On Monday, Sept. 29, at a joint White House news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump announced an ambitious plan for ending the war in Gaza. With America’s key Muslim partners in the region already on board, only Iran-backed Hamas’ assent was necessary to end the fighting.
On Friday morning, Oct. 3, Trump gave Hamas an ultimatum: Accept the plan by Sunday, Oct. 5, 6 p.m. EDT or face obliteration. Within hours, Hamas agreed to release the hostages and relinquish power, and to negotiate other elements of Trump’s plan. That was good enough for the president to declare that Israel should stop bombing Hamas. And it was good enough for Netanyahu to address Israel on Saturday expressing the hope that Hamas would soon release all the hostages, living and deceased.
These stunning developments, however, mark at best the early stages of a long, winding, and arduous undertaking.
At the Sept. 29 news conference, the president extravagantly suggested that the plan might result in “everything getting solved” in the region. It won’t. Indeed, the plan faces formidable obstacles starting with Hamas’ agreement to only a few of its elements. Nevertheless, the Trump plan, supplemented by a realistic approach to West Bank Palestinians, may represent the least bad option.
The plan encompasses Israel’s principal war aims. It calls for, among other things, an immediate ceasefire in Gaza; prompt return of all Israeli hostages, living and deceased; delivery of substantial humanitarian aid; disarming of Hamas, demilitarization of Gaza, and deradicalization of Gaza’s Palestinian population; creation of a “Board of Peace” to supervise Gaza’s redevelopment; formation of a temporary transitional government composed of technocratic, apolitical Palestinians until the Palestinian Authority has completed reform; and mobilization of an “International Stabilization Force” to provide “long-term internal security.”
In addition, with a view to the long term, the plan states, “While Gaza redevelopment advances and when the PA reform program is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognize as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.”
In the spirit of his 2009 Bar Ilan speech and acceptance of Trump’s 2020 peace plan, Netanyahu stressed at the White House the stringent conditions that the PA must meet to reach a “credible pathway” to a Palestinian state. As presently constituted the PA “can have no role whatsoever in Gaza without undergoing a radical and genuine transformation.” That transformation, Netanyahu elaborated, “means ending ‘pay to slay.’ Changing the poisonous textbooks that teach hatred of Jews to Palestinian children. Stopping incitement in the media. Ending lawfare against Israel at the ICC, the ICJ. Recognizing the Jewish state, and many, many other reforms.”
Netanyahu’s demanding list of requirements for PA reform is a far cry from the announcements last month by 10 democracies. Joining approximately 140 nations which had already done so, Andorra, Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Portugal, and the United Kingdom formally recognized a Palestinian state that does not exist. Their diplomatic grandstanding will do nothing to bring such a state into existence or to ameliorate Palestinians’ plight.
Indeed, formal recognition of an imaginary Palestinian state sets back security, stability, and peace, and not only in the Middle East. It panders to the growing Muslim populations in Western democracies. It reinforces the progressive fantasy that the primary obstacle to a just and lasting solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict is Israeli belligerence rather than Palestinian intransigence and Hamas bloodthirstiness. It rewards Hamas’ barbarism by showing Palestinian proponents of armed struggle – a sizeable proportion of Palestinian society – that mass butchery of Israeli civilians rather than negotiation and building free and democratic institutions elicits Western nations’ concessions. It distracts from the painstaking construction – consistent with Israel’s basic security – of a better life for Palestinians. And, perhaps most importantly, it overlooks the feasibility at this late date of a Palestinian state.
Recently in Foreign Affairs, Richard Haass, an elder statesman of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, made the best case for a Palestinian state’s feasibility and desirability. President of the Council on Foreign Relations from 2003 to 2023, and from 2001 to 2003 under President George W. Bush, director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, Haass argues in “A Palestinian State Would Be Good for Israel” that a Palestinian state is the least bad option.
Owing to Israel’s extraordinary military achievements following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, “[t]he country has never been in a better position to address the strategic challenge posed by Palestinian nationalism,” maintains Haass. Addressing that challenge by cooperating to establish a Palestinian state would not only be good for Palestinians but “remains the best hope for” Israeli “peace and security.”
