There Is an Alternative

About two years ago, I had a conversation with a gentleman who has served at the highest levels of the U.S. defense and intelligence apparatus. He spoke of the necessity of a continued U.S. commitment to the so-called two-state solution in Israel and the Palestinian territories—“so-called,” I write, because there are not two states, and because there are not going to be two states, and because it is not a solution. (Other than that … ) I asked him what seemed and seems to me to be the obvious question: How do we expect to have two states when the undeniable and repeatedly demonstrated fact of the matter is that Palestinian sovereignty and Israeli security are incompatible?

“We can’t let that be the case,” he non-answered. “There is no alternative.”

The two-state solution calls to mind many similar regional phantoms, the will-o’-the-wisps of Middle Eastern discourse, e.g., a nuclear deal that the Iranians will honor. Why have an Iranian nuclear deal? Because the alternative is not having an Iranian nuclear deal, which apparently is unthinkable. (Or was, until somebody thought of something better.) Why commit ourselves to a two-state solution for the Palestinians? Because we must, because TINA says so. You know TINA: “There Is No Alternative,” a declaration that seems to be invested with magical powers in the minds of people who cannot accept that some problems are practically irresolvable. 

But there is an alternative, the one nobody likes but the one we are likely to have for a long time: the status quo.

Where there is Palestinian sovereignty or semi-sovereignty, there are Palestinian forces plotting atrocities against Israeli civilians. Palestinian control over Gaza was a sine qua non of the October 7 attacks. Rockets are routinely fired into Israel from Gaza, and the Palestinian forces aspire to turn the West Bank into another launchpad. Israel, obviously, cannot and will not tolerate that, no more than the United States would tolerate rockets being shot into El Paso from south of the border. Whatever kind of fragile pseudo-state exists in Gaza and/or the West Bank is going to end up getting wrecked every 18 months or so when the Palestinians fortify their tunnels sufficiently that they feel confident in launching another murder/rape/kidnapping/torture spectacular against the hated Jews. And you can be entirely confident that the blood on their hands will not even be dry before the U.N. et al. are lecturing Israel about forbearance.

As I argued last week, recognizing the supposed state of Palestine is an exercise in asininity, given that—and I do insist that this matters—there is no Palestinian state. A state is an apparatus that has the capacity to perform state functions, and you can tell that not only is there no such Palestinian apparatus but that nobody really even pretends to believe that there is one—the Palestinians least of all—which is why the Palestinians and their advocates insist that getting humanitarian relief to the people of Gaza is the duty of the Israeli state. It is only the Jewish state that is supposed to have real agency, moral or practical. And it has used that agency in a humanitarian way: The IDF has air-dropped food into Gaza. The Biden administration went as far as to arm-twist the Israeli military into providing labor for its idiotic and short-lived aid-pier project. If the Palestinians had expended 10 percent as much effort in looking after Israeli security as the Israelis have spent looking after Palestinian aid, they wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. 

Never mind the administratively challenging problems of standing up a state to govern non-contiguous territories—consult the people of the former East Pakistan about that–think about what a Palestinian state would actually be: a weapon, an instrument of terrorism. While there is no Palestinian state, we do have some indication of what such a state would look like: Hamas is not an insurgency in Gaza—Hamas was entrusted by the Palestinians with the administration of the enclave, and it is the closest thing (not very close) to a legitimate government they have.

In the West Bank, there is the Palestinian Authority overseen by Mahmoud Abbas, now into the third decade of the four-year term to which he was elected. The Palestinian Authority is best understood as a mafia. One need not be a cranky libertarian (guilty!) to appreciate that there is no bright line of separation between mafias and emerging states: The original mafia in Sicily performed many state-like functions, filling the power vacuum left by the decline of feudal institutions following the Risorgimento. It protected landowners, arbitrated disputes, and worked to maintain public order on the streets. But even with access to technology and international resources, the Palestinian Authority has not reached a point of political development equal to that of the 19^th-century Sicilian mob. It has a long way to go before it can be treated as a credible and legitimate state.

But as with the French who have just “recognized” a Palestinian state that does not exist, advocates of the so-called two-state solution generally wave their hands and cover their ears when the facts of the case come up. Instead, recognizing the Palestinian state that does not exist is taken as a kind of symbolic moral gesture—and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s explicit use of such recognition as a cudgel to try to bully the Israeli government into accepting his government’s priorities (as Israel fights against national extermination) very much suggests that this is not about building a Palestinian state at all but about placating domestic constituencies in the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, and elsewhere, including constituencies in which antisemitism is a deeply held creed. Empty symbolism rarely is admirable, but this is something worse than empty symbolism: It is symbolism that makes things worse, punishing the Israelis for defending themselves and rewarding the Palestinians for October 7, for the use of human shields in Gaza and elsewhere, and for Hamas’ ghastly, cynical campaign of purposefully inflicting suffering on Palestinian civilians for the benefit of Western news photographers. 

