Recently, I got into a debate online with someone who demanded to know why, after all these years, there is still no Palestinian state.
The question was clearly meant as an indictment of Israel.
But as the exchange went on, it became clear to me that the person knew almost nothing about the history of the conflict. There were plenty of accusations but very little knowledge of the facts, a phenomenon we see all too often nowadays.
So let’s set the record straight.
Before asking why there is no Palestinian state today, it is worth recalling a basic historical fact: there has never been a Palestinian state in all of history.
The land was ruled, over the centuries, by Romans, Byzantines, Arab and Muslim dynasties, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, and the British. But there was never an independent Palestinian Arab country with its own government, army, currency, or capital.
Even the name itself is revealing. The word “Palestine” appears precisely zero times in the Hebrew Bible, the Christian New Testament, and the Koran. Indeed, it was only after crushing the Bar-Kochba revolt in the second century CE that the Romans. Under Emperor Hadrian, Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina. The change was intended to sever the Jewish connection to the land and erase the memory of Jewish sovereignty.
The many failed chances for a Palestinian state
In the modern era, Palestinian Arab statehood was repeatedly put within reach and repeatedly rejected.
The pattern began early. In 1937, a British royal commission headed by Lord Peel recommended partitioning Mandatory Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. Arab leaders rejected the proposal, while the Zionist leadership accepted partition in principle, while objecting to key boundaries and details.
A decade later, in 1947, the United Nations proposed dividing British Mandatory Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab.
The Jewish leadership said yes, and the Arab leadership said no.
Instead of accepting the opportunity to establish a Palestinian state, the Arab world went to war in 1948 to prevent the creation of a Jewish one.
And even after that war, there was another prolonged opportunity.
From 1948 to 1967, Jordan controlled Judea and Samaria, while Egypt controlled Gaza. Israel had no presence in either territory. Yet no Palestinian state was created during those 19 years.
The PLO, founded in 1964, underscored what the real priority was. It did not even focus its claims on Judea and Samaria and Gaza. Its original charter demanded the whole of Israel.
That same rejectionist approach was evident after Israel’s 1967 Six Day War victory, when the Arab League responded at Khartoum with the famous “Three Noes”: no peace, no recognition, no negotiations with Israel.
The 1993 Oslo Accords: A wasted opportunity
Then came Oslo in September 1993, when Israel decided to test a different path.
Israel recognized the PLO, withdrew from Palestinian population centers, and helped establish the Palestinian Authority, expecting negotiations to lead to a permanent settlement.
That process eventually led to Camp David, where, in July 2000, prime minister Ehud Barak met with Yasser Arafat under US president Bill Clinton’s auspices. Barak accepted the idea of Palestinian statehood and offered far-reaching territorial concessions, including in Jerusalem.
Arafat rejected the deal, and the summit ended without an agreement.
But the effort did not end there. Later that year, in December 2000, Clinton proposed parameters envisioning a Palestinian state in Gaza and nearly all of Judea and Samaria, territorial swaps, and a capital in east Jerusalem.
Arafat did not accept those terms either.
In the years since, Clinton has been remarkably blunt about what happened. Speaking at The New York Times DealBook Summit in December 2024, he recalled telling young Americans that Arafat had “walked away from a Palestinian state, with a capital in east Jerusalem, 96% of Judea and Samaria, 4% of Israel to make up for the 4%” that Israel would retain.
Then Clinton drove the point home: “You walk away from these once-in-a-lifetime peace opportunities and you can’t complain 25 years later when the doors weren’t all still open, and all the possibilities weren’t still there.”
Those are the words of the American president who spent years trying to broker peace.
And what followed the collapse of that effort was not another Palestinian diplomatic initiative, but the Second Intifada. Israeli buses, restaurants, and cafés were attacked by Palestinian terrorists.
Still, Israel tried again.
In 2005, the Jewish state withdrew its soldiers and expelled its civilians from the Gaza Strip, uprooting every Jewish community and ending its permanent military presence inside the Strip.
Gaza now had the chance to become a test of what Israeli withdrawal could produce. Instead, Hamas seized control and turned it into a terrorist fortress. Rockets were fired at Israeli towns. Terror tunnels were dug under the border.
Three years later, Israel returned to the negotiating table once more.
In 2008, prime minister Ehud Olmert pursued another far-reaching agreement with PA President Mahmoud Abbas. According to former US president George W. Bush, the plan would have given the Palestinians the “vast majority” of Judea and Samaria, while Israel retained certain settlement blocs. It also envisaged shared sovereignty in Jerusalem and a tunnel linking Judea and Samaria and Gaza.
Bush later wrote in his memoir, Decision Points, that both leaders had privately accepted the details of the plan, but Abbas ultimately backtracked and refused to endorse it publicly.
And the problem is not confined to the negotiating table.
Abbas has spent nearly two decades as president without new elections, while the PA under his leadership continues paying stipends to terrorists and their families and educating children in a culture of rejection and “martyrdom.”
Then came Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel had left Gaza 18 years earlier. There were no Israeli towns or villages there and no Israeli military government running daily life. Yet Gaza became the launching pad for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Thousands of Palestinian terrorists poured across the border, murdering, raping, burning, and kidnapping Israelis.
We left Gaza and got rockets, dismantled Jewish communities and got terror tunnels, and withdrew every Israeli soldier and civilian and ultimately got Oct. 7.
And now there are voices once again telling Israel to repeat the experiment of retreat in Judea and Samaria, which would endanger Jerusalem, the Coastal Plain and Ben-Gurion Airport.
No Israeli in his right mind can or should agree to that.
After all, if Israel were really the main reason there is no Palestinian state, then the periods when Israel was absent should have produced one – from 1948 to 1967 in Judea and Samaria and Gaza, and in the years following Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza. They did not.
A Palestinian state under present conditions would be a gamble with millions of Israeli lives. Territory surrendered by Israel was used to prepare and launch the Oct. 7 massacre. Why assume land surrendered in Judea and Samaria would produce a different result?
So the next time someone asks why there is no Palestinian state, turn the question around.
Ask them: Why did the Arab leadership reject partition in 1947? Why did Arafat walk away when Clinton was offering him a state with its capital in east Jerusalem and 96% of Judea and Samaria?
Why did Abbas fail to endorse the far-reaching agreement described by Bush in 2008?
Why was Gaza turned into a base for terror after Israel withdrew?
And after Oct. 7, why should Israel be expected to ignore every lesson of the past and take the same risk again?
The bottom line is that there is no “Palestine” because for generations the Palestinian leadership has preferred the struggle against Israel to the compromises required for statehood.
Palestinians cannot repeatedly pass up opportunities, embrace or tolerate violence instead, and then insist that someone else is solely responsible for the consequences.
Clinton understood that, Bush saw it, too, and Israelis certainly understand it now.
Simply put: the facts have not changed. Only the willingness to face them has.
The writer served as deputy communications director under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.