It’s called a solution, so it must be one, right?
Everyone seems to think that what the Middle East, and the world at large, really needs is the “two-state solution.” Governments and international organizations frequently call for it. The establishment media consistently treats it as a consummation devoutly to be wished. If only the Palestinian Arabs had a state of their own, with a full-fledged government and complete independence from the state of Israel, both sides would lay down their arms, the lion would lie down with the lamb, and the two states, Israel and Palestine, would live side-by-side in peace forever after.
The corollary to all this is the idea that the obstacle to peace is not the Palestinian Arabs, with all their calls for jihad, the bloodlust they inculcate in even the youngest children, and their all-consuming desire to pursue ethnic cleansing and a new genocide of the Jews. No, all that is a perfectly understandable reaction to their having been denied national sovereignty. Give them a state and — hey presto! — suddenly these people who have shown nothing to the world but hatred and fanaticism will become the lovable lugs the left is certain they really are.
They’re not the problem; the Israelis, who already have their state but supposedly keep encroaching upon Palestinian sovereignty and denying them a state — they’re the problem.
And so on Monday, France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot bragged that “we recognized the state of Palestine in September 2025 and decided to ban products from illegal Israeli settlements this month.” The illegality of those settlements is highly questionable, since Israel is the only state that has any plausible claim to sovereignty over the land in question, but Barrot was working to “save the two-state solution and revive a credible path to peace.”
Barrot’s statements came just over a week after British Prime Minister Andy Burham wrote: “We have called for years for a two-state solution in the Middle East, but we must recognise that those words are meaningless unless we back them up with action.”
Likewise, in late August, Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote: “The expansion of illegal Israeli settlements and outposts in the West Bank, alongside the ongoing horror of life in Gaza, makes the need for a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine more urgent and necessary than ever. International dithering and procrastination must stop to preserve any chance of sustainable peace.”
All these leaders and many others, including many that aren’t as far-left as Barrot, Burnham and Robison, take it for granted as axiomatic that Palestinian state will bring lasting peace. On what basis they think this, however, is never explained. In fact, more than a few Muslim clerics have directly refuted this idea.
A Qatari sheikh, Muhammad Al-Muraikhi, stated on Qatar TV years ago, on Jan. 9, 2009: “We do not treat the Jews as our enemies just because they occupied Palestine,” he explained, “or because they occupied a precious part of our Arab and Islamic world. We will treat the Jews as our enemies even if they return Palestine to us, because they are infidels. They rejected Allah and His messengers.”
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An Egyptian imam, Muhammad Hussein Ya’qoub, declared that Muslim hatred of Jews had nothing to do with land and everything to do with the Qur’an: “If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. We will never love them. Absolutely not. The Jews are infidels—not because I say so, and not because they are killing Muslims…. It is Allah who said that they are infidels…. They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing.”
Another Muslim cleric, Sheik Said Al-Afani, said of the Jews: “Our hatred of them is purely on religious grounds, and not because of the pure, sacred land, which was blessed by Allah, or because of Gaza…not only because of Al-Aqsa and so on. We hate them, first and foremost, because of their enmity towards Allah, and because they slayed our prophets.”
If the state of Palestine were universally recognized tomorrow and the “two-state solution” fully implemented, do you think these Muslim clerics and their followers would suddenly decide that the Israelis aren’t so bad after all, and that they’re going to live in peace with them? Neither do I. Like Gaza after Israelis withdrew from it completely in 2005, the state of Palestine would simply become a new jihad base for attacks against a diminished Israel. World leaders, however, prefer ignorance and denial to facing these difficult truths.