Hamas rejects a two-state solution, and in 2006, the last time there were Palestinian elections, Hamas won a plurality of the vote. But Hamas is not alone in its rejection. Every mob that chants “From the river to the sea!” rejects a two-state solution. Many of Israel’s critics in the West reject a two-state solution, explicitly or implicitly. October 7, rapturously celebrated by the Arabs of Palestine, was a rejection of a two-state solution. Supposed Palestinian moderates indulge eliminationist rhetoric when they think they are among friends. Palestinian chief Abbas spends a good deal of time talking about the need to understand what Adolf Hitler was trying to accomplish. Advocates of the supposed two-state solution must either ignore these facts or insist that it does not matter whether the Palestinians accept a two-state solution; that Western idealists must somehow accept a two-state solution on their behalf.

As a purely humanitarian question, it is not at all clear that what the two-staters propose is good for the Palestinians. Hamas is not some exogenous force imposed on the Arabs of Palestine and it is not going away—whether the elements that compose it are called “Hamas” five years from now or are called something else is hardly material. You can go to any number of mainstream newspapers and wire services (many of them hostile to the Jewish state) and see photos and videos of aid meant for the Palestinians being hijacked by criminal gangs and sold in Palestinian markets—and this does not happen without Hamas’ blessing and cooperation or without Hamas getting its cut. And if our humanitarian concerns also extend to the Jewish people—the murdered, the tortured, the raped, the hostages—then giving Hamas or its reconstituted elements state-like powers is obviously the wrong thing to do, in very much the same way that the Taliban was awful as an insurgent militia but a much more significant problem for the rest of the world when it assumed power in Afghanistan.

If the argument is that there is some kind of moral urgency pushing us to recognize the national aspirations of the Palestinians, consider me among the unmoved. There are sovereignty-minded people in Catalonia, Quebec, and Texas, too. I cannot think of a good reason to move the heroes of the Battle of Sbarro (because murdering pregnant American women eating pizza is the stuff of which Palestinian heroes apparently are made) to the front of the line. I can think of many good reasons to move them to the back. 

Sentimentality will not do. The point of American policy is to serve American interests, and the American interests here are pretty straightforward: We have a reliable ally in the region whose security is of political, diplomatic, military, and economic interest to the United States, while none of those interests are served by empowering—even if only rhetorically and symbolically—those who as a matter of publicly stated principle seek to eliminate that ally in toto. And it is impossible to take seriously the Panglossian proposition that we can have a Palestinian state in which such eliminationist elements do not predominate—presumably, a Palestinian state will contain a great many Palestinians, and the genocidal attitude toward the Jewish state has not been imposed on the Arabs of Palestine by some mysterious act of colonial hypnosis. The desire to apply some kind of moral quarantine around the Palestinian people may be understandable, and it may be charitable, but it is profoundly foolish. Vicious Arab antisemitism is a fact of life. 

Maybe there is a way to educate (which is to say, propagandize) the Arab world out of its pathological Jew hatred, but that is a very iffy and long-term proposition–one might reasonably want to see some evidence of meaningful and durable progress on that front before blessing the prospect of a Palestinian state. Maybe we should let the Palestinians put a few decades between themselves and their most recent programmatic murder of actual babies before we take their aspirations toward national sovereignty as a serious moral concern.

The Middle East is a region that would seem to be positively chock full of no alternatives. But, as it turns out, there was an alternative to the Iranian nuclear deal: destroying Iranian nuclear facilities and killing critical personnel. Likewise, there is an alternative to the two-state solution: killing Hamas fighters and their political leaders, destroying their matériel, seizing their assets and those of their collaborators, and stripping them and their allies of what trappings of sovereignty they already enjoy. If that means that the Palestinians must continue to languish as wards of the Israeli state, the United Nations, and international humanitarians, consider that this already is the status quo and probably should remain such wards until they can figure out how to conduct their affairs without a national identity based on the murder of Jews.

That may not be the most pleasing outcome we could dream of, but we know what the actual alternative looks like, and it isn’t some Palestinian answer to George Washington, or even Lee Kuan Yew, building a prosperous and orderly and decent society—it is a world in which every day is October 7.