“Free Palestine”. That’s one of the most common chants we’ve heard in the past few years. A cry for freedom, resistance and justice. A wishful praise for the creation of a Palestinian state. A demand to end the suffering of the Palestinian people who long for peace and wish to build a better future for their children. It’s not only activists all over the Western world who demand to Free Palestine based on the right of the Palestinian people for self-determination.

It has become a very popular political stance across many countries around the world to declare their recognition of a Palestinian state. From France and Britain to Canada and Australia, the world unites again behind the Two-State Solution in the Middle East.  All these countries are suddenly rushing to officially recognize a Palestinian state, as if this is a brand-new idea that is going to fix everything. They think they’re championing this noble idea, but they are completely ignoring a staggering historical reality – the two-state solution is not new at all. It has been offered repeatedly for nearly a century and it has been consistently rejected by one side. Can you guess which one?

Have you ever wondered, how come a Palestinian state does not exist yet? So much attention is given to this particular conflict, much of the world has been involved over the years, so what is it that prevents a resolution, a compromise, a means to settle things between the Israelis and the Palestinians and finally move on for the benefit of all humanity.  

We’re going to look at the actual historical timeline of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and break down the reality of the two-state solution. Most importantly, we’re going to look at why it has failed over and over again. If you look at the fundamental architecture of modern international diplomacy, it all basically rests on the assumption that every conflict – no matter how brutal – is ultimately a dispute over tangible things like land, borders or resources. If we just draw the map correctly, everyone will be happy. The belief is that if diplomats can find the perfect combination of land swaps and economic incentives, both sides will eventually reach an agreement because the alternative of an endless war is irrational to the Western mind.

But what if that whole foundational assumption is just entirely wrong? What happens when one side doesn’t view compromise as a path to peace, but actually sees it as an act of treason to their core ideology? Well, then the whole standard negotiating framework just completely collapses. Unfortunately, that is the reality in the middle east today. We’re going to look at the facts and see how the international community has spent nearly a century trying to cure a geopolitical disease using the entirely wrong medicine.

1937

So where do we even start? Most people think this all started in 1948 or maybe 1967. But it goes way back to the 1930s, before the modern map of the Middle East was even drawn, before the modern State of Israel even existed. Back then, the region was under the British Mandate. The Ottoman Empire had collapsed after World War I, Jews and Arabs lived under the British mandate, sometimes in harmony but mostly not so much. Tensions between the two people were evident back then and the violence was just escalating. The British attempted to figure this out, so they formed a Royal Commission in 1937 led by Lord Peele to basically investigate the conflict and come up with a plan. The Peele Commission and their proposed solution was essentially the very first two-state solution. They looked at the situation and said, “Look, these two groups have completely incompatible national aspirations. We have to divide the land. Let’s partition this mandate territory into separate Arab and Jewish states.”

The mechanics of the proposed map are important. The proposed Jewish state was just a tiny sliver along the coast and some northern valleys. The vast majority of the land was given to the Arab state. You might be thinking, well, a European colonizer is coming in and dividing land. Isn’t rejection the natural response? It’s a fair question, but let’s look at the reaction from both sides for comparison, because the historical reality of that 1937 offer is stark.

The Jewish leadership debated it fiercely because it excluded Jerusalem, their historic biblical capital, but ultimately they accepted it. The Holocaust was looming in Europe, Jews were facing total annihilation and desperately needed a sovereign safe haven, even if it was just a tiny strip of coast. And what was the Arab response to the offer? The Arab leadership rejected it. Period. Just like that. A categorical absolute objection. They refused the very concept of Jewish sovereignty in any part of the land, no matter how small. And the whole plan was scrapped completely.

1947-1948

Which brings us to the next massive historical moment. A decade later, after World War II. The British are decolonizing from many parts of the world, so they just hand the whole mess over to the newly formed United Nations. The UN proposed dividing the land into a Jewish state and an Arab state with Jerusalem as a special international zone. The United Nations General Assembly literally votes in favour of the UN Partition Plan to divide the land, officially United Nations Resolution 181 on November 29, 1947.

The Jewish community accepts the division, completely willing to share the land. People were literally dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv when the UN vote passed. They were just thrilled to finally have international backing for a state. And what about the Arab response this time, did they see the Jewish community’s willingness to compromise and say, “Okay, let’s talk.” Nope. Total rejection again. The Arab population and literally every neighbouring Arab leader completely rejected it. But this time, it wasn’t just a diplomatic no. They actually declared war.

