In October 1953, before any “occupied territories” or “open-air prisons,” a group of fedayeen fighters snuck into the village of Yehud, Israel, and threw grenades into the rooms of a mother, Suzanne Kinyas, and her 3-year-old girl and 1-year-old boy, killing them.
In 1979, another group of Arabs, sent by Abu Abbas, today the president of the Palestinian Authority, landed in Nahariya, Israel, on boats and took Danny Haran and his 4-year-old daughter Einat hostage. Danny’s wife, Smadar, escaped by hiding in a crawl space where she accidentally suffocated her crying daughter Yael, who was 2. The terrorists led the father and daughter down to the beach, where they shot Danny point blank in the back of the head and murdered Einat by using the butt of their rifles to bash her head against the rocks.
In 2011, two Palestinians snuck into the town Itamar in Samaria and massacred Ehud and Ruth Fogel and three of their six children: Yoav, 11, Elad, 4, and Hadas, a 3-month-old whom they decapitated. This kind of barbarism has gone on virtually nonstop since the Arabs began their pogroms in Hebron and other cities in the early 20th century, years before there was any Jewish state.
And here we are in 2025. Israeli forensic examinations revealed last week that Palestinians had beaten Ariel (4 years old) and Kfir (9 months) Bibas “with their bare hands” weeks after kidnapping them on Oct. 7, 2023. Hamas probably didn’t initially return the body of their mother, Shiri, also murdered, because, like many others, she was tortured.
And it may well have been that Palestinian “civilians” in Gaza, many of whom participated in the rapes, killing, and kidnapping on Oct. 7, bludgeoned the children to death. Numerous returning hostages tell stories of being held, abused, and hurt by Palestinian “civilians.”
There are no Oskar Schindlers in Gaza. Indeed, the people who show up to cheer Hamas as it hands over tiny coffins, holding Ariel and Kfir, their mother, and an 84-year-old named Oded Lifshitz, do not deserve a state.
Shiri’s coffin featured the words, “Arrested on October 7.” How do you think we would react if a foreign militant army paraded the bodies of murdered American children to cheering crowds? Badly, one imagines.
The barbarians had already forced Yarden Bibas, the father and husband of the murdered, to claim on video that their deaths were a result of Israel Defense Forces air raids. Hamas’s defenders in the West, of course, repeated that lie. But even if that were true, both children would be alive today if Palestinians hadn’t dragged them from their homes to a warzone. Every Palestinian child lost to the war would be alive as well.
Now, I could go on and on about the atrocities perpetrated by Palestinians, the originators of modern terrorism. Whether they were being led by “nationalists” like Yasser Arafat or theocrats like Yahya al Sinwar, the cause has always been predicated on the fiction that one day, the Jews will be swept into the Mediterranean. In this crusade, every Jew, from the tiniest baby to the oldest man, Israeli or not, is a legitimate target. And rejoicing in death, even the death of martyred Palestinian children, is the norm.
The myth of an Arab “Palestine,” a place that has never existed, has plunged the region into an endless state of war, violence, and self-inflicted deprivation. There’s no legitimate moral, historical, or geopolitical case for creating a Palestinian state. And the sooner everyone comes to terms with this fact, the better it will be.
Over the decades, we’ve been programmed to adopt deceptive language to create the perception that a “Palestinian state” was inevitable. But a Jewish person isn’t a “settler” in Judea and Samaria. And Arab cities aren’t more “refugee camps” than Jewish cities are “settlements.” The “West Bank” is not a former state unless we’re talking about the “West Bank of Jordan,” a country with a majority “Palestinian” population that sits predominately on land set aside by the United Nations in a 1947 partition plan.
The word “occupation” is itself misleading. It insinuates that Israel has engaged in wars of expansion and taken lands from other states. From which country did Israel “occupy” the “West Bank” or Gaza? Those areas have always been in dispute. Still, Israel offered both the “West Bank” and Gaza back to Jordan and Egypt, respectively, after winning the 1967 war and only asked for recognition in return. The Arab world could have created a Palestinian state numerous times if it felt like it, but it was interested in creating a quagmire for Israel.
Even “al Nakba,” the origin story of the Palestinian plight, is a myth. Israel agreed to a U.N. plan that would have created a Palestinian state larger than the one offered in any “two-state solution,” but it was rejected. Palestinians, though few called them that, joined the Islamic world in a war of annihilation. Israelis weren’t keen on that proposition, so they fought back and won.
