I’m well known for long, academic articles so this time let me be brief: a Palestinian state would be a disaster. I say this not as a “right-winger” (I’m not), but as an observer of empirical fact.
If a Palestinian state were founded tomorrow, this would be the immediate result: Hamas would be elected or seize power. Rockets would be fired from the West Bank onto the coastal plain. Israeli communities would be terrorized. October the 7th-style terrorist attacks would be planned.
At first Israel would hold fire under inevitable pressure from the international community. Eventually though, they would have no choice but to act. With their major population centres becoming unliveable, the government would start its campaign with vigor. Depending on the proximate casus belli, disaster would rain down upon the Palestinians of the Land. The mutual death spiral would have begun.
Previous left wing activists of Tel Aviv would demand safety in their everyday lives. The left, such as it was, would completely collapse.
The tanks would roll into Jenin. The precision bombings would strike against Nablus. Homes with tunnels would be overturned into rubble. Any brief European celebration about the establishment of Palestine would quickly turn into marches about “Israeli genocide”.
The hate-marching masses would become amnesic; they'd soon forget that Palestine is now a State and that their launched rockets and border incursions constitute invasion. Instead the very fact of Israeli self-defence, legal under international law, would be immediately seen as “occupation”, “apartheid” and other long words with absent punctuation.
There would be no solidarity with the Israeli state under constant attack from a fellow member of the United Nations. All talk of Russian aggression in Ukraine would be immediately forgotten, for there in the Middle East, the “Palestinian Russia” would gain all the students’ support. We would quickly learn the reality: that all those decades of two state solution activism were a sham front for supporting Palestinian terrorism whatever the cost. Israel would be hounded into destruction followed by a Europe that had long ago forgotten its reason to be.
We would remember the good old days of the “Israeli occupation of the West Bank”: where Palestinians shopkeepers could run their own businesses, where Palestinian labourers could work in Israeli settlements and where Palestinian institutions could function in security. But it would be too late: Hamas or its equivalents would be surrounding Israel from every compass point; the Middle East would be facing the ultimate fauda.
We all want self-determination for the Palestinians, but a State called Palestine isn’t the method for delivering it. (Day-to-day autonomy is fine.) In the first place, insofar as statehood is the real objective, they want self-determination for the majority alone. They want a Judenrein Palestine. They want the subjugation of political opponents. As we see in Syria, in the situation of its embattled minorities, such self-determination isn’t worthy of the name. It’s Arab self-determination for Kurdish -Druze-Alawite enslavement. It’s the antithesis of our values.
In the second place, they don’t even want self-determination, not even on a collective, oppressive, Syria-style basis. How many peace processes have to be destroyed and how many peace offers have to be rejected until we finally understand this? Golda Meir’s famous dictum is as true as ever: peace will only come when they love their own children more than they hate ours.
When the Palestinians finally see statehood as the ultimate goal, peace will be the inevitable result. Until then, they and we are faced with a monstrous polity whose sole raison d’etre is a dutch auction for Israel’s destruction. There on the Arab Street, democratic legitimacy comes not through those who can improve the lives of its inhabitants, but from those who can destroy the lives of its inhabitants through endless war with their neighbour.
Of course we must be compassionate for the innocent Palestinian civilians caught up in the fauda. We must fight their fighters under international norms and do all in our power to protect the lives of their children. But at the same time we cannot lose sight of the fact that they are our enemies: that they have rejected peace on countless occasions and have started war just as often; that the majority are unrepentant for October 7th and, in the words of Hamas, would launch the terror again and again. And when I say “they”, I mean the Palestinians as a collective polity because if free elections actually took place in the West Bank and Gaza they would undoubtedly vote for Hamas once more.
The two-pronged approach is this: we must forgive the Palestinians like Jonah and expect their recidivism like Nachum. As with our Biblical forebears, we must love all human beings and care for them as God loves all his creations, but we must be aware that the same political ideology will lead to the same results. Just as Jonah’s Ninevah became Nachum’s “city of blood”, so the Palestinian State as constituted would act as terrorists again. Certainly. Without a doubt.
Put simply: We can forgive the past, but we must expect the inevitable future. We must cast out all vengeance and hope for peace, but we should know at the same time that it will not happen –at least under the current political structures. For as with the Assyrians before them, current Palestinian political society is hardwired for brutality and our destruction.
Unlike Macron, we call for Palestinian agency and accountability. One cannot vote for the same terrorist government again and expect no consequences. If October 7th comes from an independent West Bank, we know precisely what will happen. If Nelson Mandela comes from an independent West Bank, we also know what will happen. The future is in their hands.
But to get from terror to Mandela is as difficult as Assyria becoming Isaiah. It requires a political and religious sea-change. For Assyria it came with their conversion to Christianity followed by their subjugation to the Arabs. Only today, in their current diminutive, oppressed form are they ready to call upon the Jews as friends.
The Palestinians will need to go through a similar humbling process. Christian Assyria was completely different to the Ancient Assyria of accursed memory. It had entirely distinct values and norms. In the same way, Palestine needs a complete rebrand: not only different parties and different programs, but a completely different overarching ideology. They must cease acting as the vanguard of the Arab Empire and turn into a liberal, tolerant, Mediterranean outpost seeking the freedom of the open seas. Perhaps they will even need a new name: Levantia.
Until then, we must be alive to reality: The Palestinian State would be an oppressive outpost for unspeakable violence. It would sponsor terrorism on a grand scale. It would destroy dissent within its broder. It would deny Jewish residents any rights and expel them. It would attack Israel constantly. It would be appeased by the Western World. Israel wouldn’t be permitted to defend herself.
It would be the end of our faith in Western Civilisation and a complete disaster.
I am not a right-winger. I would vote for The Democrats if I were Israeli. I’ve had enough of the Ben Gvirs and the Smotriches and the Karhis and an increasingly extreme Knesset which talks with principled uncompassion instead of MENA-pragmatism. But it’s all irrelevant to the case in point. A Palestinian State can only be permitted to exist if it allows us to exist. Until then, we must retain our humanity.
Yes, good for them and for us that they would reject any offer of a state, as they have consistently done since 1948.
Exactly right. Regrettably. You're telling the awful truth.