That is just crazy to think about, it’s like two people being offered a split inheritance, one person signs the paperwork and the other person literally burns the contract and declares war. Five Arab armies – Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq – invaded Israel immediately after declaring independence in May 1948. They launched the Arab-Israeli war to prevent a Jewish state from existing. The war lasted more than a year, Israel survived and expanded beyond the borders proposed in the UN Partition Plan, the West Bank came under Jordanian control, Gaza Strip came under Egyptian control, and no independent Palestinian Arab state was created. The war is remembered very differently – for Israel it was the War of Independence, for Palestinians it was the Nakba (“catastrophe”) which became a central part of national identity and memory.

An Irreconcilable Conflict of Principles

There’s a very specific quote from 1947 that really anchors this whole reality. It’s from Ernest Bevin who was the British Foreign Secretary at the time and he basically predicted the next 80 years. While the British were managing the territory back then, Bevin was standing up in the British Parliament while discussing the conflict in Mandatory Palestine, basically throwing his hands up in exhaustion. He told Parliament:

“His Majesty’s Government have thus been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles.”

Irreconcilable. Unsolvable by normal means. He stated that, and this phrasing is so important as he described the competing positions:

“For the Jews the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.”

Resist to the last. He was saying the Arab’s primary motivation wasn’t even building their own country. It was just preventing the Jewish people from having one. The Jews want a state of whatever size and the Arabs want the Jews not to have a state at all. That is the core of it. If you understand that dynamic, everything else that happens over the next 80 years makes perfect sense. It wasn’t about borders. Negation was the core objective. The Arabs denied any compromise with the Jews. And what’s vital to understand here is that this isn’t some modern biased talking point. This was an objective observation by an outsider, a British diplomat before Israel was even a recognized state.

But you know, if you look at Tik Tok today, all you see are videos about stolen land and colonialism. How do we reconcile that modern framing with this 1947 reality? Modern activists focus entirely on the outcome of the 1948 war while ignoring what caused it, which was the Arab rejection of the UN partition plan. The displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 war was a massive tragedy. But the war only happened because Arab nations chose to fight instead of accepting the compromise. If they had just accepted it, there wouldn’t have been a war, there wouldn’t have been a single refugee, and a Palestinian state would be celebrating its 78th anniversary right alongside Israel today.

That really reframes everything. But I can see why people may be thinking right now, okay, that was the 1940s. Leadership changes. You can’t blame people today for what happened back then. That’s a fair point. Which is why we move on to the modern decades of the peace process to see whether the core dynamic has changed at all.

1993

Let’s talk about the 1990s, because that seemed like a massive breakthrough at the time. If you are old enough to remember, in the 1990s with the Oslo Accords, everyone on the news was celebrating. People thought this was the huge breakthrough. They genuinely thought the creation of the Palestinian Authority was going to lead to a peaceful state. You had the iconic imagery of Israeli Prime Minister Issac Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat shaking hands on the White House lawn with Bill Clinton standing right there. And it wasn’t just talk. It was actual tangible steps toward a state. Israel literally brought the Palestinian leadership out of exile, gave them control over parts of the West Bank and Gaza, and let them set up their own armed police force. Palestinians were getting land, they were getting governance, international funding was pouring in.

It was supposed to be a transitional period leading to a permanent state. The road map to the two-state solution. But what actually happened on the ground? Well, the response from radical factions like Hamas and Islamic Jihad was a massive coordinated campaign of suicide bombings across Israeli cities. We really need to pause and explain what that meant because if you’re 20 years old, you do not remember this. This wasn’t military combat. We are talking about guys walking into crowded restaurants, nightclubs and shopping malls with jackets full of explosives and nails, targeting families, blowing up city buses during the morning commute. Hundreds of Israeli civilians were murdered in horrific violence. But why? If they were finally getting a state, why launch a terror campaign right then?

We really need to point this out – the violence wasn’t a desperate plea for a state, it wasn’t a desperate reaction to a lack of progress. That terrorism was a direct response to the emerging peace process itself. People always think terrorism happens because people lack hope. But the reality flips that entirely. The violence against purely civilian targets in the heart of Israeli cities spiked because a compromise was approaching, it was a weapon used specifically to stop the peace process from happening. Because a successful peace treaty would mean accepting Israel permanently. The extremists recognized that if Oslo succeeded, they would have to give up their core goal of destroying Israel. A peace treaty is their worst-case scenario. So they sabotaged it with terror.

