Rape, mutilate, and slaughter your neighbors, and you’ll get a state of your own. That is precisely the message that the Biden administration is sending to Hamas and the rest of the Palestinians.

As early as Oct. 8, while Israel was still repelling the terrorists who had carried out the atrocities of the prior day, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated Washington’s commitment to a two-state solution. President Joe Biden and other officials have said the same since.

A two-state solution may be long-standing U.S. policy, but that doesn’t make it good policy. Rather than recognize that a Palestinian state would be a terror hub and destabilize the Middle East, the Biden administration is indulging the delusion that it would be a responsible actor.

Consider who would govern a Palestinian state. Two camps currently vie for power. The first is the Islamists in Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and the second is Fatah’s secular nationalists running the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The former are much more popular than the latter. According to a recent poll by the Arab World for Research and Development, 87.7% of Palestinians in the West Bank have a very positive or somewhat positive view of Hamas, whereas just 26.6% have a very positive or somewhat positive view of Fatah.

Free and fair Palestinian elections would propel Islamist terrorists to power, much as they did Hamas in Gaza. Hamas’s malignant rule there previews what would happen to the West Bank if Islamists also controlled it.

Fatah is scarcely better. The group is weak, venal, and unpopular. President Mahmoud Abbas, who is now 88 years old, is still serving out the four-year term he won in 2005.

Although seen as the more moderate faction, Fatah supports terrorism with alacrity. Through a “pay for slay” policy, it unapologetically disburses payments to terrorists who attack Jews and their families. It has also refused to condemn the Oct. 7 massacre, blaming it instead on the Israelis.

If given the trappings of a state, the Palestinian leadership in either group would pose a mortal threat to Israel, the greatest source of American power in the region. Unless a serious peace partner emerges, which appears unlikely, the Israelis would have to be suicidal to acquiesce in a Palestinian state.

A Palestinian state would also threaten friendly Arab regimes — none more so than Jordan, whose monarchy was almost overthrown by Palestinian militants in 1970, and Egypt, where the Sinai Peninsula is teeming with jihadists. Both countries have tellingly said they won’t take any Palestinian refugees.

It isn’t hard to see where a Palestinian state would fit on the geopolitical chessboard: it would be a terror state supported by Iran, China, and Russia. Why should the United States support the creation of a state that would be decidedly aligned with its enemies?

Past and present champions of a two-state solution haven’t grappled with that question. Instead they cling to shibboleths, one being that the lack of a Palestinian state precludes wider Arab-Israeli reconciliation. “The Arab countries have made clear that they will not make peace with Israel without resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” John Kerry asserted in December 2016. He was proven very wrong four years later when the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel.

Another shibboleth is that a Palestinian state is in America’s interests. There are enough unstable authoritarian regimes in the Middle East as it is. Why make another?

There are only bad alternatives. Israel could maintain the status quo in the West Bank and reoccupy Gaza. Egypt, Jordan, or an international coalition could administer the Palestinian territories. Though far from ideal, these options are far preferable to a Palestinian state.

Daniel J. Samet is a pre-doctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins SAIS and a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is completing his dissertation on U.S.-Israel defense relations.