When Palestinians get a sovereign state of their own, they will be able to look back and thank Benjamin Netanyahu for helping to make it possible, albeit unintentionally.
His unyielding opposition – not counting a coerced and later recanted endorsement in 2009 – to the two-state solution is no doubt sincere, but welcome to the land of unintended consequences.
France and Saudi Arabia are preparing to lead a UN conference in New York later this month to discuss the establishment of the sovereign State of Palestine. They may try to admit it as a full member of the UN, but Donald Trump will veto it, just as Joe Biden did last year.
If there’s one thing the two presidents agree on it is that statehood must be the result of a peace agreement between the two sides.
Unilateral moves are ineffective
Unilateral moves like those French President Emmanuel Macron is talking about may feel good for some, but they are at best meaningless and more likely counter-productive, since they give the Palestinians a false sense of confidence and motivation to harden their demands.
The Palestinians’ maximalist approach has prevented progress and led moderate secular Arab states to lose patience and drop their old pledges of no peace with Israel without a Palestinian deal. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco have signed the Abraham Accords, and the White House has said it expects others to join soon, including Saudi Arabia.
Many policy mavens believe Hamas’s motivation for its October 7 terrorist attack was to block Saudi normalization with Israel. It worked, but only temporarily, and eventually triggered the destruction of Hamas – and the devastation of most of Gaza – by Israel with the Saudis’ blessing.
The accords are a victory for Netanyahu, and the Trump administration, and the Israeli leader’s strategy of bypassing the Palestinians on the road to peace with the Arab world. But it is no substitute for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Netanyahu’s position on the two-state solution remains “no, never,” but to his dismay, he has made some important moves to pave the way toward Palestinian sovereignty by removing some of his best excuses.
Mark these dates on your 2024 calendar: April 19, September 27, October 16 and 26, and December 8. That’s when Netanyahu lost his strongest arguments against Palestinian statehood.
On April 19, the Israel Air Force decimated Iran’s primary air defense system and went back on October 26 to take out its remaining S-300 SAM batteries, missile production capabilities, and a nuclear weapons facility.
Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, was killed on September 27 by the IAF, which destroyed much of the missile arsenal of the Lebanon-based Iranian proxy. The heavily armed terror group was supposed to be Tehran’s front-line retaliation in case Israel attacked Iran, but the threat was largely removed.
Hamas has been taking a severe beating in Gaza and was decapitated on October 16 when Israel removed the October 7 mastermind, Yahya Sinwar. Gruesome videos of his killing were widely distributed for his supporters to see.
By the end of the year, Iran lost its last ally on Israel’s border, the Assad regime in Syria. Ahmed al-Sharaa, the new Syrian leader, has no love for Iran, has said he doesn’t want any conflict with Israel, and is open to cooperation against “common enemies.”
France and Britain are threatening to recognize the Palestinian state for all the wrong reasons: anger and frustration with Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis it has fostered. Already three-quarters of UN member states have formally announced recognition.
Netanyahu has resisted calls to begin planning for the day after the war ends, beyond endorsing Trump’s proposal to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza and send in the real estate developers to turn it into a riviera with luxury hotels, condos, and a Trump Tower.
Steps toward Palestinian statehood
The outrage over Hamas’s brutal massacre and Israel’s deadly and destructive retaliation have focused world attention on the largely ignored Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There have been no serious peace negotiations for more than a decade.
A new attention-getter was provided last week by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich when he announced plans for 22 new West Bank settlements, acknowledging they are intentional obstacles to Palestinian statehood and another step toward annexation.
Unlike its predecessors, the Trump administration has been ambivalent on annexation and supportive of settlements.
The one-state solution Netanyahu and his partners envision means Israel can either be democratic or Jewish, but it can’t be both.
New leadership is essential if Israel and the Palestinians are to have peace. Corruption and authoritarianism at the top have led voters on both sides to lose faith in their governments.
The Palestinian Authority is unresponsive to people’s needs, incompetent, corrupt, authoritarian, and brutal; the Netanyahu government, populated with ultra-nationalists and racists, has worked fervently to undermine democratic institutions, and its tolerance and even encouragement of corruption rivals that of the current president in Washington.
Most Israelis would support statehood but only if they were confident it would “bring them security,” and that means demilitarization, said David Makovsky of the Washington Institute.
To convince Israelis to elect a government willing to take the historic risks for peace and statehood, the Palestinian public and leadership must persuade Israeli voters that they have a neighbor genuinely ready to live in peace. Palestine must also convince Jordan, with its 65% Palestinian population, that it will not pose a threat to its independence.
Palestinians have no Arab role models to look to for guidance in building a secular, democratic nation-state. In fact, other Arabs could see a popular, democratic Palestine as a threat that might stir unrest among their own people
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (New York) said: “The only real and sustainable solution to this decades-old conflict is a negotiated two-state solution, a demilitarized Palestinian state, living side by side with Israel in equal measures of peace, security, prosperity, dignity, and mutual recognition.”
Netanyahu has been lobbying every member of Congress he meets, trying to convince them that a Palestinian state would be an Iranian terrorist base and an existential threat to Israel, and sovereignty would be a reward for the Hamas atrocities of October 7.
Palestinian statehood is still well in the future, but Netanyahu has unintentionally undercut his own argument with big steps in the right direction by making peace with secular Arab states and striking severely damaging blows to Israel’s enemies in all directions.
The writer is a Washington-based journalist, consultant, lobbyist, and a former legislative director at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
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2025-06-04 21:33:00
