As you may know, Elliott Abrams is a long time foreign security advisor, having served under Reagan, G. W. Bush, and Donald Trump. Wikipedia adds this:

 Abrams is considered to be a neoconservative. He was a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as the U.S. Special Representative for Venezuela from 2019 to 2021 and as the U.S. Special Representative for Iran from 2020 to 2021.

I should add that he was born into a Jewish family, though I have no idea if he’s observant now. And Wikipedia adds “[Abrams’s] involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration led to his conviction in 1991 on two misdemeanor counts of unlawfully withholding information from Congress. He was later pardoned by president George H. W. Bush.”

I’m not sure the conviction is relevant to the argument he’s making here, but I don’t want to hide anything. What I think is more relevant is his foreign-policy experience, so at least he has some chops. And this long article from Mosaic, a Jewish organization run by the Tikvah Fund, includes a lot of facts, none of which I found obviously wrong. There is also his “solution” that you can judge for yourself.

Abramas’s thesis is concisely expressed in the title. It jibes pretty much with my own view, except that, as a former exponent of a two-state solution, I thought there might eventually be one. But that was before October 7 of 2023, and now I don’t see a two-state endpoint happening in my lifetime.  Israel doesn’t want it and the Palestinians don’t want it.  If the Palestinians could get some decent leadership not dedicated to wiping out Israel and killing Jews, that would be a different matter, but that leadership hasn’t surfaced (of course perhaps the PA and Hamas is preventing it from surfacing.)

I will summarize with bold headings what I see as Abrams’s main reasons why a Palestinian state will not come to be, though it’s been “recognized” by over a hundred countries. (The U.S. would, in the UN security council, never accept such a state, which is a necessary step for real sovereignty.) But Palestinians themselves will never countenance having their own state so long as it must recognize and coexist peacefully with Israel, and that is why, in the main, Abrams says the “two-state solution” won’t come to be. At the end, Abrams suggests one solution, and though it sounds feasible, I think it’s really a non-starter.

Click on the headline below to read for free:

Remember that dozens have countries, including our European allies, have recognized a state of “Palestine” (details of what they’ve actually recognized are nonexistent). It is, as Abrams says, a reward for Hamas and a rebuke for Israel’s conduct in the war. But should a state be recognized with the aim of lauding terrorists and punishing the only democratic country in the Middle East.  That doesn’t make sense.

A lot of Abrams’s arguments builds on a new book by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, who have summarized their own efforts to create a Palestinian state in the 2025 volume Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine.

Abram’s words are indented in the summary below, but headings are mine.

The opening and the ending. They’re similar. Opening first:

 France will be the 148th country (by most counts) to recognize a state that does not exist and never will—a “state” with no borders, no government, no economy, and no control over its claimed territory. Norway, Spain, Ireland, and Slovenia recognized Palestine in May 2024 in a clear reward for the Hamas terrorist onslaught in October 2023. The United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia will join the French, as may a dozen or more other countries. These acts of “recognition” do nothing to help Palestinians. Their effect and their usual objective is to harm Israel, both by blaming it for the Gaza war and by making an end to that war more difficult to achieve. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in August, “Talks with Hamas fell apart on the day Macron made the unilateral decision that he’s going to recognize the Palestinian state.”

The article’s end reprises the beginning:

The most apt metaphor for Palestinian life today is the Gaza cityscape as it existed on October 6: behind and beneath the facades of homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques lay a vast network of terror tunnels and weapons storehouses. And underlying that physical network lay, and lies still, an intellectual and ideological network of beliefs—beliefs that lead to such widespread support for Hamas even today, and that lead the Palestinian Authority to name schools and plazas after the terrorist murderers of children, and to pay salaries and bounties to terrorists in Israeli prisons.

Israel has done a great deal toward eliminating the physical infrastructure of terror, but there cannot be a Palestinian state unless and until the intellectual network that prizes “armed struggle” against the Jewish state above building a normal life for Palestinians ends as well. That is a task for Palestinians, not Israelis, and it is a task that Palestinians will not take up while international organizations and leaders of important nations assure them that statehood will come to them soon and without conditions.

Now the reasons behind Abrams’s thesis. I see five major arguments:

A. There is no tangible proposal about how such a state would be constructed and run, or where the borders will be. Further, although Abbas has made promises that such a state will be confected in ways that appeal to other countries (peacefulness, etc.), nobody believes him. This is all part of the history of Palestinian dissimulation and lying.  And, in fact, because Palestine doesn’t want its own state so long as Israel survives, they are seeking recognition solely as a way of getting plaudits and having the world condemn Israel.  Abrams dismisses the “commitments” that Abbas has made to the countries to buy their demonization of Israel and recognition of a Palestinian state:

It is difficult not to laugh at all those “commitments” to a “credible reform agenda” by the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, who has made them and others like them over and over again during his nearly twenty years as head of Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the Palestinian Authority. The PA is no closer to ruling Gaza than it has been since June 2007 when it was expelled from there by Hamas, nor any closer to fundamental reform. Macron also stated that “we must build the state of Palestine (and) guarantee its viability,” and it apparently never occurred to him to suggest that Palestinians must “build the state of Palestine and guarantee its viability.”

Why, after 80 years of efforts to partition the Holy Land, has a Palestinian state never been created? Why am I persuaded that this objective will never be achieved? Scores of new countries have been created since the Second World War. What is unique about the struggle for “Palestine” that has doomed it, and what are the alternatives? While my particular focus here is on the West Bank, most of the analysis that follows applies just as well to Gaza.

. . . The Oslo Accords happened over 30 years ago now, and have failed. They were the apparent high point of Israel-Palestinian accommodation and agreement, but what has transpired since shows that their promise was empty. As David Weinberg put it, “Thirty years and billions of dollars and euros later, the return on Western investment in Palestinian independence is abysmal. There is no democracy, no rule of law, no transparency, no sustainability, no investment in economic stability, and no peace education in the PA.” An Economist editorial in September 2023 said the “lasting achievements” of Oslo were “to create a limited Palestinian government loathed by most Palestinians.”