The closer they got to actual peace and a two-state solution, the more the violence escalated. It completely shatters the Western assumption that diplomacy reduces violence. In this specific conflict, every time the international community pushes for a two-state solution, it actually acts as an accelerant for terrorism. It’s like administering medicine that just makes the patient way sicker. That is so dark, but the moderate camps kept trying.

2000

Let’s talk about the year 2000. The Camp David Summit with US President Bill Clinton. Israeli Prime Minister Ehoud Barack makes this unprecedented offer – a Palestinian state in all of Gaza, 92% of the West Bank, and East Jerusalem as a capital, which broke every Israeli taboo at the time. That is literally the territorial framework everyone around the world was asking for. Critics will say the map wasn’t perfect or Israel wanted to keep some control over the airspace. Well, in any negotiation, the first offer is never the final offer. If you don’t like the map, you make a counter offer. You say, “Give us 95% instead of 92%.” Or you say “let’s start here, ensure we maintain peace for a number of years, collaborate to fight terrorism and extremism together and then move on to the next phase”.

But what happened? The Palestinian Chairman said no. He didn’t make a counter offer. Arafat, who, let’s be honest, operated as a longtime terrorist since the 1970s before becoming a political leader, rejected the offer, walked away, went home and immediately after he launched the second Intifada – a massive organized wave of suicide bombings across Israel that was so much worse than the violence in the ’90s. Exponentially worse. Over a thousand Israeli civilians were murdered in relentless suicide bombings. It was a multi-year campaign of pure terror, which just perfectly proves Bevin’s quote from 1947 – the Palestinians were offered a state, and they chose absolute war instead, just to avoid recognizing Israel. It’s the exact same irreconcilable principle playing out 50 years later. A huge territorial concession was offered, followed by outright rejection, and then immediate mass casualty violence against civilians. The pattern is just undeniable. It completely destroys the western assumption that Palestinians just want a state. The land was sitting right there on a map and all they needed to do is reach out and take it.

In his memoir “My Life”, Bill Clinton expressed deep frustration with Yasser Arafat over the failure of the 2000 Camp David Summit. One of Clinton’s most frequently cited remarks from the memoir is: “I killed myself to give the Palestinians a state. Arafat was here fourteen days and said no to everything”. He was leading his people to catastrophe.

2005

Which brings us to 2005, the Gaza disengagement. We really need to spend time on this because it feels like everyone just ignores this part of history. It’s the most glaring omission in modern activist discourse. By 2005, the peace process is essentially dead. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said there was no realistic peace partner at the time, but Israel still needed to shape its own future. He argued that ruling over millions of Palestinians indefinitely threatened Israel’s long-term identity. He decided to execute a unilateral withdrawal without a negotiated peace agreement. Israel pulled out every single Israeli settlement, every civilian, and every military force from the Gaza Strip. They forcibly evicted thousands of their own citizens out of their homes, dismantled 21 Israeli settlements, pulled out every single soldier. They handed over complete control of the entire Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority. Gaza has a coastline, it has a border with Egypt, and it was 100% free of Israeli occupation. When the Israelis left, international philanthropists bought all these high-tech agricultural green houses that the Israeli farmers had built, millions of dollars worth of infrastructure, and they just handed the keys over to the Palestinians to kickstart a massive export economy.

It was essentially an experiment, to see what the Palestinians would do with actual sovereignty. There’s the opportunity to start building their own state, to become the Singapore of the Middle East. But what did the Palestinians actually build?

The Palestinian legislative elections in both Gaza and the West Bank were held in January 2006. Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council, defeating Fatah. These were the last elections held across Palestinitan territories to date. Within months, the green houses were looted and destroyed. By 2007, Hamas violently taken over the territory, overthrowing the more moderate Palestinian authority in Gaza. Violently, in a bloody civil war. Hamas literally threw political rivals off the roofs of high-rise buildings. And once Hamas took over, what did they do with all the international aid that was pouring in? Instead of building schools and hospitals or investing in an economy or the infrastructure of a nation, Hamas diverted almost everything into building a military apparatus. How do you even do that? How do you turn civilian aid into a military base? They used the cement and steel meant for civilian infrastructure to build hundreds of miles of underground terror tunnels. They dug up international water pipes to make rocket casings. They literally took the foundation of a potential state and turned Gaza into a launchpad for a forever war.

