The United States does everything possible to prevent peace in the Middle East by still pushing for a two-state solution. None of the countries in the Middle East cares about a Palestinian state. The US would do well to learn from them.
The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and later the Palestinian Authority (PA), both under the firm control of Yasir Arafat, made sure that nobody moved to make peace with Israel without the Palestinians getting their own state. Anwar Sadat made peace with Israel in 1979 and paid with his life, with members of the Muslim Brotherhood killing the Egyptian president who dared to go to Jerusalem to address the Knesset. The late King Hussein, in spite of so many smiling pictures with Arafat, survived numerous assassination attempts orchestrated by the Palestinian leader. The general rule in the past was that no country would move with Israel if the Palestinians did not approve.
One cannot overstate the accomplishment of Donald Trump and his associates in getting Dubai, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and Morocco to make formal peace agreements with Israel via the open-ended “Abraham Accords”. I personally never thought that I would see any of these countries, but companies like Emirates that once refused to allow Israeli passport holders onto their planes today serve kosher food on their daily flights to and from Israel. The leaders of these countries, after seventy years of kowtowing to the Palestinians and promising not to move without the latter’s approval, finally realized that their financial, military, and technological needs would benefit via direct relations with the Jewish state. Saudi-Israeli peace discussions are supposedly in advanced discussions, and for the first time an Israeli minister led a group officially to a meeting in the Saudi capital. My accountant said that a friend of his wore a kippah on his head and went around unmolested in Riyadh. Again, this is not something I would have ever imagined. I still remember when a sitting non-Jewish US senator was not allowed into the country to visit US forces during Desert Storm because he had an Israeli stamp in his passport. Only a new emergency passport from the US embassy allowed him to enter the country. How times have changed.
So where does that leave the Palestinians? Pretty much in the dust. All of the countries that formerly funded them and paid lip-service to no peace before the Palestinians had peace have left them behind. Those countries have come to the realization that a nuclear Iran and a hi-tech Israel make for new calculations. Billions in deals and investments have been made between Israel and its Abraham Accord partners and tens of thousands of Israelis have visited countries which only a few years ago were formally in a state of war with the Jewish state. The Palestinians overplayed their hand, expecting countries to deny themselves advanced military hardware and agricultural technology forever while the intransigent Arafat and his similarly disposed successor did nothing to advance peace with Israel. The Palestinians expected their Arab brethren to toe the line forever, while Arab leaders realized that they could not deny themselves any longer the possible fruits of Israeli know-how and intelligence. The Abraham Accords were an earthquake for the Palestinians; a signed Saudi-Israeli peace deal with full normalization, flights, investment and technological sharing would be a tsunami washing over Ramallah.
The fact of the matter is that throughout the decades, the Arab countries never cared about the Palestinians. We had a Palestinian carpenter from Hebron over for some work and he said that during his stay in Saudi Arabia, the locals treated their sheep better than they treated him and his fellow Palestinians. Lebanon remembers that Arafat and his fighters destabilized the beautiful country and helped to plunge it into fifteen years of civil war. Even today, Lebanese forces have to deal with violence in Palestinian refugee camps (that have been around for nearly 80 years—the Lebanese have no interest in giving these people citizenship). Fear of Arafat and his terrorist associates made countries toe the line; even after his death and the rise of Mahmud Abbas, Arab countries were leery of crossing the Palestinians. The odd story of an Israeli athlete playing in an Arab country or some containers of Israeli produce surprisingly showing up in one of these countries led to denunciation and promises that it would never happen again.
The only countries that actually care about the Palestinians on the face of it are the Western powers. The US and “Quartet” members are always repeating the “two state” mantra, though there can never be two states here, and not for a lack of real estate. The Palestinians do not recognize Israel as Jewish state and have continuously made demands for Tel Aviv and Haifa in the same terms used for Gaza and the west bank. The Palestinians do not recognize any right of Israel to exist, and just this week the major Palestinian student organization in the US celebrated the beginning of the Second Intifada twenty-three years ago. The intifada was directed at civilians; the Palestinians did not attack military or government targets. They blew up buses, shot up civilian vehicles and detonated themselves in crowded cafes and hotels. They are murderers of women and children and have no morals whatsoever. One cannot compare Israeli attacks on Palestinian terror infrastructure, with collateral civilian damage to intentional attacks against civilians in the most depraved manner possible. I met up last week with the doctor who took a Philips screw out of my arm after a suicide bombing in downtown Jerusalem. The Palestinians want to kill Jews and destroy Israel. That is the sum total of their foreign policy.
The best the Palestinians might get is a reservation-type arrangement that the US gave Indians and the British gave the Aborigines. They will not have a state. They will not have heavy weaponry of real armed forces. They will not control international borders such as those of Jordan and Syria. The US, uncreative as usual, will continue bleating on about “two states for two people”. The regional Arab states realize that that train left the station a long time ago. The Palestinians may one day wake up and try to get the best deal that they can. Until then, they can rely on the US to push something that will never happen. Israelis will pay the price of the US catering to Palestinian fantasies. The US should learn from the pragmatism of the Abraham Accord signatories and stop pushing Palestinian statehood.