. . . For Western countries there was always something more important: the “peace process” itself. Negotiations, visits, declarations, summits—these were the proximate goals; state-building was arduous, long, boring, and unrewarding. Western politicians needed something flashy to fill an immediate political need. This is precisely what we are seeing today in the ritual recognition of the non-existent state of Palestine by Western governments. The “peace process” has become not a process of construction but an alternative to it—substituting declarations and conferences for hard work that, the leaders knew, was unlikely to be undertaken, to succeed, or to make anyone very happy in the short time that politics demanded.

The conditions that Bush demanded twenty years ago seem almost quaint now. Everyone understands that the Palestinians will not meet any prerequisites that are set. So, leaders like Macron instead accept Abbas’s empty pledges that “reform” has taken place, is under way, or will soon happen. It doesn’t matter: he is lying, they understand fully that he is lying, and they have decided that the lies do not matter. The alternative approach is that of Starmer, who says Israel must achieve impossible goals by a certain date or he will recognize a Palestinian state. Then he can do so and blame Israel at the same time. In all these cases, the goal is to fill a political need (namely, to attack Israel) rather than to bring Palestinian statehood or any concrete improvement in Palestinian lives closer.

Nothing is clearer about the Palestinian leadership’s bogus “reforms” than their failure to lay down their arms, recognize Israel, and, tellingly, to release the hostages. How can we trust the “assurances” of people who won’t even let the hostages go, and who have killed quite a few hostages alreadt or let them die? It is shameful that all those countries, and running dogs like Starmer and Macron, don’t even require Hamas or the PA to guarantee the release of the hostages before recognizing a state!

. . . .Under left-wing political pressure and the demands of growing Muslim populations, even the Anglosphere democracies—Canada, Australia, and the UK—that were once a staunch bulwark against radical demands and often voted against senseless and one-sided UN resolutions have given up. They know what a Palestinian state will require to be successful, but they no longer care, the political pressures are too great to resist, and they wish to punish Israel and its right-wing government for the sin of defending itself. Which Palestinian cannot be struck by the fact that so many world leaders do not even require the release of all hostages before they make their self-indulgent declarations?

Nothing has been more pernicious to building a decent, democratic, peaceful Palestinian state than such “support.” The message to Palestinians is clear: what you need to do to get your state recognized is nothing. No reform, no institution building, no democracy, no defeat of terrorist groups, no competent government. All of that will happen magically in the Palestinian state once it comes into existence. The use of brutal and inhuman violence will bring some nice rewards, while Israel’s reactions will bring it punishment—for it is crystal clear that without the October 7 attacks Macron, Starmer, Albanese, and Carney would not today be recognizing this imaginary state.

. . . Even as war continues, even as hostages remain in captivity, even as the “reformed Palestinian Authority” remains entirely mythical, country after country insists on immediate Palestinian statehood. Israelis know that whatever conditions they set will eventually be abandoned.

B.  The Palestinians have been given opportunities to have their own state at least five times before, and they’ve always rejected it, even when the offers were more generous than any that could be made now. Clearly, they don’t want a state unless Israel is gone. 

It is worth recalling what Palestinians have in fact said “no” to—the Israeli offers of statehood they have turned down. Here is the account of the late Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator during the Oslo period, later  minister of negotiation, and then secretary-general of the PLO from 2015 to 2020.

On July 23, 2000, in his meeting with President Arafat in Camp David, President Clinton said: “You will be the first president of a Palestinian state, within the 1967 borders—give or take, considering the land swap—and East Jerusalem will be the capital of the Palestinian state, but we want you, as a religious man, to acknowledge that the Temple of Solomon is located underneath the Haram al-Sharif.” Yasir Arafat said to Clinton defiantly: “I will not be a traitor. Someone will come to liberate it after ten, fifty, or one hundred years. Jerusalem will be nothing but the capital of the Palestinian state, and there is nothing underneath or above the Haram al-Sharif except for Allah.” That is why Yasir Arafat was besieged, and that is why he was killed unjustly. [Note that, in reality, Arafat died of natural causes.]

In November 2008, . . . Olmert . . . offered the 1967 borders, but said: “We will take 6.5 percent of the West Bank, and give in return 5.8 percent from the 1948 lands, and the 0.7 percent will constitute the safe passage, and East Jerusalem will be the capital, but there is a problem with the Haram and with what they called the Holy Basin.” Abu Mazen [i.e., Mahmoud Abbas] too answered with defiance, saying: “I am not in a marketplace or a bazaar. I came to demarcate the borders of Palestine—the June 4, 1967 borders—without detracting a single inch, and without detracting a single stone from Jerusalem, or from the holy Christian and Muslim places.” This is why the Palestinian negotiators did not sign.

If those Israeli offers were insufficient, none ever will be. And those offers are inconceivable right now to Israelis, because the risks they would impose are unacceptable to Israelis left, right, and center after October 7. Olmert was in fact willing to place the entire Old City of Jerusalem under international control, an astonishing concession that was unlikely to pass his Cabinet or the Knesset and will not be repeated. But even that elicited no response from Abbas, nor did he respond to the Kerry-Obama peace proposal in 2014.

C. Both the PA (and the PLO and Fatah) still support terrorism, and Hamas is openly dedicated to eliminating the state of Israel and killing Jews.  How can we possibly expect Palestine to fully renounce terrorism in their new “state”? Although Wikipedia implies that the Palestinian Authority has stopped its “Pay for Slay” program (“Martyr’s Fund“), which pays off imprisoned Palestinian terrorists who have tried to kill Jews, they haven’t. The fund has simply been renamed. Remember that money donated by other countries donate to Palestine, formerly including the U.S., went into this fund. This is odious and no country should recognize a state that does this. But of course they do!

Nor has Hamas renounced its original charter to kill all Jews, and Abbas still manages terrorism. There is not the slightest indication that the “new” Palestinian state will stop killing Israelis or give up terrorism.