That word really changes how you look at this because when we think of land, we think of farms and homes and businesses. But if your core ideology is negation, then land isn’t a place to live. It’s a tactical military asset. It’s just a place to base your weapons closer to your enemy so you can destroy them. That is such a crucial distinction for people to understand.

But what about the narrative that Gaza was blockaded and starved by the Israelis from day one? That is a myth. It was only after Hamas started firing thousands of rockets into Israeli cities, that both Israel and Egypt imposed varying levels of blockade and restrictions on Gaza. That sequence is crucial. The blockade was a reaction to the terror, not the cause of it. But if you look at campus protest today, they call Gaza an openair prison and act like the blockade just happened for no reason.

So why do Western activists completely ignore the reality? Because the truth of 2005 shatters their entire worldview. The activists operate on this rigid oppressor versus oppressed binary. The oppressed are always innocent victims. To admit what happened in 2005 requires acknowledging Palestinian agency. It requires admitting their leadership chooses terror over state building when handed a golden opportunity. Even worse, Hamas is controlling the Palestinian people of Gaza with sheer terror, killing opponents, abusing women and throwing gay people off the roof. Think about it, who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed?

Critics of the disengagement argue the withdrawal strengthened Hamas, did not lead to peace, and turned into a catastrophic failure. You give them land for free and instead of a state they built a terror base. Was this the last breath of the peace camp? If Gaza turned out to be such a nightmare, how on earth would the Israelis ever agree to withdraw from the West Bank which is 15 times larger, overlooks Israel’s population and economic centre and can become a breeding ground for rocket launchers, armed terror groups or hostile military infrastructure.

2008

Even after the Gaza disengagement and Hamas takeover, Israel made another offer. In 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Ulmert offered a peace proposal to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, including 100% of the West Bank using land swaps plus a sovereign share of Jerusalem. Israel basically said “We need to keep about 6% of the West Bank where our major populations are. In exchange, we will give you an equivalent 6% of our own pre 1967 sovereign Israeli land”. So the Palestinians would get exactly 100% of the land area they were asking for, plus half of Jerusalem, plus a physical corridor connecting Gaza and the West Bank. Sounds like an unbelievable offer, right? An offer you can’t reject.

But guess what – Abbas did. Walked away. Never made a counter offer. Deal collapsed. The Palestinians argue that one reason for the rejection was because it did not satisfy the Palestinian stance on the “Right of Return” for Palestinian refugees, those displaced in 1948 and 1967, along with their millions of descendants.

In international law and human rights, the “Right of Return” refers to the fundamental right of a person to enter, reside in, and return to their country of citizenship or nationality. However, the Palestinian interpretation of the law is that following a peace agreement refugees would allegedly be able to enter not only the newly established state of Palestine, but to return to live in modern-day Israel. This would cause a massive demographic shift inside the State of Israel, as it would lose its Jewish majority and Israeli identity. No other conflict resolution anywhere in the world throughout history had ever included a return of one people into another state rather than their very own.

Bottom line is, the Palestinians have again rejected the chance of establishing their own state. It is a documented historical fact. From 1937 to 2008, a completely unbroken track record of rejection.

And Then What Happened?

Israel and Hamas (or other Palestinian militant groups in Gaza) have fought five major wars since Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, with thousands of rockets fired towards major Israeli cities, and hundreds of airstrikes on Palestinian targets in retaliation. The worst of all was triggered on October 7, 2023 when Hamas militants and other Palestinian groups invaded Israel and massacred 1200 Israelis. The argument that Hamas turned Gaza into a terror state and a launchpad, proved to be a devastating reality. But the ongoing war expanded from the battle field to social networks, mainstream media and public opinion. It captures the attention of millions of young people, often confused by the narrative which is missing a lot of critical facts about extreme ideology, zero compromise and a forever war mentality. But other than a track record of repeated rejection and “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” (as coined in 1973 by Israel’s ambassador to the UN Abba Eban), there is an immense effort to shape the narrative, suppress the facts and blame the Israeli side for the ongoing misery of the Palestinian people. On the other hand, the Palestinians take no responsibility for their own fate. Ready for some fact-check? Buckle up.

The Historical Palestinian State

We have to talk about something that constantly comes up in the media. This is a huge point of confusion for so many people. When you hear about the 1967 borders, the West Bank and Gaza, everyone always calls them “The Occupied Palestinian Territories”. The whole world assumes this land belongs to a historical Palestinian state that is currently being occupied by the Israelis. How do the historical facts align with that?

