Several European countries, led by France, are expected to formally recognize a Palestinian state at the United Nations in New York. Their leaders justify the move by claiming it will advance peace in the Middle East, based on the assumption that the absence of Palestinian statehood is the core of the conflict. Once that gap is filled, they seem to believe, peace will follow.
But they are wrong.
If the establishment of a Palestinian state were truly the crux of the problem, such a state could have been created decades ago. The idea of partitioning the land into a Jewish and an Arab state has been on the table for nearly ninety years. Each time, however, the Palestinian Arab leadership rejected it – whenever acceptance meant acknowledging Jewish sovereignty in part of the land.
This rejectionism dates back to 1937, when Britain’s Peel Commission proposed a small Jewish state proportionate to the Jewish share of the population at the time. It continued in November 1947, when the United Nations voted to end the British Mandate and establish two states. And it carried into the 21st century, when the Palestinians walked away from two unprecedented offers of statehood.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton proposed a Palestinian state encompassing almost the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Eight years later, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went further, offering nearly 100 percent of the territory, the removal of Israeli settlements, and shared sovereignty over Jerusalem’s holy basin. Both proposals were rejected.
If the Palestinians truly wanted a state alongside Israel, they would have seized these opportunities. The fact that they did not raises a deeper question: what is this conflict really about?
The British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin offered the clearest diagnosis in 1947. “For the Jews,” he observed, “the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.” His words remain accurate nearly eight decades later.
At its core, Palestinianism has never been about achieving self-determination in part of the land, but about preventing Jewish sovereignty in any of it. To Palestinian Arabs, Israel is not the homeland of the Jewish people but an alien colonial implant. Like the French in Algeria, the Jews are cast as foreigners who must ultimately leave. At best, Jews might be tolerated as a religious minority under Muslim rule – but never as a nation entitled to self-determination.
That worldview collides directly with Israel’s raison d’être: the right of the Jewish people to national self-determination in their historic homeland. The conflict therefore persists not because Palestinians lack a state, but because they continue to deny the legitimacy of the Jewish one.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the so-called refugee issue. Unlike any other refugee population, the descendants of Palestinians who fled in 1948 are still labeled as “refugees” by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), a unique institution established solely for them. Today, UNRWA counts over six million such “refugees,” while Palestinian leaders themselves speak of eight to nine million. Their demand is that all of them – children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the original refugees – possess an individual “right of return” to homes inside Israel.
This demand, if realized, would not mean coexistence but the dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state. With eight million Jews and two million Arab citizens, Israel would simply be demographically erased by the influx of millions more Palestinians. That is precisely the intention.
Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas made this point unmistakably in 2008. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice presented him with Olmert’s sweeping proposal for statehood, Abbas asked: “And what shall I tell the four million refugees?” His answer revealed the truth: no matter how generous the territorial offer, Palestinians would not accept statehood if it meant abandoning the demand to “return” millions into Israel.
That consistency tells us everything we need to know. Palestinianism has never wavered in its ultimate goal: not compromise with Israel, but the elimination of Israel. Even when professing to pursue diplomacy, Palestinian leaders insist on the “right of return” – a coded phrase for undoing the Jewish state.
As long as the Palestinians do not change their attitude toward the Jewish state, the creation of a Palestinian state will not advance peace – it will push it further away. Such a state would serve as a launching pad for sharper, more extensive attacks on Israel.
Western leaders who now rush to recognize Palestinian statehood in New York misunderstand this fundamental point. By doing so, they are not promoting peace but rewarding rejectionism. They are reinforcing the illusion that the absence of a Palestinian state is the root of the conflict, when in fact it is the refusal to accept a Jewish one.
Progress can only begin once the Palestinians abandon the dream of erasing Israel. Until that shift occurs, diplomatic gestures in New York will not bring peace any closer.