. . . the core of the problem remains the reality and the potential on the Palestinian side. Will Palestinian society ever abandon support for violence and terrorism? Will dreams of destroying Israel ever be replaced by efforts to build a real state? Will businessmen, honest officials, doctors, lawyers, architects, and engineers ever replace terrorist murderers as the most honored citizens? Einat Wilf noted recently that “there are perfectly capable people in Gaza, as we saw on October 7. That massacre required billions of dollars, years of investment in infrastructure, leadership, strategy, and vision, of the most perverse kind. What it shows is that the people of Gaza are not lacking capacity or resources. Their problem is ideological.” From the early Zionist days, to those of Haj Amin al-Husseini, to Arafat, to the present, Palestinian nationalism and even Palestinian identity have been irredentist and negative: about destroying, not building. That is why there is no Palestinian state.

. . .There is a lot more to be said about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but the essence of it remains in 2025 what it was in 1947: the Arabs said no.

Daniel Pipes has commented on this many times, writing of what he called the Palestinians’ “genocidal rejectionism.” Why haven’t peace and Palestinian statehood prevailed? In the early years, Pipes wrote, “The local population, which we now call Palestinians, didn’t want them there and told them to get out. And [the Zionists] responded by saying no, we are modern Westerners, we can bring you clean water and electricity. But Palestinians engaged in rejectionism, and said, ‘No, we want to kill you; we’re going to drive you away.’” Over a century ago, the Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky explained that this is the response the Jews should expect to such offers of economic advancement, although he believed the attitude would change in the fullness of time. But little has changed, as Pipes writes:

It hasn’t worked because it can’t work. If your enemy wants to eliminate you, telling him that you’ll get him clean water is not going to convince him otherwise. What’s so striking is that the Palestinians have retained this genocidal impulse for such a long period. I would argue, as an historian, that this is unique. No other people have ever retained that kind of hostility for such a length of time.

D. Israel recognizes that any Palestinian state, especially if it abuts Israel, is an existential threat. Israelis don’t want a two-state solution either, but they take this view to maintain the peace. 

The idea that Palestinian institutions should be built up first, largely as Fayyad proposed but necessarily with a far more realistic timeline, is rejected out of hand. Improving Palestinian lives pragmatically—better jobs, better educations, better futures, better government—seems to satisfy no one in diplomatic circles because it quiets none of the political pressures governments are under. Demonstrators are surrounding parliaments and spray-painting government buildings with the slogan “from the river to the sea,” not “let’s build effective institutions.” So the pragmatic alternative of a much-improved version of the status quo is politically “unsustainable.”

But the alternative of creating a Palestinian state now will fail because it is far greater a threat to Israel than Israelis (or any nation) would be willing to accept. As we have seen, this widely acclaimed “alternative” is not even the real goal of Palestinian nationalism, and would create a launching pad for future attacks on Israel from what would become sovereign territory under international law

E.  Neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority will cooperate to run a Palestinian state, especially because Hamas hates the Palestinian Authority and its Fatah party. Remember, in a 2006 election, Hamas defeated Fatah, the PLO’s political party headed by Abbas, and the next year a civil war broke out in Gaza in which Hamas proceeded to slaughter many of their fellow Palestinians who were on the side of Fatah:

But the very most that can hoped for in Gaza, if Hamas is destroyed and the entire place is physically rebuilt by some grand international coalition, is that it will resemble the West Bank. There will still be a residue of twenty years of Hamas indoctrination of an entire generation, there will still be thousands of young men trained by Hamas to fight, and there will still be all those Gazans who voted for Hamas and tell pollsters they still support it. A May 2025 poll found that 64 percent of Gazans oppose disarming Hamas and a majority oppose exiling Hamas military leaders; if legislative elections were held with all the parties who ran in 2006, voters in Gaza would go 49 percent for Hamas versus 30 percent for Fatah. Forty-six percent of all Palestinians told pollsters they support “a return to confrontations and armed intifada” (a higher number than in the September 2023 poll mentioned earlier). When asked what the most vital Palestinian goal should be, 41 percent said statehood, including East Jerusalem as the capital—but 33 percent said it must be the “right of return” to their 1948 towns and villages, which would of course mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state.

This is why a Palestinian state run by the Palestinian Authority and Fatah is not tenable.  There would have to be two Palestinian states: one encompassing part of the West Bank and the other the whole of Gaza.  And of course nobody has that in mind.  There are no credible leaders of such a state that would be supported by both Hamas and Fatah.  This is why countries like France and Germany, who are acting like idiots vis-à-vis recognizing Palestine, are merely acting to condemn Israel, not to solve the problem of terrorism and enmity.

ABRAMS’S “SOLUTION”.  Abrams says that there are really only two things he finds reasonable in the face of cries for a Palestinian state. The first is to do nothing and allow the status quo to exist. That solves no problems. He also rejects the “one-state solution—a state encompassing both Palestinians and Jews (and Israeli Arabs), but that won’t work as Israel would never accept it because it would lead to the mass slaughter of Jews. The solution Abrams likes best is to allow Jordan to help administer a Palestinian state. I believe he got this idea from Agha and Malley’s book:

So what is the idea that they then raise? Jordan. As they write, “another potential outcome is a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation comprising the Hashemite Kingdom and the West Bank. . . . Israelis . . . might view a Jordanian security presence in the West Bank as reliable, more so, certainly, than a Palestinian one, more so, possibly, than a Western one.” King Hussein proposed such a confederation in 1972: a united kingdom consisting of two districts, with full West Bank autonomy except for Jordan’s control of military and security matters and foreign affairs. In 1977, President Carter raised it with Menachem Begin; at various times, President Sadat of Egypt and Henry Kissinger espoused the idea. Hussein and Arafat agreed to such a confederation in 1985. But Jordan renounced the idea in 1988 and today rejects it, demanding Palestinian statehood.

The idea still has some currency. Shlomo Ben-Ami, the Israeli Labor-party (and later Meretz) politician who served as foreign minister under Ehud Barak, wrote this in 2022:

Since all other attempts to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have failed, it may be time to revisit the Jordanian option. . . . King Hussein’s waiving of Jordan’s claim on the West Bank was never ratified by the country’s parliament and was seen by many, including the former crown prince Hassan bin Talal, as unconstitutional. In 2012, he said that since no two-state solution was still possible, the Palestinian Authority should let Jordan recover its control of the territory. . . . A Jordanian-Palestinian confederation has a more compelling logic in terms of economics, religion, history, and memory.

