Nonstarters To Statehood

By Rawan Osman

When I say the two-state solution is dead, people assume it’s wishful thinking. It isn’t. I wish Palestinian culture were different, but wishing doesn’t change reality. A Palestinian state will keep living as a romantic notion in the minds of its supporters, but it will never materialize.

We hear: “If the Palestinians had a state, October 7th would never have happened.”

But they were offered statehood multiple times and rejected it every time, because what was offered was never enough. The two real obstacles to peace were Jerusalem and the so-called “right of return.”

Look at the map below, made by my Finnish, non-Jewish Zionist friend, Risto Huvila. Anyone who understands Jewish history understands why Jerusalem is Israel’s undivided capital. The city that welcomes everyone is governed by Jews. No one contests that Mecca is governed by Muslims, or that the Vatican is governed by Christians. No one should contest Jewish rule over Judaism’s holiest city either.

The “right of return” is a mechanism for dismantling Israel, as Einat Wilf lays out in The War of Return. How could Israel absorb millions of descendants of the roughly 700,000 Palestinians displaced in the 1948 war of independence, without ending its existence as a Jewish state? Insisting on this “right” is a tell, not a good-faith negotiating position.

Don’t Palestinians have a right to self-determination? Of course. But like everyone else, rights come with responsibilities, and freedom ends where it infringes on someone else’s existence. Palestinian governance has failed, repeatedly. The answer to that failure isn’t more power, it’s less. You don’t hand more authority to a leadership that has consistently misused it. And enjoying human rights doesn’t require having a sovereign state.

Palestinian culture, as it stands, rejects coexistence with Israelis and Jews. It glorifies violence against them. How many more thousands need to die before the world accepts that it’s time to close this chapter?

Millions want something different: for Israel to disappear. Antisemitism and Antizionism aside, a plain comparison of what Israelis and Palestinians have built suggests an obvious conclusion: preserve what works, abandon what doesn’t.

So what happens to the Palestinians? That’s their call. They can build lives wherever they choose, ideally in an Arab or Muslim country, and Jordan remains the most logical option. Jordan was, after all, the largest portion of the British Mandate for Palestine, carved out and handed to the Hashemite family from the Arabian Peninsula. Royalty on gifted land welcoming their Arab, Muslim brethren isn’t a radical idea. And rather than leaning on foreign aid indefinitely, Palestinians and Jordanians might do better setting Israel aside for a decade and building a real economy. Even a fraction of what Israel has achieved would transform the region.

RAWAN OSMAN is a self-described “recovered antisemite,” and a writer and researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Her regular commentary can be accessed on X, Instagram, Linkedin and Facebook.