Why Is there no Palestinian State?

One binational state is impossible, two-state scenario has proven elusive

A picture of old Gaza

Hussain Abdul-Hussain

Caravan - The Hoover Institution

The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is intractable. One binational state is impossible, given that the two sides – Jews and Arabs -- have irreconcilable national projects. The two-state scenario has also proven elusive with Palestinians refusing to recognize Jewish nationhood. Even if they did, Palestinians have not shown any capability of constructing and governing a state of their own – whether a democracy or an autocracy. As long as the prerequisites for peace remain unfulfilled, the status quo will persist: A Palestinian hodgepodge autonomy meshed with Israeli policing and occasional flare-ups of war.

The one-state solution, popularized among Arab-Americans by late Columbia professor Edward Said and endorsed today by protesters on U.S. college campuses, was tried as far back as 1920 when Britain assembled three Ottoman provinces into a state it called Palestine and designed it as a binational homeland for both Arabs and Jews.

But multiethnic nations in the Middle East — Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon — have proven to be utter failures. Palestine is no exception.

Even when America threw its weight behind building a federal Shia-Sunni-Kurdish Iraq, the Shia enlisted Iranian muscle to crush federalism. In Lebanon, the once thriving Christian and Druze majority has been shrinking over the past half century and has now become an irrelevant minority.

It did not take long before the world discovered the impossibility of a binational Arab-Jewish state in Palestine. As early as 1937, the British presented the first partition plan — the Peel Commission Report. At the 1939 London Conference, the Arabs demanded the declaration of “Palestine as a sovereign Arab state” in which the Jews live as a minority. The “Arabs of Palestine” rejected the binational Arab-Jewish state model. Partition became inevitable.

In 1947, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181, which endorsed the two-state solution. Arab states at the UN voted against it. The following year, when Israel declared its independence, seven Arab armies invaded the nascent state but lost the war. Jordan kept the West Bank. Egypt took the Gaza Strip. The Arabs called their 1948 military defeat Nakba, Arabic for disaster.

The 1948 War included Arab displacement of Jews from the West Bank and East Jerusalem and, in the years that followed, from Arab countries. Israel understood the move as a population swap similar to the 1923 Turkish-Greek swap of two million and the 1947 Indian-Pakistani exchange of 17 million. Israel thus absorbed 750,000 Jewish immigrants to replace the 750,000 Arabs, who became permanent refugees, passing on this UN status to their descendants.

It was in 1948 that the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194 that called for the return to Israel of those Arabs who wanted to, thus contradicting Resolution 181, which had partitioned the land into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab.

At its 2002 Beirut Summit, the Arab League endorsed the Arab Peace Initiative, an official acceptance of UNGA 181 and partition, but with a caveat. The initiative also demanded the return of Arabs to Israel, along the lines of UNGA 194, thus ignoring the Jewishness of Israel.

Israel has since found itself standing before two Arab camps: The moderates, who recognized Israel but demanded the return of Arabs to the Jewish state, and the radicals, who rejected the very existence of Israel and called for an Arab Palestine from the River to the Sea, reminiscent of the 1939 Arab demand in London. The moderate Arabs have since been astounded as to why Israel would not take the Arab Peace Initiative, oblivious to the fact that the plan was tantamount to Israel committing suicide.

Israel tried to play ball. Starting in 1993, Israel hoped that the Arab moderates, including Palestinian strongman Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), could deliver on the two-state solution. For considering two states, the radicals – including Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Hamas, and most Palestinian-Americans – bashed Arafat.

Thus, while Arafat talked peace to Israel, Islamist Hamas launched a suicide bombing campaign that killed dozens of non-combatant Israelis. Reminiscing, in March 2024, Arafat’s top aid Yasser Abdrabbo said that the PLO chief encouraged Hamas’s violence believing that he could use it as leverage to force more concessions on Israel.

The Israeli military engaged in a three-year-long campaign that eventually subdued Palestinian violence, known as the Second Intifada.

Israel’s bet on Arafat to deliver peace thus came to an end, but the Jewish state was not yet done with the two-state solution. Buoyed by President Bush’s agenda to spread democracy, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon stirred the Palestinians toward an election that saw Mahmud Abbas succeed Arafat. In 2005, Sharon handed over the Gaza Strip to Abbas and his government and conceded more areas in the West Bank, allowing Palestinians to govern up to 40 percent of the 1967 territory, the land slated to become Palestine under a two-state solution.