. . .Agha and Malley acknowledge that such proposals will meet with “considerable hurdles” in Jordan. But they explain the advantages for both sides:

[F]or Jordan, a confederation would mean expanding its size and political weight. For the Palestinian elite, Amman already serves as a substitute political and social hub. . . . Palestinians would gain economic and strategic strength, reduce their vulnerability and dependence on Israel, obtain valuable political space, and form part of a more consequential state.

Palestinian support for the idea has risen and fallen, but the leading Palestinian pollster said in 2018 that previous polls had found support to be above 40 percent. Why raise the confederation idea here, and why now? In part to demonstrate that it is not an idiosyncratic notion but rather an option with historical roots and real advantages. In part as a reminder that it is simply false and facile to state that “there is no alternative” to full Palestinian statehood. And, in part, because Palestinian statehood is not going to happen, so contemplation of alternatives will at some future point be required. One of the worst effects of the “there is no alternative” position has been to stifle all discussion of what other options might exist.

It can be argued, of course, that such a confederation would not satisfy Palestinian nationalism. But in its current form Palestinian nationalism cannot fully be satisfied without Palestine extending “from the river to the sea”—that is, by replacing Israel rather than living “side by side in peace and security.” A more positive form of Palestinian nationalism would indeed be satisfied by complete local autonomy in a confederation with Jordan, which is an Arab, Muslim, and already half-Palestinian state. Those who wish to argue that this is insufficient—that Palestinian national identity or ethnicity require an independent state—must tell us why the same is not true for Kurdistan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Quebec, and Somaliland, among many other cases.

Well, it’s better than other solutions, but it isn’t really a solution for several reasons.  The Palestinians don’t want to be overseen by Jordan. The Jordanians don’t want to have anything to do with Palestine, which they consider a den of terrorists. There is no physical location for this state unless it unites Gaza and the West Bank, each run by a faction that hates the other. Could Jordan keep that under control? I doubt it, not without lots of money and help from Western and Arab countries. And remember that half the West Bank is still run by Israel or is occupied by Israelis.  So that problem remains.

In the end, Abrams’s article is an excellent summary of historical arguments for why a two-state solution isn’t feasible, but his alternative doesn’t seem feasible, either. All we can do is wait and watch. But I agree with Abrams that the 148 countries that recognize a Palestinian “state” are not only fooling themselves and rewarding terrorism, but also damaging Israel, a democratic ally of the West.  I have nothing but contempt for people like Macron and Starmer for signing on to such a boneheaded and unworkable scheme.  There is no “there” there.

I quote Abrams again:

. . . . leaders like Macron instead accept Abbas’s empty pledges that “reform” has taken place, is under way, or will soon happen. It doesn’t matter: he is lying, they understand fully that he is lying, and they have decided that the lies do not matter.

But if you have a better solution, put it in the comments.

When I woke up the other day, I found an email from an old and good friend—who may no longer be a friend, at least on her side. It was a bit of reporting from the British satirical magazine Private Eye, which does have some straight reportage, and she insisted that the magazine had “a stellar record in reporting.” Well, if it did, it doesn’t any more. The bit my friend sent me was not only strongly anti-Israel, but full of lies and unsubstantiated assertions. I’ll embed it here, and hope you can read it by clicking on the photo.

The article above has bought totally into Hamas propaganda, ranging from the ludicrous claim that there have been more than “60,000 trauma-related deaths” of Gazan civilians caused by Israel, and “an estimated 70% of the Palestinians killed are women and children, victims of widespread indiscriminate bombing.”  That sentence needs some severe correction; even Hamas, I think, wouldn’t claim that 70% of the dead are women and chilren. (And don’t forget that “children” are defined as those under 18, while, as John Spencer notes below, the average age of a newly recruited Hamas terrorist is 16).   This ignorant writer also claims, without evidence, that Israel is deliberately shooting Palestinian children in the head and neck or abdomen. I won’t go into that “indiscriminate bombing.”

Note that the article mentions Hamas only once—to deny that Hamas uses Gazan hospitals as command centers. But that happens to be true, and is well documented. Dr. Maynard, the author, is another example of someone who deliberately ignores facts they don’t like, and, in fact, denies them.

It’s an abysmal piece of propaganda that the writer, a surgeon in Oxford, has swallowed whole.  I was deeply saddened to wake up to this in an email, especially from a friend with whom I once was very close.

I wavered about responding, but decided that I coiuldn’t let this pass, so I said a few words about the “data” given above, and then simply sent my correspondent the video below from the podcast Triggernometry.

Here, the two moderators,Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster, interview John Spencer, “chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, codirector of the Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast at West Point”.  As an expert in urban warfare, Spencer is qualified to speak about the kind of palaver given above, though you can say he’s biased if you want (he is not Jewish). He’s emphasized since the war’s beginning the care that the IDF has taken to avoid killing civilians, and that the civilian/terrorist death ratio among Gazans is lower than any ratio in modern warfare (between 2/1 and 1.5 to 1, I think).

I won’t go on; you can listen for yourself, but of course those who are anti-Israel or anti-Zionist (which amount to the same kind of bigotry), will not listen.  As for the starving children, if it were true it would be horrible, but, as you can read in this Free Press piece, nearly all the photos used to convince the world that Israel is starving children involve infants with other medical conditions that would make them malnourished.  There is certainly hunger in Gaza, but widespread starvation of children, and starvation planned by Israel? I don’t buy it.

Listen for yourself: it’s an edifying hour.  And remember, if you want to criticize Israel for all kinds of war crimes (I will not tolerate dumb accusations of Israeli “genocide,”), be prepared to offer a solution to the war, preferably one that leaves Israel still in existence.

