On Palestinian statehood: Lessons from Germany and Japan

As Israel nears its goal of eliminating Hamas from Gaza, the United States, the United Nations and European allies are aggressively pushing for the near-term establishment of a Palestinian state. Saudi Arabia has made Palestinian statehood a condition of normalization with Israel, while President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu lit up headlines last week with conflicting visions of a post-Hamas Gaza. Yet in their rush to implement a “two state solution,” Western leaders have overlooked a critical impediment: the Palestinian people don’t actually want one. 

Hamas leader Khaled Mashal summed up the prevailing Palestinian attitude in  an interview last week, “…especially after October 7, there’s a renewed dream of the hope of Palestine from the river to the sea, from the north to the south…we reject [a two state solution], because it means you are required to recognize the legitimacy of the Zionist entity [Israel]. This is unacceptable. [This is] the position of Hamas as well as the majority of the Palestinian people.” (Emphasis added.)

Mashal’s assessment is correct: According to Arab research sources, 75 percent of Palestinians desire a Palestinian-only state that entirely supplants Israel, while 72 percent support the Oct. 7 massacre. The Palestinian Authority government (the presumptive leader of a future Palestinian state) has publicly committed to spending at least $2.8 million per month out of its national budget as a cash reward to the individuals (including the terror operatives) who carried out the Oct. 7 massacre. Palestinian support for the total annihilation of Israel and of all its people is, therefore, not limited to Hamas, nor would such support automatically disappear in a post-Hamas world.

To ask Israelis to entrust their safety to the Palestinian Authority, a government that both supported and has committed to funding the Oct. 7 massacre, would be inappropriate and dangerous. To provide such a government with significant resources, including increased funding and international legitimacy, will both plant and water the seeds of more Oct. 7-style massacres to come. 

The West has a history of willful blindness to Palestinian public opinion. For example, the 1990s saw widespread Israeli and Palestinian support for the Oslo peace process. But there was a critical difference between the two sides: Whereas Israelis envisioned the peace process as bringing an end to the conflict, both Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat and more than 72 percent of Palestinians did not. To the contrary, the prevailing Palestinian vision at the time was to accept the benefits and resources provided by the Oslo process but without any intent of actually ending the conflict.

Accordingly, Western nations initiated a massive influx of funding, resources, weapons, training and international legitimacy, in the naive hope of somehow changing Palestinian priorities. Nonetheless, much of these resources flowed to a variety of Palestinian terror organizations — thus vastly increasing the power and destructiveness of those groups, right up to the present day.

Since that time, decades of academics have sought to explain why Oslo failed, often placing blame on the West for not providing even more resources and concessions than it did. However, history shows that a peace agreement cannot possibly work if one of the sides does not actually want peace. That was the case in Palestinian society during the Oslo era and it remains the case today. 

All of this leads to a critical question: What can be done today to ensure a better tomorrow for Israelis, Palestinians and the world at large?

It is exceedingly rare that an aggressive dictatorship transforms into a peaceful and prosperous democracy, but there are at least two historical examples: post-war Germany and Japan. Both cases began with full scale war and complete defeat, followed by total and unconditional surrender. During post-war “reconstruction,” the pre-existing governments were completely dismantled and former leaders subjected to war crimes tribunals. Germany underwent an intense program of “de-Nazification” and Japan underwent “de-empiralism” and “Westernization,” in both cases with the primary goal of ensuring that these former enemy powers could never again threaten the safety of the world.

Local populations understood, unequivocally, that any dreams of achieving victory through violence would have no possibility of ever succeeding. Only as these processes began to truly take root over the course of years did Germany and Japan gradually rejoin the international community as functional and prosperous independent states. Less thorough efforts, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq, have resulted in disaster. It is notable that Iran played a role in undermining stabilization efforts in those regions, just as it is presently doing in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Gaza, and attempting to do throughout the Red Sea shipping lanes and within Israel.

The question the world must ask itself today is whether we envision a Palestinian future that resembles modern day Germany and Japan, or Afghanistan and Iraq. If we desire the former, history and common sense demand we take the same steps that achieved it: including total dismantling and reconstruction of Palestinian governing institutions, accountability for all Palestinian leaders who have supported terror, justice for Israeli and international victims of that terror, and an unequivocal demonstration to the Palestinian people that the goal of supplanting Israel and the tool of violence will have no chance of success, ever.

It may also be necessary to defeat or at least massively deter Iran and its proxies. Anything less will result in a danger to Israel, an ongoing threat to the world and a disaster for the Palestinian people.

Daniel Pomerantz is an expert in international law, an adjunct professor at Reichman and Bar Ilan Universities in Israel, and the CEO of RealityCheck, an nonprofit NGO dedicated to clarifying global conversations with verifiable data. Daniel lives in Tel Aviv, Israel and can be found on Instagram at @realitycheckresearch or at RealityCheckResearch.org.