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The Empty Sloganeering of a "Two-State Solution"

(National Review-AEI) Danielle Pletka - It is beyond ironic that the vile attacks of Oct. 7 have revived the notion of a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians - an idea that was, until that moment, politically moribund. But it remains the only idea available to the lazy diplomatic and peace-processing class, flailing to "do something" in response to the far Left's anti-Israel-driven outrage over the war in Gaza. The one question no one has bothered to ask is, Is it good for the Palestinians? And the short answer is, no. The fate of the Palestinians is of little genuine interest to their putative champions. To be "pro-Palestinian" has come to mean little more than to be anti-Israel. The rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) focused not on the actual lives of Palestinians but on the "virtue" of killing Israelis and other Jews. The PLO maintained its death grip on the reins of the Palestinian cause by insisting that no Palestinian move into permanent housing or demand equal rights in the Arab lands they occupied, thereby creating permanent stateless "refugees." How was this about the betterment of Palestinian lives? Even after the 1993 Oslo Accords, which created the Palestinian Authority, the question of Palestinian well-being at the hands of their own masters never entered the equation. In the West Bank and Gaza, we saw corruption, declining levels of education, collapsing economic security, Islamist indoctrination, murder, kidnapping, and crime - all at the hands of the PLO in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, from which Israel withdrew in 2005. Right now, the Palestinian people are pawns, props in a local, regional, and global game that puts their real interests last. The writer is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
2024-02-11 00:00:00
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