Daily Alert Archives

Why There Never Will Be a Palestinian State

(Mosaic) Elliott Abrams - 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? What is unique about the struggle for "Palestine" that has doomed it? The UN General Assembly voted in November 1947 to create two new states, one Arab and one Jewish. The Jews said yes and the Arabs said no. The essence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains in 2025 what it was in 1947: the Arabs said no. As Daniel Pipes has written: "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." The problem is not the technical challenge of delineating borders or some diplomatic failing, that if solved will lead to Palestinian statehood. The problem is that Palestinian nationalism is fundamentally about destroying the Jewish state, not building a Palestinian one. In his famous Bar-Ilan speech of 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu said: "The root of the conflict was and remains that which has been repeated for over 90 years - the profound objection by the hard core of Palestinians to the right of the Jewish people to its own country in the Land of Israel." State-building is not a Palestinian priority, and the absence of a state is not the cause of the conflict. A Palestinian state will fail to meet Palestinian aspirations since it will still have to exist alongside Israel. Why would the violence not continue (or increase) across the border of an independent Palestine, as it did across the border from the West Bank and from Gaza? Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, who have written a book about their decades of efforts to promote Palestinian statehood, said: "October 7 was neither uniquely Hamas nor distinctively Islamist. It was Palestinian through and through....There is no denying that Palestinians largely embraced the events of October 7 because they spoke to their most profound feelings. October 7 was Palestinian to the core." Will Palestinian society ever abandon support for violence and terrorism? The writer, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, served as White House deputy national security advisor, where he supervised U.S. policy in the Middle East.
2025-09-02 00:00:00
Full Article