of the analysis that follows applies just as well to Gaza.
I.
The “two-state solution” is an offshoot of the older idea of partition—the division of the Palestine Mandate held by the United Kingdom into Jewish and Arab lands. Transjordan, a separate British mandate and now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, came into being in 1946, and the UN General Assembly voted in November 1947 to create two more new states, one Arab and one Jewish. The Jews said yes and the Arabs said no.
There is a lot more to be said about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but the essence of it remains in 2025 what it was in 1947: the Arabs said no.
Daniel Pipes has commented on this many times, writing of what he called the Palestinians’ “genocidal rejectionism.” Why haven’t peace and Palestinian statehood prevailed? In the early years, Pipes wrote, “The local population, which we now call Palestinians, didn’t want them there and told them to get out. And [the Zionists] responded by saying no, we are modern Westerners, we can bring you clean water and electricity. But Palestinians engaged in rejectionism, and said, ‘No, we want to kill you; we’re going to drive you away.’” Over a century ago, the Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky explained that this is the response the Jews should expect to such offers of economic advancement, although he believed the attitude would change in the fullness of time. But little has changed, as Pipes writes:
It hasn’t worked because it can’t work. If your enemy wants to eliminate you, telling him that you’ll get him clean water is not going to convince him otherwise. What’s so striking is that the Palestinians have retained this genocidal impulse for such a long period. I would argue, as an historian, that this is unique. No other people have ever retained that kind of hostility for such a length of time.
Such views can be, and have often been, attacked as those of a Zionist and conservative. But Pipes’s conclusion has now been given support by an unexpected source: Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, who have written a book called Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine about their decades of efforts, individually and together, to promote Palestinian statehood. Agha was a trusted confidant and key negotiator for Yasir Arafat. Raised in Beirut, now holding a British passport (after previously having Lebanese and Iraqi citizenship), a member of Fatah from 1968, educated at Oxford and associated for 25 years with St. Antony’s College there, the wily and charming Agha advised the Palestinian leadership and participated in talks from the Madrid Conference in 1991 through those with John Kerry in 2014. Malley, son of a far-left and anti-Zionist Egyptian Jew, was special assistant to the president for Arab-Israeli affairs during the Clinton administration and then a key Middle East adviser and negotiator for Barack Obama. Malley and Agha worked together, each for his respective team, to prepare for the Camp David Summit in 2000, and then collaborated on a famous New York Review of Books article in August 2001 that defended Arafat and rejected the view (advanced by President Clinton and most other U.S. participants) that Arafat was to blame for the failure of the peace effort....
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