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By Dan Perry
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The catastrophe in the Middle East since Oct. 7, 2023, has reignited discussions about a Palestinian state. We are told that Saudi Arabia still conditions peace with Israel on the creation of one, and voices across the West might leave a listener thinking that anything else would be a historical abomination.
I categorically favor Israel not controlling millions of Palestinians by force, and I wish for my Palestinian friends to be happy and fulfilled; if statehood is what would do it, I'm down. But the idea of an inalienable Palestinian right to nation-state status is wobbly at best, and may be damaging to all sides.
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It may be damaging because it might not be possible. When the impossible is treated as indispensable, problems follow, as they have in the 35 years since the first efforts to engineer a two-state solution. Here are the problems:
- The Holy Land is small. The heart of the place is about 100 miles of Mediterranean coastline—a temperate zone south of the Galilee hills and north of the Negev desert with an average width until the Jordan River of about 50 miles. Cramming two countries in there is hard; a pullout by Israel from the West Bank (the eastern slice of this area) would leave it 12 miles wide at the narrowest point. That would be dicey even if your region wasn't overflowing with jihadism.
- The effort to begin a partition with the Gaza Strip has failed colossally. Israel handed it to the more moderate Palestinian Authority in 2005, but it was expelled two years later by Hamas, which has courted war with Israel ever since. Since the massacre of 1,200, which Hamas staged 16 months ago, they got a big one. I don't know how you convince Israel to try it again in the West Bank. It would mean that areas a few miles from the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem would be under Palestinian control, perhaps soon falling to jihadis once more.
- During this entire period, the Palestinians failed to prepare for statehood in any mature way. The Palestinian Authority is corrupt, ineffectual and undemocratic; Hamas in Gaza has run a satanical mafia state, half theocracy and half kleptocracy, indoctrinating the youth for barbarism while crushing the spirit of the adults.
- Given this history, any Israeli government of the foreseeable future would demand that a Palestinian state be demilitarized, with severe restrictions of the weapons even a police force can carry. The Palestinians will reject this.
- Indeed, the Palestinians are generally inflexible because they believe demography is on their side and the Jews will eventually run away. Inter alia, they demand control of half of Jerusalem, including the walled Old City—which, again, means dividing a city between countries where large minorities, especially from the Palestinian side, will want to cause mayhem with terrorism. Israel is very unlikely to ever agree to this. It's lazy to claim this would be easy; the closest I can find to such a divided city is Nicosia, Cyprus, with not one-tenth the level of potential animosity.
I've always supported the two-state efforts and would do so again. I hold this view because the default outcome, a continuation of the status quo, is a single half-Arab half-Jewish country that will not be democratic, because the Jews will not let the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians be citizens; it also will not be at peace. But that doesn't mean I don't see the problems in insisting that the Palestinians must have all the trappings of a separate independent state, such as a military and an air force and full control of borders.
Is it inconceivable to seek alternatives? One idea might be to append parts of the West Bank, including its main cities, to neighboring Jordan—and have them be a demilitarized province of the larger country. Maybe Gaza can be appended to neighboring Egypt, or be an international protectorate, totally demilitarized. There are problems with both scenarios—for one thing neither country wants any more Palestinians—but problem-free options don't exist.
Meanwhile, telling the Palestinians that national self-determination is a natural right of all peoples is a lie.
According to studies, there are over 10,000 identifiable ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious groups in the world (and according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, indigenous peoples alone account for approximately 5,000 distinct cultures). Many of them far more distinctive than the Palestinians, who are scarcely different from Sunni Lebanese or Syrians (indeed, until the creation of Israel there was no reference to a Palestinian people, any more than there was a Jordanian people).
Yet there are only about 200 recognized countries. We do not live in a world of thousands of microstates. Only a few groups achieve statehood, and it's a function of power, will, cleverness, geography, circumstances, and luck.
The very construct is newish. For most of history, empires, kingdoms, and city-states defined political organization. National self-determination—where the entirety of a group with a shared characteristic (like language) govern themselves—only gained traction in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly with Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points and post-colonial independence movements (which often, ironically, created incoherent and artificial states. And it was always selectively applied.
Political theorists long argued that the world is a competition of power, not a landscape of moral entitlements. Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, depicted life as a "nasty, brutish, and short"—a war of all against all. This is particularly relevant in an era symbolized by leaders like President Donald Trump, who appears almost devoid of values. It is an extension of the principles of the Renaissance political philosopher Nicolo Machiavelli, who said political success comes from seizing opportunities—not pressing moral claims or grievance narratives.
Plenty of groups have strong national identities, long histories, and often overwhelming cases for self-rule, yet remain stateless: the Kurds, a distinct ethnic group of 35-40 million people spread across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, are continuously denied independence because regional powers oppose it; the Tibetans, annexed by China in 1951 with no country daring to challenge it; the Uyghurs, who face a cultural genocide (at least according to the United States) in China's Xinjiang region but lack a path to independence; the Chechens, who fought two wars against Russia for independence, only to be crushed; the many indigenous groups of Latin America; the Basques and Catalans; the list goes on.
Meanwhile, some groups fought successfully to grab a territory (like Vietnam or Algeria) or to unify tribes under a common language (like Germany and Italy). That applies, too, to the unusual case of the Jews, scattered to the winds and reconvening 2,000 years (and one extraordinary tragedy) later in Israel.
Human history is an unbroken chain of conquest, displacement, and absorption. All of humanity originates from Africa; everything beyond that point is a story of migration, conflict, and domination. France exists not because of an eternal right of the French to that land but because, at various points in history, different groups—the Franks, the Romans, the Gauls—fought and prevailed. Britain is an amalgamation of Celts, Saxons, Normans, and countless others who conquered and were conquered. The idea that any group has an inalienable right to a specific territory is historically untenable.
Understanding this reality clarifies the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The question is not whether Palestinians deserve a state—by that logic, so do many others. It's whether they have the power, wiles, and circumstances for it.
And here, the Palestinians have repeatedly undermined their own case. They have refused multiple offers that would have given them a foothold for sovereignty, allowed extremist groups like Hamas to flourish, miseducated their public—especially their youth—with narratives that maniacally glorify violence, and clung to implausible goals such as a full return to land that has been Israel for more than 75 years. Israel has crazies too, but its national movement was very much sane.
Moreover, the very notion of Palestinian statehood plays into the arbitrary nature of borders in the Middle East, many of which were drawn by colonial powers with little regard for the identities of those they ruled. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, a secret deal between Britain and France, carved up the region into artificial states that persist today. The Arab League already has 22 states—which, with a few exceptions, basically speak the same language. It is laughable that well-meaning know-nothings on American campuses will devote such energies to creating the 23rd, and care nothing for the Kurds.
It is easy to chant that the Palestinians must have a state, that anything less is a moral outrage. Coddling them that way does them no favors. Rather, it has led them down a cul-de-sac. At the end of it stands Trump, with his loopy ideas about depopulating Gaza, owning it, and building magnificent resorts.
Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem and the author of two books. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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