Jewish World Update May/Jun 2025
An End to the Palestinian State Fantasy
by Jonathan S. Tobin
(JNS)— Everyone who claims to be an expert on the Middle East is sure about one thing: President Donald Trump’s proposal to move Palestinian Arabs out of Gaza either cannot or should not be enacted. Of course, the same experts said the same thing about the 2020 Abraham Accords that achieved normalization agreements between Israel and four Arab and Muslim-majority countries. They also predicted that Trump’s moving of the U.S. embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would set off Armageddon (it did not).
Regardless of the outcome, Trump’s decision to champion the idea of restructuring Gaza is enormously consequential. It decisively changes the conversation about the Middle East by dwarfing the importance of even the most significant pro-Israel policy moves of his first term. Above all else, it means the end of the fantasy about the creation of a Palestinian state.
The international community has held onto the belief that a Palestinian state would end the conflict. A Palestinian state was an integral part of the first Trump administration’s “Peace Through Prosperity” Mideast plan, though it was appropriately far less generous than previous offers. And even after October 7, 2023, former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris were among those who pretended that the last century of Palestinian Arab intransigence was meaningless and no reason to stop pushing for the same idea that had failed time and again.
The centerpiece of Trump’s Gaza rebuilding proposal is its clear assumption that there will never be an independent Palestinian state in Gaza or elsewhere. The Palestinian Authority (PA) may rule the internal affairs of Arabs in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). However, the corrupt kleptocracy that continues to subsidize terrorism through its pay-for-slay policy rewarding violent Palestinian terrorists, including those responsible for October 7, has never shown any realistic interest in transitioning to a sovereign entity devoted to creating a peaceful and productive state alongside Israel.
Gaza has been a dagger pointed at Israel ever since the Jewish nation withdrew every soldier, settler, and settlement from the Strip in the summer of 2005. Two years later, Hamas toppled PA rule (also run by its political party, Fatah) in a bloody coup against its rivals.
Still, it remains an article of faith among the foreign-policy establishment that Israel must be compelled to facilitate the creation of a Palestinian state—a state whose main purpose will serve, like Gaza under Hamas, as a springboard for Israel’s eventual destruction.
The United States will no longer regard the facilitating of this destructive concept as a policy goal. On the contrary, whatever else does or doesn’t happen in the coming years, a different solution has to be found for the Palestinians. The people who cheered the mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, and wanton destruction on October 7 will not be rewarded with more pressure on Jerusalem to do something the overwhelming majority of Israelis from right to left oppose as suicidal.
Trump has consigned the idea of Palestinian statehood to the ash heap of history, where it belongs. Along with his withdrawal from UNRWA—the UN refugee agency that has refused to resettle the Palestinians since 1948 and that helped perpetuate the war on Israel—and his defunding of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), whose “humanitarian” projects similarly helped prop up Palestinian intransigence, Trump has decisively shifted U.S. policy away from fantasy to realism.
American support was always essential for Palestinian statehood. That is finished. His critics may decry this all they want, but the bitter truth they fail to acknowledge is that their alternatives to Trump’s Gaza idea are even more unrealistic and dangerous than his.
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