I append a second Triggernometry video below, titled  “Our honest opinion on Israel”.  Kissen does most of the talking at the beginning, and it turns out that both he and Foster are “pro-Israel”, but only with respect to this war, not necessarily in general. Kissin avers that Israel is winning the war against Hamas and Iran, but is losing the propaganda war to Hamas, which is true.

Kissin feels, like Spencer, that many people who discuss the war are ignorant of the facts, are not rational, are governed by their emotions, and have no interest in resolving the issue. They just want to demonize Israel. He asks the question that I often do, “If you are so keen to demonize Israel’s behavior in the war, what would YOU do?”

You never get an answer that would work.  Kissin mentions that he posed the same question in a Triggernometry discussion with Bassem Youssef, and got no answer from the strongly anti-Israel Youssef.

Kissin does add that Israel is committing some war crimes (he mentions the food cut-off and the West Bank situation) but says that every Western country has committed war crimes in every war it’s been in, including the U.S. in WWII and its response to  9/11.

But then the discussion turns discursive, dealing with free speech, antisocial behavior in the West, housing prices, the problems facing college-aged Westerners, and British politics. I listened dutifully to the whole video, but found most of it uninteresting.

There is more coming later, as I found a Triggernometry video of Kissin and Foster interviewing PM Benjamim Netanyahu, and I suspect they didn’t go easy on him.  I haven’t watched it but will before I post it.

A couple of weeks ago I got the following email from a colleague whom I deeply respected and was friends with for years:

Greetings, Jerry,

Regretfully, I ask that you unsubscribe me from WEIT.

You often include interesting and even delightful information, but I strongly disagree with the position you advocate, at length and incessantly, on Gaza and Israel’s actions.

You have been a good professional colleague, and have made major contributions that I will probably have occasion to cite in the future. I regret having to break with you over this issue.

Of course this was a blow, and, although I still support Israel in the conflict and think the media constantly exaggerates the situation in favor of Hamas, and although I also unequivocally reject the claim that Israel is committing genocide, when I get something like this email I always ponder what truth, if any, there is in it.  Have I been too sympathetic to Israel and neglected any bad actions they’ve performed?

I am not only revealing my dubts and ruminations, but also using them to ask a question of readers, given is in bold below.

My constant questioning of my views and sympathies center on these four questions:

1.)  Is Israel withholding food from Gazans, leading to civilian starvation?  I haven’t written about this simply because I haven’t seen enough evidence one way or the other. My sympathy for Israel has made me think that they are—despite the earlier “pause” on aid—now allowing sufficient food into Gaza, and that it is simply being hijacked by Hamas and either kept for terrorists or put on the black market at inflated prices. Israel says there is sufficient food going in, but the rest of the world says no, there isn’t. Perhaps the rest of the world might be ignorant, and it’s for sure that the UN isn’t helping. Further, it’s unprecedented that one country (Israel) is expected to feed another while they are still at war.  But they are, though they get no credit for it.  Once the war is over, though, I think Israel has the responsibility to take care of the people of Gaza until the IDF withdraws completely from the country. But the war isn’t yet over. And there have been credible videos of Hams (or armed and masked thugs) hijacking food trucks.

2.)  Is Israel really shooting Gazans who are trying to get food at distribution centers?  This I don’t believe, simply because it would be the worst possible optics for the IDF to kill Gazan civilians. So far I have not seen any video of this happening, but I keep looking.

3.) Does Israel have a credible plan for the end of the war?  If they do, I haven’t heard of it. Things are changing rapidly. The IDF did conduct the beginning of the war in a way that, I thought, was well planned, but now there seems to be no military endgame, save to keep bombing members of Hamas, something that now often involves substantial deaths of nearby innocent people.  And what plans are adumbrated still change rapidly. On one day Gazan civilians are supposed to relocate elsewhere, like the Sinai; on the next day Israel says it will occupy Gaza City for the indefinite future, and so on. In this form of urban guerrilla warfare, it seems unlikely that Israel can destroy every member of Hamas, and the terrorists seem unlikely to surrender so long as any are still alive, though I think the organization must surrender and disarm the war is to end. Israel cannot accept any less.

4.) What about the hostages?  It is not in Hamas’s interest to release all the hostages, for that is the only card they’re holding that will make Israel negotiate for a cease-fire.  Yet the retention of the hostages has turned many Israelis (though not the world, which doesn’t seem to care much about the hostages) against their government.

Thus the two aims of the IDF at the beginning of the war—the destruction of Hamas and the release of all the hostages—seem not only impossible, but incompatible. And yet I have always believed, and still believe, that these things need to be done if Israel is to continue existing.

Nor do I see any viable two-state solution: Israel doesn’t want one for clear and obvious reasons, and neither does Palestine.  My hope that a third party, like the United Arab Emirates, could take over and supervise the reconstruction of Gaza is a hope that seems doomed. No other Arab country wants to step in here

My dilemmas, then, are that there seems to be no “day after” plan, that a lot of Gazans are being killed (even though as a byproduct of Hamas’s policy of embedding itself among civilians), and that a lot of Gaza has been destroyed.  Yet Hamas seems unlikely to surrender. As for the hostages—and this will sound callous to hear—I regarded them all as doomed right after October 7, though of course I’d be elated for them to all return home, and I get furious every time one is killed, or a dead body is released in swaps. (Why doesn’t the world care, for instance, that the Bibas family was killed–strangled–by Hamas?)  But should we allow Hamas to remain in power just so some hostages will be released? Do realize that Hamas will never release all living hostages: if they do anything, they will release some living hostages and kill the rest without telling Israel.

So, here is my question for readers:

If you were Israel’s PM (you can go after Netanyahu if you want, though that’s rather irrelevant here), what plan of action would you devise to end the war?

This is the question I would ask anyone who says Israel is behaving badly, like my erstwhile friend and colleague above. I have not heard a credible answer save the inevitable and futile “two-state solution.” But anybody who knows anything about Hamas and the Palestinian Authority knows that the two-state “solution” would not mean the end of anti-Israel terrorism. Those countries that recognize Palestine as a state, like France and the UK, are simply stupid if they think that this recognition will create a real state of Palestine and thereby end terrorism against Israel. And do they not know that Hamas hates the Palestinian Authority and would not co-govern any state as partners?

