OpEd: So-Called Two-State Solution is Lunacy

By David Anderson, J.D.
Columnist, The Moderate Voice

NEW YORK — Westerners love the compromise of a Two State Solution. Because the Palestinians are “just like us,” apparently. Well no, actually. No.

Why not their own state? Sounds legit! But the much touted Two State Solution is advanced by Westerners who have utterly no conception of what Palestinian nationalism is.

That a national identity can be artificially constructed from animus, resentment and murderous rage is hard for outsiders to understand because they haven’t experienced that rage or anger – and jihad isn’t our operating system.

“They just want what everybody wants” is the idea we project onto Palestine.

And they do – what human doesn’t? – want peace, schools, food, money? But we’re blind to the fact that more than the above they want dead Jews. They’ve prioritized this above the “schools and food” thing over and over.

And they’re not sneaky: they announce, broadcast and shout this all the time.

The more strident cohort of Palestinians – using Islam and the actual words of the Koran applied to al-Yahood/Jews as their intellectual architecture – want a caliphate – across the globe built on the bones of the unbelievers.

For example: October 7th has almost universal appeal in recent surveys in the West Bank and Gaza. Above 80% actually, but consider 10% are Christian Palestinians. They hate the Jews also but are a tad less genocidal in their hatred, less martyrdomy if you will.

Hamas was elected, and support for it is stronger now more than ever. Those who didn’t vote for Hamas voted for more fanatical parties than Hamas so consider a universe where Hamas are the moderates and there you have the Palestinian center.

This is a moral monstrosity.

Westerns in our secular, rational, comfortable bubbles imprint our own values on a people whose values are utterly different to our own in important ways. The berserkers destroying kibbutzim are not the Muslim equivalent of Jesus-freak fanatics like the Westboro Baptist Church, those craaahzie Christians of Kansas who picket army funerals. The entire “Arab Street” is almost uniformly of the same, maximalist mindset as Westboro Church. This occurs when your main operating system is Islamist fundamentalism. Secular westerners don’t get this.

And again: the issue isn’t about real estate because Palestinian representatives have been offered real estate five times: serious offers for independence all spurned, and indeed Gaza hasn’t had a Jew “occupying” it, or even in it since 2005 yet the murderous rage only burns brighter.

Further: “Palestine” is a reality already: they HAD independence, they HAD a ceasefire and HAD self-government until 10/7/23. They effectively had that second Palestinian state for 16 years!

Amazingly few people appreciate this but in 2005 all Jewish settlers left Gaza – kicking and screaming. No Jew has lived in Gaza between 2005 and Oct. 7. Current Jewish residents, 150-ish and still alive are really unhappy about being there because….well… they’re hostages.

So what happened between “Judenfrei”/Jew-free 2005 and 2023? Well, Hamas and its handmaiden UNRWA have been the beneficiary of a welfare largess unprecedented in modern times. The ONLY UN agency devoted to one ethnic group, UNRWA, gives billions from everybody to pay for everything in Gaza though enough has been “skimmed” by Hamas’ leadership to, somehow, make those brave “warriors” billionaires with a “B”. What they did with it was the Palestine of October 7th.

But let us be indulgent:

What would a “Free Palestine”, this “Second State” look like?

Time for some economic history: First, take oil out of the equation (Palestine has none) and what does Islamo-Socialism look like in other Arab contexts?

Because since Palestine has been a dream (1964 and the founding of the PLO, not “time immemorial”), all the evidence of their national plan converges on socialism up to the 1990s and thereafter socialism + Islamist fundamentalism.

Based on that it’d look a lot like Yemen, a failed state. Or Sudan, ditto. Or Libya, an utterly failed state, one so horribly failed that other losers point to Libya to take the heat and shame off themselves.

The above three examples are the worst countries for humans to live in: their citizens risk their lives to run, swim, float and drown anywhere else. They are all at the very bottom of all metrics of human flourishing, they’re even at the bottom of Henley’s “Passport Power Index”.