Notwithstanding Israel’s remarkable battlefield accomplishments, Haass recognizes that circumstances for the establishment of a Palestinian state are far from propitious, and the window of opportunity, he asserts, is closing fast. All previous attempts collapsed because Palestinians refused to accept the existence of a Jewish state, and no significant change of Palestinian attitudes is in sight. Extensive Israeli settlement building in Judea and Samaria obstructs the fashioning of a workable Palestinian state. And since Oct. 7, Israeli opposition to a Palestinian state has hardened.
Still, argues Haass, a Palestinian state would benefit Palestinians, Israel, and the region. The state would possess, he maintains, a compelling interest to keep in check terrorism within its borders. It would allow for broadening the Abraham Accords. It would enhance Egyptian and Jordanian stability by relieving pressure from their restive populations to champion the Palestinian cause. It would placate Arab citizens of Israel, who want better for their West Bank and Gaza brethren. It would enable Israel to preserve its status as Jewish, democratic, and free by giving West Bank Palestinians citizenship in their own state. It would reduce the international opprobrium to which Israel has been subject. And it would give Arab nations license to provide a stabilization force in Gaza to replace the IDF.
The argument of Elliott Abrams’ recent Mosaic Magazine essay, however, indicates that Haass’ solution suffers from an insuperable flaw: A Palestinian state has no chance of working because it cannot satisfy Palestinian national demands and it cannot meet Israel’s basic security requirements.
A Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow and chair of the Tikvah Fund, Abrams is, like Haass, an elder statesman of the American foreign-policy establishment who has grappled for decades with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In “There Will Never Be a Palestinian State. So What’s Next?” Abrams argues that the absence of a Palestinian state is not the cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A member of the national security team in the George W. Bush administration that sought to bring into existence a Palestinian state, Abrams now argues that the principal reason that Palestinians don’t have one is that they have never really wanted a state, at least not one that coexists with Israel. The PA and Hamas differ regarding means and rhetoric, but they agree that Palestinians’ proper political aim is to rule all the land between the river and the sea. If Palestinians established a state alongside Israel, it would not end the conflict but rather provide a haven for Islamist radicalization, a new opportunity for Iranian proxy warfare against the Jewish state, and a platform from which Palestinians could more effectively pursue their national goal, which is to eliminate Israel.
According to Abrams, the least bad option for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Judea and Samaria has been around for a long time and is overdue for reconsideration: a confederation with Jordan. A Jordanian-Palestinian confederation would benefit Jordan, he argues, by increasing its size and influence in the region. It would benefit Palestinians by offering them citizenship in a sovereign state. And it would benefit Israel by placing responsibility for security in Palestinian areas of the West Bank in the hands of a pro-Western monarch who commands a professional military and police force.
Abrams understands that the Jordanian option may not satisfy Palestinian national aspirations. And he appreciates that billions in aid will be necessary to persuade the Jordanians to take on the risk of incorporating approximately 3 million additional Palestinians into a country in which Islamists and Palestinians already uneasily coexist. But, he concludes, it’s less bad than the alternatives.
In reply, Rafi DeMogge – pseudonym of an Israel-based author and researcher who writes on political demographics – explains that the chief problem with Abrams’ solution is that it won’t work. In “Jordan Might Not Want Confederation with Palestinians, and Might Not Survive It,” DeMogge observes that both Palestinians and Jordanians have good reasons to reject the Jordanian option. The Palestinians will reject it because it does not fulfill their principal national aspiration which, as Abrams himself emphasizes, is to destroy Israel. Jordan will reject it because, as Abrams also considers, the addition of 3 million disaffected Palestinians will destabilize the fragile country. And, one should add, Israel has good reason to reject the Jordanian option for the same reason: It would imperil the Hashemite kingdom, which provides a pro-Western buffer against jihadism on Israel’s eastern border.
All things considered, it would be better for American diplomats to shift focus from long-term resolution of the conflict in Judea and Samaria to near-term efforts, consistent with Israeli security, to promote West Bank Palestinian self-governance and prosperity. Admittedly, the focus on small-scale and near-term improvements in Judea and Samaria combined with President Trump’s ambitious plan for the redevelopment of Gaza has only a modest chance of long-term success.
Nevertheless, the approach may represent the least bad option.
