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.
