by JPost
Pushing for a two-state solution now is unmoored from reality, as Palestinians have shown no ability or willingness to run a peaceful entity alongside Israel.
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As Israelis sit down this evening for their Rosh Hashanah meal, dipping apples in honey for a sweet year, a UN conference on the eve of the General Assembly’s opening will be unfolding – one that promises to leave a bitter taste in the country’s collective mouth.
Co-chaired by Saudi Arabia and France, the conference is titled the “High-Level International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution.” For the first time, several Western democracies – led by France – are expected to recognize a Palestinian state. Britain, Canada, and Australia already did so on Sunday.
That these countries are prepared to recognize a nonexistent Palestinian state is a mistake. It will do nothing to promote peace in the region and will instead give a tailwind to the terrorists and Islamic extremists who carried out the October 7 massacre.
However Paris and London try to spin it, the takeaway on the Palestinian street will be clear: 32 years after the signing of the Oslo Accords – which state that Palestinian statehood would come only at the end of a negotiated process – a Palestinian state, even a fictitious one, has been delivered not through compromise, change, or negotiation, but through brutal, mind-numbing terrorism.
In other words: Terrorism pays.
But this is an illusion. Declarations of statehood will not conjure a state into existence if Israel is opposed. Israel controls the territory, and unless it withdraws its troops, no “Palestine” is going to emerge.
Israel will not remove its troops if Palestinians don't change
And Israel is not going to remove its troops – not now nor in the foreseeable future – until there is a fundamental change in Palestinian society.Until the Palestinians accept that the Jewish state is here to stay, that it cannot be wished or fought away, and that their only option is to live beside it rather than in place of it, no progress will be possible.
Moves like the one at the UN do not bring that realization closer. They push it further away. Rather than rushing to recognize a make-believe Palestinian state, the world should be demanding Palestinian deradicalization – not only in Gaza, where Hamas rules, but also in Judea and Samaria, where support for the October 7 massacre is even higher.
Peace, as Oslo tragically demonstrated, is not made through declarations. In 1993, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat signed an agreement, and much of the world – including many in Israel – were foolhardy enough to believe that was enough; that leaders sign a piece of paper, and peace flows like a river.
It doesn’t. Peace requires changes in mindset and behavior, neither of which has emerged. The Palestinians responded to various generous offers of statehood in the 1990s with the Second Intifada, and to the granting of a Palestinian ministate in Gaza in 2005 with the October 7 massacre.
The world, with its recognition of a Palestinian state, is now once again going down the same rabbit hole – insisting that Palestinian violence and terrorism are merely symptoms of statelessness. Give the Palestinians a state, they say, and they will have no incentive to murder Israelis.
There is absolutely no historical evidence to support that wishful thinking; the opposite is true.
Pushing for a two-state solution now is unmoored from reality. After more than 30 years, the Palestinians have shown no ability – or willingness – to run a peaceful entity alongside Israel, and Israelis have lost all belief that the Palestinians even want to.
While the world keeps pushing a two-state solution, Israelis have long soured on the idea – not because their hearts have hardened or their minds have closed, but because of bitter experience. Time and again, when Israel gave up land – the premise of a two-state solution – that land was not used to build Palestinian independence or prosperity but as a launching pad to attack Israel.
France, the UK, Canada, and Australia can say what they will. But without Israel’s agreement, there will be no Palestinian state. And that agreement will not come without a profound, sustained change in Palestinian behavior and mindset.
All the rest is just vacuous moral preening – grand declarations that may win applause in London and Paris but do absolutely nothing to change the reality on the ground in the Mideast.
JPost
Source: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-868294
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