Well, in actual fact, they don’t align at all because there was never a sovereign Palestinian state in that territory. Never.  And this is a piece of history that gets completely ignored. Between the 1948 war and the 1967 six-day war, the West Bank was occupied by Jordan and the Gaza Strip was occupied by Egypt. Arab nations completely controlled that exact territory for almost 20 years.

Wait, so did Jordan or Egypt set up an independent Palestinian state? Not at all. Jordan actually annexed the West Bank and Egypt just kept Gaza under strict military rule. For nearly two decades, two Arab countries had absolute authority over the land. And here is the devastating question you have to ask yourself. If the West Bank and Gaza are the indisputable historical heartland of a Palestinian nation, why didn’t Jordan and Egypt establish a Palestinian state when they had the power to do so? the Arab world itself didn’t even prioritize it when they literally held the keys to the land. They could have just drawn the borders and created the state right then and there.

And were there massive global student protests demanding a Free Palestine from Jordanian or Egyptian occupation? Crickets. Absolute silence from the international community. Did the local population launch violent intifadas demanding a state from Jordan or Egypt? Nope. The demand for an independent state only magically materializes when Jews were the ones controlling the land. It’s so glaring when you think about it. And when Israel eventually made peace with Jordan and Egypt, neither of those countries even wanted that land back. The land itself wasn’t the core issue.

The whole modern narrative of a stolen Palestinian state is historically just fiction. A modern invention. Israel captured land from Jordan and Egypt that had never been an independent Palestinian state.

The Palestinian National Identity

It gets even more interesting. Before 1948, “Palestinian” was largely a geographic identifier rather than an exclusive national identity. Jewish people who lived under the British Mandate were also referred to as Palestinians, evidently their business entities were The Palestine Post, The Anglo-Palestine Bank, Palestine Airways and the Palestine Football Association – all founded, owned and managed by members of the Jewish community. After the establishment of Israel in 1948, Jewish residents generally stopped using the term for themselves, as they were now “Israelis”, while it took almost 20 years more for the local Arab population to form their national identity.

This is a really explosive historical reality. The whole concept of a distinct Palestinian national identity is remarkably new. The Arabs in the region basically found this identity only 60 years ago. And no, Jesus was not a Palestinian, he was a Jew. That’s when they started calling themselves Palestinians, which sounds crazy to a modern college student who thinks this is an ancient indigenous struggle. They view it as this classic anti-colonial fight. But historically, prior to the 60s, the Arab population there primarily identified as part of the broader Pan-Arab nation or as southern Syrians.

The Palestinian National Identity actually formalized in the 1960s. The PLO, Palestine Liberation Organization, was founded by Yasser Arafat in 1964. It essentially constructed a distinct national identity specifically as a tool to oppose Israeli existence. Effectively, that was 3 years before the 1967 war, when Israel did not capture the West Bank and Gaza yet. You got to ask yourself, what was the PLO trying to liberate in 1964? They wanted to liberate the rest of Israel, cities like Nazareth, Jaffa and Haifa. From the very beginning, the national Palestinian movement wasn’t about building a state, economic prosperity or civil rights. It was entirely about dismantling Israel.

Western Diplomacy

We grow up in the West with this democratic, rational mindset, the idea that everyone just wants to compromise, live in peaceful coexistence and build a nice life for their kids. If two kids want a toy, you split it. We just assume that underneath it all, every culture values life and prosperity over conflict. But projecting those Western values onto radical Middle Eastern factions is a fatal blind spot. What happens when you try to apply Western compromise to a leadership that literally glorifies death? It creates total policy failure. The West treats this like a complex real estate dispute. They think, “Oh, if we just adjust the border here or give them another billion dollars, we’ll get a deal”. But it’s anything like that. It’s an existential ideological war. Rejecting a 100% of the land seems like irrational madness, that makes no sense. But if you shift your paradigm and understand it as a war of total annihilation, suddenly every rejected offer and every act of terror make perfect terrifying sense. It’s just the rational execution of an extremist ideology. The question is, how can we possibly solve that? I mean, other than a complete destruction of the only Jewish state in the world. Wait, is that what you had in mind?

Modern Activism

That really brings us crashing right into the present day. Let’s talk about October 7 and this massive wave of viral activism and the “Free Palestine” movement. I mean, nobody is calling for a Two-State Solution anymore, right? The shift had already happened, and the activists have come up with a new idea – the One-State Solution. Can you imagine Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in peace and harmony? Is that what they mean?