Anybody who follows this conflict must realize that there are many accusations against Israel that are simply false or undocumented and, in my view, criticisms of Hamas have dwindled to nearly zero—comprising at most a caveat in some news reports that “Yes, we realize that Hamas were terrorists and the acts of October 7 were reprehensible.”  But do you hear now that Hamas are still keeping hostages, killing them, and starving them? That they have committed war crimes repeatedly and continue to do so?

But I digress. Please dilate on the question above, and if you think there’s a viable solution, please give it.

The heterodox Coleman Hughes, now writing for The Free Press, tenders 17 minutes of discussion about the Hamas/Israeli war on “Conversations with Coleman.”  The reader who sent me this link said, “He gets it spot on!”, and was so impressed with this video that he/she immediately subscribed to Highes’s Substack, which you can find here.

You may remember that Hughes got into trouble with TED for giving a preapproved talk about how people should be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character (see my posts on this here and here, and you can read about it on Wikipedia here).

Although Hughes thinks that Israel are the “good guys” and Hamas the “bad guys,” he avers that both sides have committed war crimes and that the IDF has done unjustifiable things, including cutting off aid to Gaza for two months, which he sees as close to a war crime. But, as he says in his summary below, he maintains that the sides are not morally equivalent: as he says, “Israel’s goals as a country are far more benign and ethical than Hamas’s goals.”  In short, Hamas is genocidal and Israel is not (Israel could easily have wiped out all of Gaza any time in the last two decades, but they withdrew and gave Gaza autonomy).

And of course anyone with more than a handful of neurons realizes that he’s right:

In this special episode, I take on probably the most controversial and emotionally fraught topic of the moment: the Israel-Hamas conflict. I think war crimes have been committed on both sides. But that doesn’t mean I think the two sides are morally equivalent. Today, I argue that there’s a fundamental asymmetry between Israel and Hamas, one that’s too often blurred or ignored by the mainstream media. Israel’s actions, while sometimes flawed or tragic in consequence, are ultimately rooted in a defensive logic. Hamas, on the other hand, has explicitly genocidal goals. But where does that leave us when we see images of children starving and hear reports that Israel is responsible?

Hughes notes that war crimes have been committed by both sides in most wars, including by the U.S. in WWII and the Union Army during the Civil War. What matters to him in the main are the goals for which each side is fighting.  Again, though, he says that Hamas has committed far more war crimes, like fighting without wearing uniforms; and that Hamas’s war crimes fall largely not on Israelis, but on Gazan civilians.  He goes on to list a number of further war crimes committed by Hamas. Nevertheless, as he says, when we hold Israel alone responsible for the civilian death toll in Gaza, “We are implicitly holding Israel responsible for Hamas’s war crimes against the Palestinians.” He goes on to indict the mainstream media, like the New York Times, for distorting the news by relying on Gazan sources (the misleading photo of an emaciated child on the NYT front page is one example).  He’s not denying that there is hunger of food insecurity in Gaza, but adds that “the pipeline that’s feeding you information about the humanitarian disaster in Gaza is fundamentally broken, biased, untrustworthy, and weaponized against Israel.” In the end, we simply don’t know how to trust the reports of the Gazan Health Ministry, who can’t be “trusted blindly.”

And the end he discusses the accusation of genocide committed by Israel, which he considers “absurd.” He is, of course, right, because any fool can see that the goal of Israel is not to destroy the Palestinian people in Gaza. And that’s in contrast with Hamas, whose goals are explicitly genocidal. “If the IDF chose to destroy Gazans as a people, they could kill almost everyone in Gaza in a matter of weeks. So ask yourself, ‘Why haven’t they?'” (The answer “because of international pressure” won’t wash, because that concedes that Israel is not in fact committing a genocide.)

Finally, he says that if you want to argue that Israeli actions reflect the angry statements of a few Israeli officials soon after October 7, 2023, he recommends that you read the following Atlantic article (the link goes to an archived version):

In the end, Hughes’ take seems both objective and correct.  I hope he has a bright future ahead of him (he’s only 29), but of course his heterodox views, and probably now his association with The Free Press, will hamper the approbation he deserves. (I was on his show two years ago, and found the guy was highly informed about evolutionary biology, even though that’s not his field.)

A fair number of countries have decided to recognize Palestine as a sovereign state (the U.N. can’t as it requires Security-Council approval, and the U.S. is on that council).  This has had little effect as simple declarations like this have no force in international law (see reference to Natasha Hausdorff below).

Now, however, another state has decided to recognize Palestine, and it’s an important one: France. For President Emmanuel Macron of France has decided to join the queue, and France’s recognition will have a lot more influence than those of other countries. It is a move guaranteed to further endanger the sovereignty and safety of Israel.  Yet whether one likes it or not, Israel was recognized by the UN as a sovereign Jewish state, and so it remains.

And yes, I can understand that people don’t like all the killing of Gazan civilians associated with the war between Israel and Hamas, but they seem to forget that Hamas can stop this war instantly by disarming, surrendering, and letting the hostages go.  But for some reason Americans seem to overlook Hamas’s war crimes and its tactic of conducting urban war in a way that guarantees the death of Gazan civilians, and have laid all the onus for the Gazan war on Israel.

One of those people appears to be Macron, who wrote the letter below to Mahmoud Abbas. The original letter from Macron to Abbas is below, and, weirdly, I cannot find an English translation. Instead, I’m forced to rely on an AI summary, which says this:

Recent news reports indicate that French President Emmanuel Macron sent a letter to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas confirming France’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state.

