Brokering a peace deal to end the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through the so-called two-state solution has been a foreign policy objective of every U.S. president of the past four decades. While the idea of Palestine and Israel existing side by side remains the darling of the Israeli and American Left, October 7 and the regional war in its aftermath bear witness to the impossibility of this prospect, and make the need for new peace resolutions all the more urgent. 

Numerous problems prevent the conventional two-state solution from facilitating a lasting peace. Most notably, the Palestinians don’t want it. And second, it doesn’t resolve the regional conflict between Israel and Iran’s “resistance axis” of terrorist proxies, which has been fully exposed in the past two years.  

Palestinian rejections of the two-state solution stem back to 1947, when the Arab leadership opposed the UN partition plan that would have granted Arabs complete sovereignty over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. After Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, the West Bank was annexed by Jordan, granting Palestinians Jordanian citizenship, while the Gaza Strip fell under Egyptian occupation. 

Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our latest print magazine.

During the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel expanded its defensive borders to include the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights after repelling a joint Arab invasion. The Arab loss of those territories was redefined as Israeli settler colonialism and fueled a narrative that Israel had occupied the national Palestinian homeland. The two decades of Arab sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that could have ushered in a Palestinian state were quickly forgotten.

In 2000, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak met at Camp David to discuss a proposition that would turn over the entire Gaza Strip, more than 90 percent of the West Bank, and East Jerusalem to Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. But Arafat walked away from the offer and two months later ignited the Second Intifada against Israel. 

Five years later, the Israeli government unilaterally withdrew its military forces, expelled over 9,000 Jewish residents from the Gaza Strip, and turned the territory over to the newly elected Hamas government in an effort to trade land for peace. Rather than build a prosperous state, Hamas funneled nearly all humanitarian aid and international financial support into its military complex and stockpiled an arsenal to carry out attacks against Israel, thus showing the world a glimpse of what Palestinians will do with a two-state solution.

President Donald Trump also proposed a two-state solution in his ambitious “Peace to Prosperity” plan during his first administration in 2020. The plan called for Palestinian political self-determination in sections of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and envisioned the integration of a new Palestinian economy into regional and global markets. But, following precedent, the Palestinian leadership rejected Trump’s proposal. 

After October 7, the only pathway for peace in President Joe Biden’s administration was to reward Palestinian terrorism with sovereignty and security. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2024, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for “a practical, timebound, irreversible path to a Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace with Israel, with the necessary security arrangements for both peoples.” By now, the cracks in the two-state policy were fully exposed, making its supporters appear all the more delusional for believing that Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and the seven other known Palestinian terrorist groups operating in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would willingly lay down their arms and coexist peacefully with their Jewish–Israeli neighbors once a Palestinian state was established. 

The current Palestinian leadership has no intention of making peace with Israel, and Jerusalem is fully aware of this. “Israel knows today, and the world should know now that the Palestinians never wanted to have a state next to Israel,” said Israeli Ambassador to the U.K. Tzipi Hotovely in an interview after October 7. As Gadi Taub at Tablet noted, “Having witnessed the vast majority of the Palestinian public cheer Hamas’ savagery, the last thing Israelis wanted to hear was plans for future partition of their land, never mind a peace agreement.” The Palestinian mantra “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” chanted by naive masses, is exposed for its literal meaning. The Palestinian leadership wants a one-state solution: the autocratic, Iranian-backed Islamic state of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. “They want to have a state from the river to the sea,” Hotovely reiterated, “They are saying it loud and clear.”

So, what’s the solution? Is peace a mere pipe dream? Perhaps answers can be found outside the conventional two-state solution box.

One major hurdle to regional stability, often ignored by the world, is the fact that Palestinians can’t even live peacefully among themselves. Hamas opposes Fatah; the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade constantly clashes with Palestinian Authority security forces; clan leaders from Hebron to Nablus want their own sovereignty; a woman from Tulkarm won’t marry a man from Bethlehem. Why not divide them up into independent city-states with residents loyal to their clans instead of a single, disunified Palestinian state? 