We have to talk about the slogans, especially the one that is literally everywhere. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. You see it on t-shirts, at campus encampments, on Instagram. But look at what that slogan actually means geographically. What river and what sea? The Jordan River on the east and the Mediterranean Sea on the west. And what currently exists between that river and that sea? The entire state of Israel. So when people chant that, they are not calling for a two-state solution, they are not calling for a ceasefire or peace. The physical meaning of that phrase explicitly demands a one-state solution, a state that completely erases and replaces Israel.

You may push back and argue, if you ask a 20-year-old student at a protest in London what they mean, they’ll tell you they just want a secular democratic state with equal rights for everyone. They don’t think they’re calling for a massacre. But that is extreme western naivety. Because it doesn’t matter what a college sophomore in New York thinks the phrase means. What matters is how of the people actually holding the guns in the Middle East interpret it. And how do groups like Hamas interpret it? Well, just look at their founding charter. They don’t want a secular democracy. They explicitly call for the violent destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews globally. It’s framed as a religious duty. Ultimately, demanding a one-state solution under these conditions is basically calling for the physical extermination or expulsion of the Jewish population in the Middle East. It is akin to the Nazi’s Final Solution and for a second Holocaust. That is incredibly heavy, but we can justify that comparison by pointing straight at the reality of the October 7^th massacre.

October 7th wasn’t a military manoeuvre for a strategic border. It was a sadistic, intimate slaughter of civilians, families in their bedrooms, kids at a music festival. And the Hamas leadership went on television and social networks and explicitly promised to commit a second, a third, a millionth October 7th until Israel is eradicated. The message is clear as they are telling you exactly who they are. Why are you projecting your western progressive values onto a group that despises everything you stand for? It’s a tragic irony. You have these well-meaning Western kids who care deeply about LGBTQ rights and women’s liberation, throwing their support behind radical jihadi enterprises that execute LGBTQ people and oppress women. It’s called weaponized empathy. Hijacking Western guilt and compassion to provide political cover for an ideology of annihilation. And bit by bit, one protest at a time, they delegitimize the State of Israel to make it appear as unlawful, unjustified, and not worthy of acceptance or recognition. Sounds familiar? That’s exactly how Palestinian leaders responded to every peace offer, and it explains why the violence never stops no matter what concessions are made.

How Can We Move Forward?

If we look at everything we’ve uncovered so far, the Israel-Palestine Conflict is endless, and the two-state solution is a proven century long failure. Then why does the UN, the European Union, and other countries around the world, why do they keep pushing to recognize a Palestinian state? Why is the international community so blind to the facts? Isn’t it interesting that the world keeps pushing towards the very same solution? Remember what Albert Einstain said: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

So how do we fix this? We need a radically different approach, a new framework. What are the actual practical steps required to change this trajectory. Well, there is a very specific blueprint for actual peace. It’s a list of a few preconditions the world should demand from all sides of this never-ending conflict. This is what needs to happen before any nation should ever even utter the words Two-State Solution again. The key here is what accountability looks like, and it starts with crucial ideological shifts, because you have to fix the psychological operating system first.

Condition 1: Acknowledgement

This is the absolute baseline. Both sides will have to acknowledge the existence of the other. Israel will need to go back to its peace camp that flourished in the 1990s around the Oslo Accords, but retreated following the ongoing war with Hamas and their supporters since 2006. Especially after October 7, not many Israelis believe that peace with the Palestinians is even possible. They got quite a few reasons to be pessimistic. The ongoing terror and the fact that no Palestinian leader had ever acknowledged the State of Israel. Palestinians will have to publicly accept that a sovereign Jewish state is a permanent legitimate reality, not some temporary crusader state they can outlast. You can’t negotiate with someone whose charter calls for your destruction. They have to formally legally recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Condition 2: Violence and Terrorism

Stop any form or shape of terrorism. This doesn’t mean a temporary ceasefire. It means a permanent abolition of violence as a political tool. No more launch pads, no more bus bombings, no more launching rockets towards civilian populations. No more October 7th operations. That seems like common sense, but you have to change a behaviour that escalated for a century, not just a tactical pause but a complete shift in mindset. We’re talking about a complete, verifiable disarmament, dismantling the terror infrastructure entirely, filling in the combat tunnels, surrendering the rockets, and stopping the “Pay-for-Slay” mechanism. It sounds like a slang term but in fact it’s not slang. It’s a formal longstanding policy of the Palestinian Authority where they pay substantial monthly financial stipends to the families of Palestinian terrorists who murdered, injured, or imprisoned for carrying out acts of violence against Israelis. The deadlier the attack, the higher the payout. That is just sick. The government is literally subsidizing murder. That obviously has to stop. Which brings us to:

Condition 3: Education

Educate children for peace. This is probably the most crucial one. In Israel, children grow up praising peace with its neighbours. There are so many songs about Peace, and the most common word for Hello – Shalom – also means peace. It’s part of the language. But unfortunately, it’s a completely different story on the Palestinian side. UN funded schools are currently indoctrinating kids into a culture of martyrdom, like teaching math by counting dead martyrs, literally. And having summer camps where kids run military drills. The curriculum has to be completely overhauled to teach coexistence instead of glorifying jihad. Palestinians must educate their children that peace is the way forward and stop the glorification of death and martyrdom. They actually have to change their school curriculum, because you cannot have a functional state if your schools, your television shows, and your religious sermons are designed to manufacture a generation of martyrs whose highest aspiration in life is to die killing Israelis and Jews. The internal propaganda machine has to be completely dismantled. That is critical. They have to completely re-engineer their cultural fabric. And that ties directly into:

Condition 4: Cultural Shift

Abandon the Forever War Islamic jihadi doctrine, the underlying religious justification for the conflict. The idea that the land can never be shared with non-Muslims has to be formally renounced. One of the reasons this conflict is not resolved is because religious forces see it as God’s will, which challenges the concept of compromise. Palestinians have to abandon the forever war Islamic jihadi doctrine. This feels really hard for diplomats to tackle because it touches on theology. But it’s unavoidable. As long as the conflict is framed as an inescapable religious war over holy land that can never be seated, compromise is impossible. They have to secularize their political goals and become moderate Muslims rather than extremists.

Condition 5: Accountability

While Israel is an established state since 1948, it was built by its own people who worked the land, built a strong economy and became a technology start-up nation. The Palestinians will need to do the same – build their own state and stop relying on billions of dollars paid to them in foreign aid by other countries. Forced fiscal independence will create the foundation for state building, rather than a failed state. Because an entity cannot be a responsible sovereign state if it relies entirely on international welfare. If they have to generate their own GDP, collect their own taxes, and pay their own roads, they will be forced to prioritize pragmatism over endless war. The Palestinian territories are among the highest per capita recipients of foreign aid in the world. But instead of building a self-sustaining economy, they’ve built a grievance-based economy. They need to focus on agriculture, tech, and civil infrastructure. Take responsibility for their own people. Stop being a perpetual ward of the international community. Which means cutting off the enablers, and that is next:

Condition 6: Refugee Status

This is a critical structural point. UNRWA is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Although the UN already has a global refugee agency, the UNHCR (the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), which handles every other refugee crisis on the planet from Syria and Sudan to Vietnam and Haiti, for some reason the Palestinians have their own separate dedicated UN agency. The UNHCR is designed to resolve refugee crisis. They help people integrate or resettle, and once a refugee gets citizenship in a new country, they aren’t a refugee anymore, the crisis is solved, everyone moves on to build a new life. But UNRWA operates completely differently. Under the Palestinian Refugee Agency, refugee status is inherited through the family line indefinitely across generations. If someone fled Haifa in 1948 and moved to Lebanon and settled over there, he’s still considered a Palestinian refugee, his children who were born in Lebanon in 1970 are also considered refugees, and if one son moves to Paris, marries a French woman, becomes a French citizen, and has a kid in 2010 who now lives two blocks away from the Eiffel Tower, that Parisian kid is officially classified by the UN as a Palestinian refugee.

That is exactly how the mechanism works. It applies even if they have citizenship in another country. That is insane. Because of this inherited status, the number of UNRWA Palestinian refugees has artificially exploded from 700,000 in 1948 to nearly 6 million today. It’s a deliberate weaponization of demographics. It’s designed to maintain a permanent multigenerational state of victimhood specifically to enforce the Right of Return. If 6 million people return to modern Israel, it instantly destroys the state demographically instead of militarily. On the other hand, many Palestinian refugees and their descendants do not receive citizenship in some countries, and remain stateless or have limited legal status. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone. The demand is to abolish UNRWA, hand the population over to the normal UN Agency for Refugees (UNHCR), and actually help these people integrate and move on with their lives.