Based on these reports, the letter outlined several key points:

• Recognition of a Palestinian state: Macron confirmed France’s decision to recognize Palestine as a state, according to the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent. He stated he would formally announce this at the United Nations General Assembly in September, notes CBS News.
• Focus on a two-state solution: Macron reiterated that this recognition is consistent with France’s historical commitment to a just and lasting peace in the Middle East, according to The Economist.
• Need for an immediate ceasefire and humanitarian aid: Macron emphasized the urgency of ending the war in Gaza and providing relief to the civilian population.
• Demilitarization of Hamas and rebuilding Gaza: He stated that the demilitarization of Hamas is key to securing and rebuilding Gaza.
• Viability and security of a Palestinian state: Macron wrote that it is essential to build the state of Palestine, ensure its viability, and enable it to contribute to regional security by accepting its demilitarization and fully recognizing Israel.

If you are fluent in French, or can find a translation of what’s below, by all means put it in the comments or send it to me:

Macron’s entire letter, though, is below in French:

Abbas, you may recall, was elected as President of Palestine and the Palestine National Authority in 2005 for a four-year term, but somehow that’s been extended to twenty years. He supports terrorism against Israel, and it was under his regime that the “pay for slay” program (or “Martyr’s Fund“), which reimburses Palestinians (and their families) for killing Jews, was put into practice. It is still in practice, and over 90% of Palestinians approve of it.

Hamas, of course, doesn’t recognize Abbas as President, and Gaza would never accept Abbas (or the Palestinian Authority) as a legitimate government.  This leads to two immediate questions:   where is the new state that Macron wants going to be located, given that Palestine is divided into Gaza and the West Bank? And who is going to run it?

These lead to a bigger third question:  why should we recognize a sovereign state unless everything is in place, and agreed on, for how that state is to be run and where its borders will be? As I mentioned yesterday, it’s jumping the gun to create a Palestinian state next to Israel until these questions are settled. Otherwise, Israel still faces existential threats. Although Macron in his letter calls for release of the hostages, a ceasefire, and the demilitarization of Hamas, these are not preconditions for his recognition of a Palestinian state. They are just what he wants, but he’s going to go ahead and recognize a Palestinian state whether or not these things are done. What kind of blockhead is this guy? He think he’s on the right side of history, but this gesture is performative, although it may be influential. As the NYT said:

It was not clear whether other members of the Group of 7 would follow the French example, although France indicated it hoped that would happen. Nor was it clear what territory France would recognize as comprising a Palestinian state.

“It’s a powerful symbol, but without really doing anything on the ground to change Palestinians’ plight,” Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in an email message. “It’s largely virtue signaling.”

The best critique of offers like Macron’s comes from Paul Friesen’s site “Minority of One,” which you can access by clicking on the headline below. Friesen apparently read the letter in French and his translation is the basis of his critique.

You should read the whole post, but I’ll give a few excerpts, which I’ve indented (all bolding is Friesen’s):

The state with no coordinates?

Let’s start with the simplest geographical question: where is this Palestine Macron plans to recognize? The 1967 lines? Adjusted borders? A demilitarized Gaza under Mahmoud Abbas’ theoretical authority, which he hasn’t been able to exercise even over Ramallah’s traffic lights without Israeli security coordination?

No answer.

A state without borders is either a fantasy or a threat. Fantasy, because you can’t govern what you can’t locate. Threat, because ambiguity is always the friend of maximalism; it gives every faction the right to fill in the map with its preferred crayons—green flags for some, blood-red slogans for others.

Which government? The Cadaver or the Caliphate?

Recognition means recognizing something sovereign. In this case, sovereignty would need to be exercised by either:

1. The Palestinian Authority: A sclerotic bureaucracy funded by Western donors, dedicated to the moral pedagogy of “pay-for-slay,” where murderers’ families are salaried for their grief; or
2. Hamas: A jihadist organisation whose founding charter reads like a fever dream of medieval Jew-hatred fleshed out by Iranian steel, Qatari cash, and Western indulgence.

Macron writes to Abbas as if the PA can govern Gaza by decree. He writes about demilitarizing Hamas as if it’s a customs offence. He speaks of elections in 2026 as if the militant factions will queue politely and accept the result. This is not policy; it is therapeutic prose—designed to soothe the conscience of a continent that outsourced its moral courage to metaphors.

I can’t imagine anybody taking issue with the bit above.  Hamas will never voluntarily demilitarize (remember, it’s sworn to destroy Israel), nor will it accept the Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza.

. . . The Gaza Experiment: a controlled study in delusion

Gaza already answered the question Macron refuses to ask. In 2005, Israel uprooted every Jew, dismantled every settlement, and even removed the dead. Gaza became a laboratory. The reagents: international aid, Israeli withdrawal, and Palestinian self-rule. The result: rockets, tunnels, human shields, and ultimately the largest pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust. The experiment ran for eighteen years. The conclusion writes itself.

Unilateral gestures reward unilateral violence. Recognition without prior disarmament and constitutional guarantees converts terror into diplomacy. Europe calls it “statehood”; the region experiences it as war.

“147 countries have recognized palestine.” And then?

One hears the refrain: 147 countries have recognized Palestine. The implied argument runs: majority equals morality equals inevitability. This is a Foreign Ministry version of argumentum ad populum. The supposed avalanche of recognitions has produced neither peace nor governance, neither civic pluralism nor demilitarization. The guns didn’t fall silent; they multiplied. Hezbollah didn’t retreat; it rearmed. Hamas didn’t moderate; it industrialized cruelty.

Recognition divorced from reform hardens the worst actors and punishes the best arguments. It tells the Palestinian street: why vote out the militants when Europe will hand you a state regardless? It tells the Israeli public: your self-restraint is evidence of guilt, your survival is evidence of aggression.

The operant phrase here—and the notion that makes hash of Macron’s proposal, is that it calls for “recognition divorced from reform.”

More:

[Macron] speaks to Abbas about “trust, clarity, commitment.” Trust must be earned. Clarity requires maps, laws, and leaders who survive without stipends from terrorists. Commitment begins with a single test: renounce the destruction of Israel in Arabic, in writing, in schools, and in mosques. No backchannels, no “resistance,” no flirtation with martyrdom culture. Then we can talk borders. Until then, we are not in the realm of diplomacy, but in the showroom of European performative statesmanship.