Israeli scholar of Arab culture and lecturer at Bar-Ilan University Mordechai Kedar is an expert on inter-Palestinian conflict and proposes dividing Palestinian enclaves into independent emirates following the successful and peaceful example of the United Arab Emirates. “Israel should rather follow the successful paradigm — the emirate paradigm — which would be based on the [Palestinian] clans of their cities,” argued Kedar. The difference between this scenario and the situation today, Kedar explained, “is that around 90% of the Arabs who live in Judea and Samaria would be independent and living in states with full citizenship of these states.” It’s a case study worth considering, but one that the autocratic, power-hungry Palestinian Authority will certainly reject.  

Another major hurdle to peace is the wider regional — and at times nearly global — war aimed at the destruction of Israel. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is one theater in Israel’s multi-front and interconnected war against a wider “resistance axis” of terrorist factions in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Documents found by IDF intelligence units on the ground in Gaza reveal how October 7 was part of a larger, coordinated effort by the “resistance axis” to destroy Israel once and for all. Various conflicts that have erupted over the past two years — from IDF ground campaigns in Gaza, to the so-called Twelve-Day War with Iran, to Israeli airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen — may all seem like independent events, but they should be understood as battles or episodes on various fronts in the same regional war that flared after October 7. 

Even off the battlefield, the Palestinian media empire and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) have carried Israeli settler colonialism narratives and the clarion call for the destruction of Israel into corporate, academic, and cultural spheres throughout the world. By linking the anti-Israel movement and its narratives with other trending — albeit contradictory — ideologies, from Black Lives Matter to LGBTQ, the battle cry to destroy Israel has become more palpable and urgent to a surging left-wing global audience. 

Ensuring regional stability through diplomacy might foster more accurate worldviews and facilitate durable pathways for peace. President Trump was perhaps on to something when he broke away from the conventional, decades-long mindset that Palestinians must first make peace with Israel before the rest of the Arab world. Trump’s Abraham Accords, signed in 2020, shored up normalization between Israel and other Arab states in the hope of legitimizing Israel in the eyes of regional neighbors, further isolating Iran, and pressuring the corrupt Palestinian leadership into making peace. 

Although an incredible achievement, the Abraham Accords have their limitations and faults. The Accords’ crown jewel will be a normalization treaty between Israel and Saudi Arabia. But the Saudi de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, has made it crystal clear that there will be no such deal until a Palestinian state is established with East Jerusalem as its capital, and it is evident that the Palestinian leadership has no intention of living peacefully next to Israel. 

In recent days, officials in the UAE — a major player in the Accords — warned Israel that annexing the future site of a Palestinian state in the West Bank is a “red line.” “Annexation would be a red line for my government, and that means there can be no lasting peace. It would foreclose the idea of regional integration and be the death knell of the two-state solution,” Emirati special envoy Lana Nusseibeh reportedly told the Times of Israel.  Even within the Abraham Accords, current and potential Arab partners see the two-state solution as the end goal and raison d’être of their diplomatic relations with Israel.  

Perhaps the creation of an entirely new state, especially one sponsored by terrorism, is not the answer to lasting peace. Although many Palestinians openly supported Hamas on October 7, this hides the fact that numerous other Palestinian communities choose to live peacefully and prosperously within Israel and under Israeli security. A vibrant Palestinian demographic is represented at every major Israeli university, and a Palestinian economic and cultural presence can be felt in mixed cities like Haifa and in peaceful towns such as Abu Ghosh. During Hezbollah’s rocket attacks and the so-called Twelve-Day War, I took cover in public bomb shelters alongside Palestinians, some praying the Rosary and others reading from the Quran, each expressing gratitude for Israel’s Iron Dome protection. Palestinians who live peaceful lives, practice the religion of their choice, and work gainfully within the borders of Israel, while traveling the world on an Israeli passport, are not anomalies. Perhaps the stereotype that all Palestinians are terrorists who hate Israel and wish for the country’s demise is also a hindrance to peace.

The stigmas surrounding a two-state solution and the narrative of “liberating Palestine” have been cultivated as tactics to bolster Palestinian terrorist organizations and their Iranian sponsors. Contrary to media portrayals, the IDF in Gaza and the West Bank is not at war against the Palestinian people. It is at war with Hamas and other terrorist organizations that have manipulated, abused, and exploited the Palestinian people. 

Pathways to peace can only be found where there is the strength and perseverance to eradicate the virus of terrorism. Only then can peace-loving Palestinians and Israelis begin negotiating the next steps toward coexistence without the narratives of hate and fear. 

Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2025 print magazine.