The Two-State Delusion

There can only be one state, and for the safety of the Western world, it had better be Israel.

What land belongs to whom? During the Ottoman Empire, pretty much all of the region here was under its rule. The main building of Waldorf-Astoria, just outside of the Old City, once served as the Turkish Jerusalem’s City Hall. Across the street from it is an old Muslim cemetery. After World War I, the British and French divvied up the lands via the Sykes-Picot agreement, often not taking into account any consideration of which peoples were being put together in countries like Syria, Lebanon and Mandate Palestine. The British promised a lot of things to a lot of people, and when they left in 1948, they made no effort to uphold their previous promises to the Jewish people for part of the land that was under their control. Rather, they left, and in leaving, their every action was to side with the local Arabs in the growing conflict that became the birth of the modern state of Israel. Had Israel been the country “from the river to the sea” and modern-day Jordan become the planned “Arab state”, one not hijacked by the Hashemite tribe originally from the Arabian Peninsula, then maybe a lot of spilled blood and ink would have been avoided.

If one looks at the clinically dead “Two State Solution”, the basic idea is that there are two peoples with claims and yearnings for self-determination. The Jews should have their own state and so should the local Arabs. The long Jewish history of the Land of Israel was irrelevant, as was the actual home countries of most local Arabs, who came from other countries to work in the fields and industries that the Jews were creating. All of those al-Masri folks in Gaza literally mean “The Egyptian”. The idea pushed since at least the days of Richard Nixon was that if Israel would give up land taken in the 1967 Six-Day War, the Arabs would in turn make peace, and then the world could focus its energies and attention on other parts of the globe. The problem is that the basic assumption was false, and as such nothing has worked, including the Oslo Accords, Israeli unilateral withdrawals and dividing the West Bank into various Areas A, B, and C.

A Muslim fellow in the West was recently asked a simple question: if a Palestinian state would come into existence along the lines of proposals made by the Ehuds — Barak and Olmert — would the new state of Palestine live in peace with Israel? The fellow questioned actually told the truth and said no. Rather, the new state — like Jew-free Gaza — would dedicate itself and its energies to destroying Israel and making a single Palestinian state covering all of the land from “the river to the sea”. They obviously would turn their attention to Jordan at that point, but let’s not get too far ahead of our narrative.

Why wouldn’t the Palestinians accept their state and just try to make for better lives while living in peace with Israel? The simple answer is the flaw in a two-state solution. The idea of two states is that each side can make some reasonable claim on part of the land. Each had pre-1948 cities, towns, and farms that it could show were either Jewish or Arab. As such, the UN 1947 Partition Plan (accepted by the Jews and rejected by the Arabs) was a checkerboard that reflected where the two populations were located at the time. Should a Palestinian state actually come into existence in Gaza and the West Bank, its leaders would note that their great-great-great-grandfathers once lived in the present Israeli cities of Haifa, Lod, Tiberias, and Acre. If our forefathers lived there, then obviously we have a legitimate claim to those places as well. The very arguments that would be used to birth a Palestinian state would be employed to justify the new Frankenstate setting its sights on all the land in present-day Israel. There is no way to simply tell the Palestinians that yes, your long-dead ancestors once did live in these places, as ours once lived in Hebron and Nablus. They will produce photos, eyewitness testimonies, and demand that any place where Arabs lived should rightfully be theirs. That Jews have lived forever in Hebron and Jerusalem will be ignored. As always, Arab arguments are only one-way. Stop settler violence! How about stopping Palestinian terror? That's "resistance"!

With the above in mind, there can never be two states. Maybe there will be some type of reservation system where the Palestinians will run their own affairs in Nablus and Hebron, but security and national identification will be Israeli. Israel and Israelis have no mitzvah to commit suicide or set up the conditions that would lead to the same outcome. And as the Palestinians have zero brakes on their desires and demands, it is literally a case of giving an inch becoming giving a mile. There is nothing that could ever satisfy the Palestinians, their Muslim supporters, and their lunatic lefty friends. If Israel gave them everything except Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, we would be subjected to endless UN motions and violent street demands that those Jews give up that street, as it has always been Arab (it was sand before the Jews built Tel Aviv) and is an integral part of Palestine. It’s all or nothing, folks. There is nobody over in Ramallah who actually thinks about deals, fairness, etc. It’s our way or exploding on the highway.

Western politicians, starting with President Trump, need to tell Palestinians that they will not have any state. They can aspire to some type of economic and territorial independence, but they will never have a state with its own armed forces or internationally recognized boundaries. The Palestinians were never a real people, and there was never a state of Palestine run by Arabs. From Turks to Brits to Jews, that is the history for the past 500 years. Do you want to go back to the days of the First and Second Temple, long before Islam came into existence and the Jews ran the Land of Israel? The whole Palestinian charade has existed in order to harm Jews and Israel and advance the interests of Jew haters, from the Soviets who invented Yasser Arafat and his PLO to present-day lefties and their friends in the Muslim Brotherhood. This hateful business has nothing to do with justice or finding a solution. It is simply a continuation of the Holocaust by other means. If there had never been a state of Israel and the British Mandate of Palestine was still in effect, Jews in the US and Western Europe would be blamed for uncontrolled immigration, lousy economics, the Ukraine war, and whatever ills exist in the world. There are those who cannot live without attacking Jews. Israel is a big target, but it is in no way the only Jewish target. Look at Jewish communities in the West that need more protection and experience more hate crimes than all other groups combined.

The Palestinians were never a real people and their cause was never an honest effort to improve their lot. Their goals have been to destroy Israel and kill Jews. They make no effort to build housing for the million-plus ersatz refugees that are supposed to return to a new, shiny state of Palestine. They have no interest in these people or their fates. The only goal of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas is to make Israel disappear. A few years ago, Israel asked the PA to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. In a fury, Mahmud Abbas refused. And that tells you everything about the mindset of the Palestinian people.

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