The Dirty Little Secret About A Palestinian State

No one seems to care or mention that it would not be a democracy. Indeed, quite the opposite.

Speeding up the dream: The pressure is increasing for recognition of a Palestinian state. But the reality requires recognition of the legitimacy of a sovereign Jewish state in the region.

Armenia this week joined Norway, Ireland and Spain as the latest countries to announce plans to recognize an independent Palestinian state, no doubt signaling their frustration with Israel for its role in the ongoing war with Hamas and the lack of a path to peace. 

There are now more than 140 countries that recognize a Palestinian state, a fact that has little practical significance. But it does underscore how irresponsible most of the world’s nations are in supporting a cause without acknowledging its makeup, goals or system of ruling. While the desired outcome, presumably, in recognizing Palestine as an independent state is for it to exist alongside Israel in peace, there is every indication this is a pipe dream that, at this stage, would result in a nightmare for Palestinians as well as Israelis.

While many American college students are chanting “Free Palestine,” and other liberal Americans see a Palestinian state as a timely solution to the ongoing bloodshed, no one seems to ask what kind of a state it would be. One thing is certain, it won’t be free or democratic. 

Consider the region, where Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Iraq are ruled by autocratic men. The track record for Arab states that provide full human rights to their citizens is zero. Far worse, though, are the two terror groups – as designated by the U.S. government – fighting Israel today. Both Hamas, which rules Gaza, and Hezbollah, which in practice controls Lebanon, are radical Islam terrorist groups whose patron is Iran, the leading source of Islamic terrorism in the world. Far from calling for a two-state solution, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran are religious zealots fervently committed to eradicating Jews from Israel and replacing it with a Muslim state. 

Do progressive Americans who cherish equality, individual freedoms and LGBT rights understand that Islamic fundamentalists reject Arab nationalism, Western culture, democracy and human rights? To put it more directly, these groups view every American as an enemy to be killed. How is it that so many of our fellow citizens are eager to support such terror groups pledged to commit genocide against Jews, rather than speak up for the only democracy in the Middle East?

In truth, the prospects are quite dismal for a Palestinian state that would not be simply a next-door base for continued, intense attacks on Israel. 

The leaders of Hamas who carried out the barbaric attack on Israeli civilians on October 7 have stated publicly that their goal is to carry out similar attacks every day until the Jewish state is eradicated. Neither Yahya Sinwar, who heads Hamas, nor Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, is calling for Palestinian statehood. The state they seek is not for living alongside Israel but to replace it.

The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank seeks independent statehood but its leaders have consistently rejected Israeli efforts to reach a peace agreement. Its rule, beginning in the 1990s under Yasir Arafat and, since his death in 2004, under Mahmoud Abbas, has been dictatorial, corrupt and without basic rights for its citizens. 

More than 30 years ago the Oslo agreement made mention of Palestinian “democratic principles.” But as Elliott Abrams of the Council of Foreign Relations noted in a February essay, those “democratic principles” were never defined or referred to again. (See “Democracy and the Two-State Solution.”)

Instead, the PA teaches Jew-hatred in its schools, textbooks and TV programs for small children. It honors martyred terrorists and provides funds for their families. And according to several respected polls, the local population would rather be ruled by Hamas than the PA.

The international community has been so focused on the potential for Mideast peace that it has given the PA a pass on its consistent, major violations of human rights and basic freedoms.. The PA has not held elections since 2005, and is led by Abbas, who, at 88, is serving his 18th year of a four-year term. Even Western leaders who suggest the PA rule Gaza “the day after” the war acknowledge that it has a long record of corruption and is highly unpopular among its constituents. 

U.S. administrations have at times called for the rule of law in the PA but have not made Abbas accountable, all the while contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to PA coffers in the pursuit of a desired pie-in-the-sky peaceful future state. That ideal is a worthy one but it cannot be achieved overnight.

It should be noted that Israel, too, has largely avoided pointing out the PA’s lack of human rights. Jerusalem is far more interested in assuring its own security and recognition of its statehood by the Palestinian leadership than in how those leaders treat their citizens. The Abrams essay cites an observation made by Natan Sharansky in 2000, that “Israel and the West are too quick to rely on strong leaders for stability. Democracies often prefer to deal with dictators who have full control.”

Israel and the PA have a unique relationship, marked by strong ideological differences – and equally strong, shared practical concerns. The PA opposes Israel’s existence but relies on the IDF to protect it from a Hamas takeover. And Israel opposes the PA’s tolerance, if not encouragement, of terror activities but benefits from the PA’s cooperation in allowing the IDF to root out terrorists in West Bank enclaves. Illogical? Yes, but that’s the reality of life in the Mideast.

Giving The PA A Pass

Based on recent history, Israel has good reason to believe that its voluntary withdrawals from contested areas do not lead to progress. Far from it. Painfully and at great sacrifice, Israel voluntarily pulled its army and several thousand civilians from Gaza in 2005, only to see Hamas destroy the greenhouses that Israel left as a sign of goodwill. Israelis living in the south, near Gaza, were prepared to greet their new neighbors with amity. Instead they were greeted with rocket attacks that have continued ever since.

Similarly, in 2000, Israel voluntarily left Lebanon, vacating a stronghold in southern Lebanon after 18 years. But Hezbollah saw the retreat as a sign of weakness and proceeded to  launch several wars in the north. The 2006 Lebanon War ended when UN Security Council Resolution 1701 was passed unanimously that summer. It called on Israel to remove its troops from Lebanon and for Hezbollah to end its rocket fire and to deploy its soldiers north of the Litani River. Israel removed its troops but Hezbollah violated both of its obligations, with no punishment for its actions.  

The U.S. led numerous attempts to carve out a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians over the last several decades. But in the end, each effort was rejected by the Palestinian side, with no counter-offer, indicating a basic refusal to accept a sovereign Jewish state in the region. In recent years, “the two-state solution” finally was set aside by would-be peacemakers who came to see the prospect as more an aspiration than a practical development.

How, then, is this unrealistic solution being made a demand now, when Hamas has launched a genocidal war against Israel, and the PA, at best, is too dysfunctional to manage the West Bank? The international community, in its rush to resolve the current crisis, will be creating a new one if it encourages the Palestinians to pursue a lawless state without civil boundaries. 

Recognizing a state without being assured of its honorable mission is to ignore history. As Elliott Abrams concluded in his essay, “the time for … debate about the nature of any Palestinian state is now, not when it is too late to insist on basic principles and practices.” He noted that one of the lessons of Oslo was that the world “simply abandoned Palestinian democracy and watched as the West Bank and Gaza both came under autocratic rule and human rights guarantees disappeared.”

Surely, the world does not need another state in the Mideast aggressively committed to wipe out Israel. Unchecked, it would be a launching pad for Iran and its surrogates to complete their core mission. That is a nightmare we cannot allow to happen. If October 7 has taught us anything, it’s that we must never underestimate our enemies, especially those who proclaim their sacred pledge to destroy the Jewish people and their state.

Am Yisrael Chai.