There Is No Palestinian State – Kevin D. Williamson

You wouldn’t know that from the formalities: Almost as many countries recognize the so-called Palestinian state as recognize Israel. But a Palestinian state cannot be wished into existence. It cannot be created by means of a declaration or a polite diplomatic fiction. A state is not a moral condition or an accoutrement of a people’s shared aspiration. A state is an apparatus that does things: providing security, law, governance, and other public goods. There is nothing in Gaza that even comes close to approximating a Palestinian state, nor is there a functioning state overseen by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank in anything but name. 

A state that cannot—or will not—perform the functions of a state is not a state. It is no more a state than a plastic banana is a piece of fruit. Keir Starmer could declare that an ostrich feather at the end of a silk thread is an anchor, but the ship will be adrift even if he shouts down the Jew-hating loons (Hitler was a Zionist!) in his Labour Party, which didn’t even get around to expelling antisemitic crackpot Jeremy Corbyn until last summer.

What the unfortunate Palestinians have is a third-rate mafia in the West Bank and a ragtag gaggle of half-assed warlords in Gaza sponsored and enabled by fanatics in Tehran and self-interested enablers from Doha to Riyadh to Turtle Bay. It is not as though the Arabs of Palestine could not someday build a state out of that sorry material: We’ve seen states grow out of mafias and warlordism before (e.g., essentially every European monarchy, on a sufficiently long timeline), but the process takes resources and a great deal of time. If a state is the butterfly you get after the metamorphosis of a “stationary bandit” as Mancur Olson put it (and I very much subscribe to his view), then the practical foundation of any Palestinian state is still very much in the larval phase, with no suggestion of a chrysalis being constructed.

Perhaps Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron mean to help build a Palestinian state, but there are problems with that proposition, too. I write this as an admirer of both countries and someone who is well-disposed toward Macron, but neither the United Kingdom nor France has the money, the guns, or the guts to get the job done. And the task requires all three: The United States had more than enough money and guns to do in Iraq what was done in post-war Japan, but Americans no longer have the national will for that sort of thing. Without the means and the conviction, all Starmer and Macron are proposing is to marginally undermine the Jewish state—and Israel is a state—in its current project, which is, let me remind you, a war for national survival against an exterminationist enemy.

You can declare that the Palestinians deserve a state—why not? You can go on and declare that they deserve a good state, a functional and humane one like what they enjoy in Switzerland or Denmark. And what will the Palestinians have after that declaration? A half-organized bouquet of murderers and rapists and thieves and imbecilic fanatics.

The suffering of the noncombatant civilians in Gaza is an outrage and an offense against decency—one that is being carried out by the Arab warlords and mafiosi of Gaza, not by the Jewish state. One need not think well of Benjamin Netanyahu (and I think his time has passed) to be perplexed, as I am perplexed, by polite world opinion regarding the Israeli government’s responsibility in this war, which was a war of the Arabs’ choosing, launched by a massacre of civilians accompanied by the torture and rape of civilians. Of course the Israelis should conduct the war with due regard for humanitarian concerns—and the Israelis have taken adequate and at times extraordinary measures to address these. Hamas, on the other hand, has cynically labored to maximize the suffering of Palestinian civilians, embedding its fighters and matériel among the civilian population, manipulating the supply of food relief and other aid, etc.

But a decent regard for civilian life is apparently not enough—at least, not enough when it comes to the singular case of the Jewish state. Instead, we have the English and the French (two countries with long and ugly traditions of antisemitism) pronouncing themselves so shocked by the unseemly spectacle of Jews fighting back when threatened with—let me remind you—national extermination that they propose to recognize a Palestinian state not because there is one or because such a declaration would do a lick of good for the Gazans, but simply to punish the Jews for defending themselves in a way that offends certain European sensibilities, including some unlovely ones. It is merely a rhetorical cudgel to use against the Israelis, not a recognition of any relevant fact. This produces reliably idiotic outcomes, e.g., Starmer’s proposition to forgo recognizing a Palestinian state if the Israelis and the Palestinians satisfy certain political demands of his—as though the existence of a state that could be fruitfully recognized were a matter of how one largely irrelevant Englishman feels about it.

The highest priority for the Israeli government is protecting civilians—Israeli civilians. For Israel, the protection of Palestinian civilians, however worthy a goal, cannot reasonably be treated as a concern of equal weight, much less as a superordinate priority. To expect the Israelis to proceed as though their own national interests should be subordinated to the humanitarian interests of the people whose political leaders are trying to murder them en masse is absurd—and something that would be demanded of no other people in this world fighting for their survival. 

Job No. 1 for the Israelis, whoever leads the government, is securing Israeli lives against murder and atrocity. That is what a state does. And the Israelis have a remarkably functional state, irrespective of whether certain Middle Eastern potentates choose to recognize it or not. 

Securing legitimate Israeli interests requires the complete dissolution of Hamas, root and branch, and further degradation of the networks of radicalism and militancy that enable the murder and brutalization of Israeli civilians. The Arabs of Palestine and their patrons in Tehran launched a vicious war that they could not hope to win and that has cost the Palestinians—and their patrons—more than they had calculated. You know that the Jews are winning when the United Nations starts crying “Peace!”

The unusually heavy expectations put upon Israel don’t make any sense unless one takes into consideration the generally unstated view that much of the world holds in common with Hamas: that the Jewish state is illegitimate and, hence, that it cannot be legitimately defended. That belief is simply incompatible with peace, properly understood.

If it is peace they want, then the Palestinians can have peace whenever they want it. If they had a lick of sense or the collective self-respect necessary for healthy nationhood, then they would fight alongside the Israelis—who are, after all, the only people in the world willing to actually shed their own blood combating the ghastly little cabal of murderers, rapists, and thieves who are, in fact, oppressing the people of Gaza.

The Palestinians cannot choose war and then pretend that they have not also chosen the consequences of war that are currently on disturbing display in Gaza. You buy the ticket, you take the ride—and that holds true for the acquiescent Palestinian population at large as much as it does for Hamas per se. 

If we believe that the Palestinians are people with moral agency like any other, then we must face head-on the fact that they have not lifted a finger to resist Hamas et al. and have, in fact, been willing and at times gleefully bloodthirsty collaborators. If the Palestinians would but rouse themselves to the most modest degree, they would find support from all quarters—not least from the Israelis, who understand that they are never going to have a normal national life living in intimate proximity to a radical population waiting to murder them at the first opportunity. A single authentic gesture toward real peace would transform life in Gaza and the West Bank—and, indeed, throughout the region. That is the power the Palestinians have, and it is, in a sense, the only power they have.

Instead of doing themselves a favor, the Palestinians have chosen a route that makes Palestinian sovereignty plainly and obviously incompatible with Israeli security. You cannot build a two-state solution on that foundation, but you do not need to do so, either, because there is no Palestinian state and not much chance of one in the foreseeable future. You need two states for a two-state solution, happy diplomatic daydreaming notwithstanding. And so we are stuck with the situation nobody wants, one in which the Palestinians will perforce remain wards of the Israeli state and of the so-called international community, i.e., the worst-case scenario except for all the others.