Condition 7: Humanitarian Agencies

The massive multi-billion-dollar humanitarian industry operating in the region is the final nail in the coffin of the current system. Without undermining the real humanitarian crisis and the loss of lives, many of the humanitarian agencies operating in Gaza and the West Bank are a scam and have proven links to terror organisations. They are collecting money to fuel the conflict. We must dismantle the NGO apparatus that provides the dark money for terrorism and enriches the corrupt elite. And this should be demanded from all the countries around the world. Western countries are trying to do the right thing by helping poor countries, but the heavy lifting must be demanded from future Palestinian leaders. The current ones had already failed. Because we know where humanitarian aid money actually goes to, and it is a stark contrast.

At the time of his death in 2004, estimates of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s personal wealth were estimated as much as 3 billion dollars, accumulated through foreign aid, tax rebates transferred to his accounts, and monopolies on commercial commodities in Palestinian territories. While people in Gaza suffer, the top leaders of Hamas live as billionaires in luxury hotels in Qatar. How do they steal billions in aid? They operate like a mafia. They tax incoming goods, seize international aid shipments, and then sell the free aid back to their own impoverished people at massive markups. Hamas even did that during the war in Gaza between 2023 and 2025. People were saying there is famine in Gaza, while tons of food was hijacked by Hamas and kept in underground tunnels away from their own citizens, to keep Hamas terrorists going and sell goods in the markets for a high markup.

That is just sickening because so many well-meaning people, from college kids and activists to everyday people all over the world, donate to a humanitarian fund thinking they’re buying baby formula, they are very often inadvertently funding the Hamas military machine. These corrupt structures must be abolished entirely. They are not helping civilians, they are only fuelling the forever war. They are raising money thinking they’re applying a bandage to a wound, but they’re actually pouring gasoline on the fire.

Conclusion

If we step back and look at everything we’ve covered today, from the Peel Commission through Oslo, Camp David, the Gaza withdrawal all the way to October 7, it’s a lot to process. But the core argument is just undeniable. The two-state solution and the establishment of a Palestinian state haven’t failed because the concept is flawed or because Israel won’t compromise. It fails because you can’t split a pie with someone whose main goal is to make sure you starve. The actual goal to “Free Palestine” will continue to fail because one side has consistently chosen the ideology of destruction over the hard unglamorous work of state building. We looked at the unbroken 80-year pattern of Arab rejection of statehood. We broke down how the Palestinian identity was essentially invented in the 1960s as a tool to oppose Israel. And we exposed the woke college activism, the river to the sea chant for what it really is, a call for annihilation.

And finally, we laid out seven preconditions that should be met before any progress can be made to achieve peace in the Middle East. It should make perfect sense. Palestinian society has to undergo a fundamental top-to-bottom socio-cultural and economic revolution before they’re allowed into the building where the negotiating table is. That is the only way forward. Statehood cannot be used as a bribe to create peace. If you give a state to a population that hasn’t undergone this massive ideological transformation, you’re just creating a heavily armed sovereign terrorist base. It would just be a much larger, much more dangerous version of the 2005 Gaza experiment. If you look at the map, the West Bank is much bigger than the Gaza Strip, overlooking the economic centre of Israel, the International Airport and the majority of the Israeli population. Until those changes are implemented, no Israeli government, right wing or left, will commit suicide and hand over the land to the Palestinians, as long as Hamas is the grassroots movement within the Palestinian society. You just need to listen to what Hamas leaders are repeatedly saying, that they will commit more October 7 attacks over and over again.

As long as the West treats this like a real estate dispute between equal partners, we’re just guaranteeing more bloodshed. True compassion isn’t enabling a forever war or dumping unchecked aid into a terror ecosystem. True compassion is definitely not chanting genocidal slogans on campus. It is demanding accountability from the Palestinian people, demanding an end to the terror infrastructure, demanding that the leadership of the Palestinian people finally decide to put their children first, but not as human shields.

There is a famous historical quote attributed to Golda Meir, the fourth Prime Minister of Israel. She famously stated: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us”. It reflects a sentiment about the prioritization of human life and the well-being of future generations over long-standing political and ideological animosity. And what is most amazing about this quote, is that it’s from 1957. So many years have gone by, so many wars, so much spilled blood and so many opportunities to end the conflict and make peace. Yet, nothing really changed. That is just an incredibly profound thought to end on.