Abbas proved to be as autocratic, corrupt, and incapable as Arafat. In 2007, Abbas lost the Gaza Strip to Hamas in a civil war that saw Hamas kill 350 PLO staff and security. The two Palestinian blocs, each commanding the following of around one-third of Palestinians today, have not spoken since or held an election, both blaming “the occupation” for their own failure to produce a state, even if a non-sovereign one.

In 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert promised to concede all of the 1967 territory to Palestinians. The only thing Israel asked was for Palestinians to forgo what they call the “right of return.” But unwilling or unable to rally Palestinian support behind such an Israeli demand, Abbas never responded to Olmert’s offer. In 2009, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated the same demand: Declare Israel as a Jewish state. Abbas refused.

In 2012, President Obama asked Palestinians to recognize the Jewishness of Israel. This time, Abbas experimented with Israel’s demand and said that, when there will be two states, he did not expect to return to his birthplace, Safed, inside Israel. Hamas bashed Abbas for his statement and he promptly walked it back, voicing ever since his wish to return, calling himself a “refugee.” Palestinian leaders clearly had no mechanism to debate peace or to deliver on whatever they promise Israel.

The model of Palestinian leadership compares to neighboring Arab countries Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. Since independence, these countries have lived in one of two states: Autocracy or civil war. Since the rise of Islamism in the 1980s, civil wars have been won by Islamist militias, all of them backed and bank-rolled by the Islamist regime of Iran, which uses them as tools in its bid to dominate the region.

When dealing with these Arabs, including Palestinians, Israel has had to deal with enemy dictators like Egypt’s Gamal Abdul-Nasser, Iraq’s Saddam Hussain, and Syria’s Assad dynasty, or friendly autocrats like Jordan’s Hashemite monarchs and the Egyptian presidents since Anwar Sadat.

With militias, Israel has not been as lucky as with friendly autocrats. Militias are Islamists whose ideology — as outlined by Sunni Egyptian Sayyid Qutb and endorsed by Shia Iranian Ruhollah Khomeini — considers the conflict with Israel not as one over national interests but as a zero-sum game that started with the rise of Islam, over 1400 years ago.

In 1993, Israel hoped that Arafat — then PLO chief since 1968 — would be the friendly Palestine dictator who could guarantee peace, like his Egyptian and Jordanian counterparts. Arafat proved unable or unwilling to do so. Like him, Abbas, 89, has been weak, corrupt and deflects blame for his failure unto Israel.

Among Palestinians today, Marwan Barghouti commands majority support. Barghouti is a former Arafat lieutenant who is serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison for his role in the death of Israelis during the Second Intifada.

So far, Barghouti’s allure has been his animosity toward Israel. Should he sue for peace if released, he would likely lose his popularity.

With the impossibility of a liberal Palestinian democracy, and with no apparent strongman, the chances of creating a Palestinian state are next to nil. And since one of the two states in the two-state solution should be the Palestinian state, and since such a state is nowhere to be found, the two-state solution will remain elusive.

Israel, for its part, would almost certainly concede 1967 territory to a friendly Arab sovereign, Palestinian or otherwise. It could, therefore, hand the West Bank over to Jordan and Gaza to Egypt. But it is most likely that, judging by their 1948-1967 experience, neither Amman nor Cairo would want to take back the territory of rowdy and violent Palestinian militias, whose attention might then turn away from Israel and unto their new governments, causing instability, as they did in Jordan in 1970.

As it stands, the Palestinians are unable to stand up a state required for peace with Israel. No Arab country wants to take them or rule their territories. After October 7, Israel will never repeat its 2005 unilateral withdrawal experiment that, instead of leading to a Palestinian state, turned Gaza into an enemy military camp.

For Israel and the Palestinians, the only possible solution in the foreseeable future is more of the same: A makeshift arrangement of Palestinian self-governance meshed with Israeli policing and periodic flareups.

Unless America is willing to go back to state-building and spreading democracy, it will have to wait until Palestinians figure out how to build a state that Israel can make peace with. Israel cannot build a Palestinian state for them. Only Palestinians can, but first, they must listen and learn how.