Arab Socialism is as bad an operating system for a nation as communism, worse than Ebola. Add Islamist fundamentalism to that and powerful AI couldn’t render a worse disaster. By contrast, peaceful (Muslim!) Arab Israeli citizens have greater GDP than anybody in the Islamosphere outside the oil lottery winners (UAE, Kuwait, etc.), and more legal rights than them.

Going by their intentions and how those intentions have played out in similar contexts you have a state of privation, misery and violent oppression. Welcome to Free Palestine.

You say one’s own proud flag unfurled is better than bread and peace? Try not eating for a while. In a dictatorship. With the local mafia raping your daughters and stealing your stuff.  Ask a Yemeni about that: you can find one on a boat to Europe.

“Palestine” has no time for democracy and they have form in this: elections were cancelled after Hamas’ win in 2008, and this is important: Democracy is utterly antithetical to Islamist fundamentalism and pretty much all Islamic scholars agree on this.

Democracy and all its accoutrements – the lifeblood of freedom, rights and wealth – are prohibited in Islam – particularly in the fundamentalist version embraced by most of the Palestinian population, as per the polls for … as far back as poling goes. More than anywhere the “Two” of “Two State Solution” would probably look like Gaza.
Uneducated campus experts wearing their hipster swastikas (keffiyehs) pretend the (non) “occupation” has strangled Gaza.

In fact, apart from armaments the Israelis let pretty much everything in and out and what they missed was smuggled in via Egypt as the falling rockets on Ashkelon (on a hospital lately, twice) attest. Israel has paid for 100% of Gaza’s electricity, internet, water and gas for decades. And medical care! (hello, fellow Americans).

Gaza’s poverty is Gaza’s own dim achievement, again, despite the generosity of the outside world.

In this “Two State Solution,” given their oft-stated intentions how would Free Palestine differ from the behavior of Syria, Yemen, Sudan? Why would Palestine be any different? Because you think keffiyehs look cool and they have a great chant? Because the IDF killing 13 year old “kiddies” who shoot AKs at women is somehow “genocide?” What if that 13 year old were an incel shooter at your kids’ school? What would you tell the SWAT team?

Because with land, global recognition and international respectability they could do the one thing they find difficult now: buy arms. Lots of arms.

Free Palestine would bristle and guess who their first target would be. Revenge is hot in the chest, powerful and immensely satisfying. They’d import (more) missiles from Iran, cool Yemeni daggers, boatloads of deadly Russian junk and exploding Mercedes from Lebanon. Hell they’d buy nukes if they could: Hello, Pakistan?

Because martyrdom and Jew-annihilation isn’t in the recipe, it is the recipe.

BUT….sometimes it is better to analyze from the other direction. What would this lovely, peaceful and prosperous Free Palestine do – pushed up against the Israeli jugular? Do you think Israelis – if they still matter – would be safer?

Knowing even what you can glean casually from mainstream media and idiot tic-tok influencers: what kind of country do you think the Palestinian leaders today would create and how would you feel about it if your loved ones lived in or next to it?

Be honest with yourself: are your loved ones women, gay, want a vote or free speech, security of property rights? If these things matter – which Arab citizens in Israel and those in non-Arab countries have, why don’t Gazans deserve those things? They’re not going to get them in any two state solution.

Westerners have to disabuse themselves of the hallucination that “all they want is peace and their own destiny” rubbish which sells in the West but is disengaged from reality. It defies all the evidence when it comes to the “burn everything down and impoverish all” reality of Third World Socialism and defies all understanding of political Islam

Could it be that a part of the world, the Middle Eastern Islamosphere, an area that has been in some kind of war almost continuously for all our lives and mainly poor despite oil, evinces a different set of base values than the rest of humanity? Could it be?

“We’ll see….” or “Let’s run the experiment” of a “Free Palestine” is a deeply reckless, ruinous gamble no sane human – presumably you – would take in the light of nearly a century of actual, bloody evidence.
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David Anderson is a columnist for The Moderate Voice website, with which San Diego Jewish World shares stories under auspices of the San Diego On Line News Association.