Danielle Pletka
It is beyond ironic that the vile attacks of October 7 have revived the notion of a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians—an idea that was, until that moment, politically moribund. Of course, such a “solution” was far from Hamas’s aim, but it remains the only idea available to the lazy diplomatic and peace-processing class. The two-state idea serves the aims of political leaders in the United States and Europe flailing for a response to the far Left’s anti-Israel-driven outrage over the war in Gaza. It answers the mail to the demand to “do something.”
But the one question no one has bothered to ask is, Is it good for the Palestinians? And the short answer to that question is no.
“Two-state solution” is part of the lexicon of sloganeering-cum-politics that includes “black lives matter,” “defund the police,” and “cease-fire now.” And like all of those reductionist bumper stickers, it crumbles under scrutiny. The evolution of each of these ideas is predicated on a grain of truth: Of course black lives matter. There is indeed police brutality. A cease-fire now would indeed end the fighting in Gaza, albeit briefly. And a two-state solution would certainly satisfy the symbolic demands for a Palestinian state.
Also true of these parallel political constructions is that the slogan has precious little to do with the actual lives it purports to value. The Black Lives Matter movement, while soothing to upper-class suburban whites focused intently on their virtue and their Land Rovers, has enriched a few grifters at its heart and delivered shockingly little to the actual blacks who live in America’s cities and are disproportionately victims of crime, beset by poor schooling, drugs, broken families, and more.
Ditto the mindless effort to slash police budgets in the unreasoned hope that by destroying the instruments of law enforcement, somehow there would be fewer incidents of police brutality. Instead, as numerous failed experiments in a light police footprint have demonstrated, crime has skyrocketed, businesses have been forced to shut down, and cities like Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Oakland, and Washington, D.C., have spiraled into dystopia.
Back to the Palestinians. They are people before they are a nation or a movement. And like the hapless props for the various other slogans/movements, their fate is of little genuine interest to their putative champions. To be pro-“Palestine” has come to mean little more than to be anti-Israel, shortchanging the very people such a position is intended to support.
A little history: Arab opposition in 1948 to the United Nations partition plan for British mandatory Palestine marks the moment the pro-Palestine movement trumped the welfare of actual Palestinians. Ignominious losses by Arab armies to the newly born State of Israel resulted not in a smaller Palestinian state but in no Palestinian state at all. Neither Jordan nor Egypt evinced any interest in creating a “Palestine” from the land they occupied after losing the first war waged against Israel.
The rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and various other “liberation” movements similarly focused not on the actual lives of Palestinians but on the “virtue” of killing Israelis and other Jews. Indeed, we have those movements and later additions like Hamas and Hezbollah to thank for the identification of the Palestinian cause with terrorism worldwide.
Worse still, the PLO maintained its death grip on the reins of the Palestinian cause by insisting that no Palestinian move into permanent housing or demand equal rights in the Arab lands they occupied, thereby creating permanent stateless “refugees.” How was this about the betterment of Palestinian lives? Of course, it wasn’t.
Even after the 1993 Oslo Accords, which created the Palestinian Authority and transferred limited autonomy over parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, the question of Palestinian well-being at the hands of their own masters never entered the equation. Israeli treatment of Palestinians has always been front and center—and that is not unreasonable. But Arab and Palestinian leaders’ treatment of Palestinians has been a matter of supreme indifference to Western champions of the cause.
Even the United Nations agency mandated to care for the welfare of the Palestinians, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, became a tool of extremists, focused on teaching radical Islamism and antisemitism. UNRWA employees have been caught participating in and celebrating the October 7 attacks, a far cry from their mandate to support the humanitarian needs of Palestinians. Indeed, UNRWA has for decades relegated its charges to endless refugee status, discouraging them from naturalizing—if permitted—in the countries where they live and forcing them to subsist rather than thrive.
In fact, the Palestinian people have no real champion.
Palestinians turfed out of Kuwait in the hundreds of thousands in 1991? Whatever. Palestinians discriminated against in Lebanon, barred from intermarriage with citizens, forbidden from entering certain professions, and barred from land ownership? Meh. And in the West Bank and Gaza? Corruption, declining levels of education, collapsing economic security, Islamist indoctrination, murder, kidnapping, and crime . . . all at the hands of the PLO in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza—from which Israel withdrew in 2005? Blame the Jews.
If, for once, the Palestinian people themselves were the priority, rather than their terrorist and criminal leaders, and if, for once, the two-state-solution movement—which has morphed into Israel-hatred over support for Palestinians—took a back seat to the well-being of the population, there might actually be a pathway to a viable Palestinian state. Right now, however, the Palestinian people are pawns, props in a local, regional, and global game that puts their real interests last.
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