There is an alternative—it just requires adult terms

The alternative to Macron’s gesture politics exists, and it has three pillars:

1. Prior Disarmament and Constitutional Guarantees: Any Palestinian state must be a state that ends “pay-for-slay,” purges genocidal education, and constitutionally recognizes Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
2. Regional Accountability: Iran and Qatar finance, arm, and launder this conflict. No Palestinian “state” stabilizes while the patrons of jihad remain unpenalized. Recognition that bypasses this reality is fraud.
3. Moral Reciprocity: Israel’s Arab minority has rights. Jews in a Palestinian state must have rights. If the future Palestinian state rejects pluralism in principle, it forfeits recognition in practice.

What’s above is Friesen’s solution (he offers another version below), and it sounds reasonable. Will it happen? No way! And what’s below is both savvy and true, and Macron is a blithering idiot for promoting these consequences:

The consequences will not stop at the Green Line

Those who think this is just about Israel are already asleep. What Macron is normalizing is the West’s capitulation to grievance without responsibility, to victimhood without introspection, and to diplomacy without memory. Today it’s Palestine. Tomorrow, it will be Lebanon’s reinvention under Hezbollah’s rebranded PR team. Then it will be the Syrian regime getting a cosmetic makeover from its Russian backers. All in the name of “regional stability,” which—if recent history is any guide—is diplomatic code for “we can’t afford to care anymore.”

And let us not kid ourselves: this will echo through the democracies of the West. Macron’s recognition gives license to every armchair revolutionary and anti-Zionist campus demagogue to declare victory. It emboldens those who set fire to synagogues in Europe while chanting “intifada.” It tells the “Free Palestine” mobs: you no longer have to argue—Paris has already agreed.

It delegitimizes Israel’s defensive war by presuming symmetry where there is none. It casts the aggressor as a co-equal interlocutor, rather than a regime that kidnaps children, slaughters civilians, and builds tunnels under schools. It gaslights the Israeli dead into mere “complications,” and elevates the architects of their murder into state-builders.

Finally, Friesen reiterates his preconditions for peace, something Macron neglected entirely. Macron states what he wants, but they are no “preconditions for peace.”

The only way forward—clarity before recognition

There is a path forward. It is not a utopia, but it is achievable:

• Palestinian reform must come before international recognition, not as a reward for avoiding it.
• Hamas must be defeated, not “demilitarized.” You do not negotiate disarmament with a group that views compromise as apostasy.
• Education must be de-radicalized, not subsidized. Palestinian children deserve books that teach coexistence, not maps that erase Israel.
• The right of return must be relinquished, not romanticized. No peace will come from imagining that Tel Aviv is negotiable.
• And finally, Israel must be recognized not merely as a fact, but as a moral necessity—a refuge state for a people nearly extinguished, and the only one of its kind.

Until those terms are met, every recognition letter, every UN podium gesture, every Elysée photo-op is an act of profound irresponsibility—a theatre of virtue where tragedy is the curtain call.

A few final statements from Friesen:

Macron’s letter is already being archived as “historic.” It is no such thing. It is the bureaucratic paraphrase of a failure to learn, a polished signature at the bottom of a diplomatic hallucination. The same moral calamity that allowed Europe to whisper through the rise of Islamism at home now shouts Palestine abroad, hoping it buys a little more credibility in the salons of global virtue.

Let it be remembered, when the next war breaks out—and it will—that the match was struck not in Rafah or Tel Aviv, but in the offices of those who mistook theatrical compassion for strategy, and who never paid the price for their illusions. Others always do.

. . . I don’t write this from a place of cynicism, but of conclusion. At this point, I consider the two-state solution—and the rush to recognition—not merely premature, but illusory. That said, I’m open to being proven wrong. Not swayed by sentiment, applause lines, or diplomatic euphemisms—but by reasoned, evidence-based arguments.

***************

One final note: as I’ve said, I consider anti-Zionism—the opposition to the existence of a Jewish state—as a form of anti-Semitism. And, in a new Pharyngula column (archived here), P. Z. Myers, who has bought deeply into Hamas propaganda, shows himself to be an anti-Zionist in this way. In fact, he wants Israel abolished and turned over to Palestine.

I no longer support the right of the Jewish state of Israel to exist. Dismantle that horrible government and turn the entire country over to Palestinians, with independent UN monitoring to prevent retaliation. Although, to be honest, I think some retaliation is necessary for justice to prevail — Netanyahu, for instance, ought to spend the rest of his disgusting life in prison.

Additionally, it’s committing genocide. I don’t care to hear from people who are splitting hairs to deny that Israel is a genocidal monster of a state.

Myers is no fool. He realizes that turning Israel over to Palestine will result in the mass slaughter of Jews, and “independent UN monitoring” will not stop that.  What good has “independent UN monitoring” done to stop the depredations of Hezbollah in Lebanon? The UN declared in Resolution 1701 that Hezbollah cannot attack Israel, must disarm itself, and had to stay north of the Litani River. UN forces are in fact in Lebanon to explicitly prevent these things, but they have done exactly nothing.And that’s what they’ll do in Myer’s “Palestinian + Jewish state.” If you think otherwise, you’re deluded.

In fact, Myers says that “some retaliation” is necessary for justice to prevail. Is that only imprisonment, or should the consequences be more severe? He says only that Netanyahu should be imprisoned for life.  Is that the only retaliation necessary?

As for Israel committing genocide, Myers is notably silent on Hamas’s explicit genocide as instantiated in its initial charter and in its actions in the various intifadas. Shouldn’t there be some “retaliation” for Hamas having killed thousands of Jewish civilians on October 7 two years ago, as well as having kidnapped and held Israeli citizens as hostages? (Hamas also killed some Israeli civilian hostages).  No, because Myers apparently has no existing beef with Hamas as well as remaining woefully ignorant of the tricky geopolitics of a two-state solution.

And so, along with Macron, we have another blockhead, and one who calls loudly for the abolition of the state of Israel. In fact, in 2010, the U.S. State Department under Secretary John Kerry declared that “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, and denying Israel the right to exist” was one form of antisemitism. As far as I know, this criterion still holds.

Draw your own conclusions.