Palestinians are perhaps the only people who rewind history after every failed war.
In the years after the creation of modern Israel, the Islamic world ejected around 750,000 Jews from their ancestral homes, some from communities that predated the Muslim invasions in the 600s. Israel didn’t refer to these expulsions as a “tragedy.” They welcomed those Jews, “racially” indistinguishable from Arabs despite the identitarian fictions of Ta-Nehisi Coates and other ignoramuses, rather than condemning them to forever refugee status. Israel came to terms with reality a long time ago. It’s about time Arabs did as well.
Endless propaganda from Western media, academics, and politicians has convinced many Americans that Arabs of Gaza have centuries-old connections to the land. Not a day goes by that I don’t read some pundit inanely contending that the Israel-Arab conflict goes back thousands of years. Not even Palestinians who live in Gaza, which was virtually empty when Israel won its independence, claim to have some deep connection to the place. Most Palestinians in Gaza live in 70-year-old “refugee camps,” with the help of an entire U.N. agency devoted to keeping them in generational poverty, teeming with people waiting to go back to their imaginary homes in Israel proper. The same can be said for many Arabs in the “West Bank,” which is filled with descendants of Arabs who immigrated to the region in the 20th century, not the ancient Palestinians of the lore.
Then again, decades of violence against Jews have paid political dividends. There is a reason no movement exists to bestow a new state to any other ethnic minority. The Druze, unlike the Palestinians, are a distinct ethnicity. The Kurds, around 40 million spread across the Middle East, are an ancient people. So are the 30 million Igbo in Africa who don’t have a country. The Uyghurs, a truly persecuted people, have yet to see Columbia University students taking up their cause. Maybe if the Rohingya blew up some pizzerias in Jerusalem, they’d get the U.N. and European Union to back their cause.
Still, the world is obsessed with accommodating these Palestinian fictions. There isn’t enough time for us to go into the numerous times Palestinians rejected a state. This week, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert revealed a 2008 map he offered Abbas for a “two-state solution” that would have given the Palestinians over 95% of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, with Israel annexing a Jewish city and making up for it with other land.
Palestinians can never agree to a state because leaders would be immediately overthrown by extremist groups. Even now, the Palestinian Authority, which refuses to have elections, is propping up Israel.
Even the demands of moderate Palestinians can never be met. They will never have control of Jerusalem proper. Any Israeli politician who even broaches the notion of handing over the home of Jewish cultural, religious, and political identity to Fatah is engaging in an act of political suicide. And there will never be a “right to return,” a proposition that would entail giving Israeli citizenship to all the imaginary offspring of the alleged first-generation Palestinian refugees (likely around 6 million).
The favorite slogan of Palestinian and Western allies is “from the river to the sea,” not from “Jordan border to the 1967 armistice lines.”
There is simply no way to placate these people. After Oct. 7, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) naïvely argued that if only Palestinians in Gaza were given economic opportunities, they would drop their violent behavior. This is a tragic misreading of reality. A theocratic government and population who celebrated the wanton murder of toddlers will not become peaceful over a slight uptick in per capita GDP. Unless they have trillions of dollars of oil under the ground, this is not in the cards.
Even after Palestinian Arabs were given autonomy over the Gaza Strip in 2006 after the Israeli government forcibly removed thousands of Jews from the area, the world promised to help them. American Jews purchased 3,000 existing greenhouses, built by Jews from the land, that stood over 1,000 acres for $14 million and bought them “crucial equipment like computerized irrigation systems” and other modern farming systems. Mobs of Palestinians destroyed all of it. This happened before Hamas came to power.
TRUMP’S GAZA PROPOSAL MAKES SENSE
The problem isn’t opportunity. It’s ideology. A nihilistic one incompatible with peace. And if you believe the preponderance of Palestinians are subjugated by their leaders, the world should let them escape the “open-air prisons” and “refugee camps” and wait out the destruction of Israel in the safe environs of Damascus or Riyadh or Cairo just as President Donald Trump has suggested.
Of course, the anti-Israel movements of the West don’t want Palestinians to go anywhere because they are dispensable props in a propaganda war. But they can keep repeating the word “Palestine” all day long. No such Arab state has ever existed, and there is a very high chance that it never will. It’s about time for those who genuinely want to see peace to come to terms with that reality.