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<\/a>What if the Palestinians Don\u2019t Want Two States, Mr. Miliband?<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\nJonathan Sacerdoti<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Britain\u2019s Foreign Secretary Edward Miliband told the House of Commons on Tuesday that securing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict \u201cin its fullest form\u201d is \u201cthe North Star of this government\u2019s policy.\u201d He then\u00a0announced the means<\/a>: an import ban on Israeli settlement goods, sanctions on anyone who finances or builds them, a ban on advertising them, a formal British declaration that the \u201coccupation\u201d itself is unlawful, an arms embargo that lasts as long as that so-called occupation does, and a coalition of European states lining up alongside him.<\/span><\/p>\n Every one of those measures is aimed at one party. Not a single one is aimed at the other. To Israelis: \u201cYou will face the full force of UK sanctions.\u201d To the Palestinian Authority, in the same statement: \u201cI urge the Palestinian Authority to accelerate reform.\u201d Urge. That is the entire consequence attached to the side that will supposedly be running this new state.<\/span><\/p>\n Which brings us to the question no British foreign secretary has been willing to ask for 50 years. What if the Palestinians do not want two states, and never have?<\/span><\/p>\n It is not a rhetorical question. It has an answer, which is a matter of record. In 1937, the Peel Commission proposed partition; the Jewish leadership accepted it as a basis for negotiation and the Arab leadership rejected it flat. In 1947, the United Nations proposed partition again;\u00a0the Jews accepted, the Arabs refused<\/a>, and five Arab armies invaded to settle the matter by other means. For the 19 years that followed, Jordan held the West Bank and Egypt held Gaza, and in all that time nobody \u2014 not the Arab League, not the residents, not a single British foreign secretary \u2014 proposed establishing a Palestinian state on either territory. The land was available. The state was not wanted.<\/span><\/p>\n The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964, three years before Israel controlled one inch of the West Bank or Gaza. Whatever it was formed to liberate, it was not the territories Miliband now says are the obstacle. After the Six-Day War, the Arab League met at Khartoum and issued its famous three noes: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. Nothing ambiguous there.<\/span><\/p>\n Then came the era of serious offers, and the record is worse, not better. At Camp David in 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat a state on virtually all of Gaza and the overwhelming majority of the West Bank, with a capital in Jerusalem. Arafat declined and revealingly made no counteroffer. What he made instead\u00a0was the Second Intifada<\/a>: bombing buses, caf\u00e9s, a Passover seder \u2014 roughly a thousand Israelis murdered.<\/span><\/p>\n In 2008, Israel\u2019s Ehud Olmert went further still, offering territory equivalent to nearly the whole West Bank, land swaps for the rest, a divided Jerusalem, and international trusteeship over the holy sites. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas never gave an answer. Not a refusal \u2014 an absence.<\/span><\/p>\n In 2014, the talks led by US Secretary of State John Kerry collapsed.<\/span><\/p>\n In 2020, the American plan for peace was rejected before it was published.<\/span><\/p>\n And in 2005, Israel actually did the thing Britain now demands. It withdrew from Gaza completely: every soldier, every settlement, every settler, some of them dragged from their homes by their own army. There was no occupation left to complain about, no checkpoint, no settler. What grew there was Hamas, tens of thousands of rockets, and eventually Oct. 7, 2023 \u2014 the invasion, the mass rape, the murder, the abduction of grandmothers. That is not an argument about borders. It is an answer to the question of what a Palestinian entity does with sovereignty when it gets it.<\/span><\/p>\n Nearly three years on, and a year after the ceasefire, Hamas has not decommissioned a single weapon. The Palestinian Authority has not held a legislative election since 2006, and its president is in the 22nd year of a four-year term. It still\u00a0pays salaries to imprisoned terrorists<\/a>\u00a0and stipends to the families of dead ones \u2014 a policy Miliband did not mention once, in a statement of several thousand words about<\/span> If a Palestinian state is ever to exist, there is exactly one design for it that survives contact with the evidence, and it was set out by the man Miliband treats as the villain of the piece. In his Bar-Ilan speech of 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu publicly accepted a demilitarized Palestinian state, on terms he summarized simply: all the powers to govern themselves, none of the powers to threaten Israel. No army. No control of airspace. No military alliances with Israel\u2019s adversaries. An Israeli presence along the Jordan Valley as a security buffer. Palestinian refugees resettled in a future Palestine rather than inside Israel. And a binding, unambiguous recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.<\/span><\/p>\n Each one of those conditions exists because its absence has already been tested to destruction. Borders and airspace left unsupervised produce smuggled rockets \u2014 not a prediction but Gaza\u2019s history, many times over. A right of return exercised into Israel rather than into Palestine does not produce two states; it dissolves one, which is rather the point of proposing it. And\u00a0recognition of Israel as a Jewish state<\/a>\u00a0is demanded precisely because 90 years of refusal have demonstrated that the quarrel was never really about where the line goes. Self-government yes; sovereign war-making no.<\/span><\/p>\n Anyone who finds those terms intolerable is not arguing for a Palestinian state. They are arguing for a rematch. And a people who will consent to exist only if they are also permitted to threaten the existence of their neighbor have not made the case for a state; they have made the case against one. A country whose animating purpose is the unmaking of another country is not a nation waiting to be born. It is a war with a flag \u2014 and not worth one more drop of blood, or one more decade of diplomacy, to deliver.<\/span><\/p>\n So let us put the uncomfortable proposition plainly. Statehood, everywhere else on earth, is something a people demonstrates a capacity for: the ability to govern, to hold elections, to keep agreements, to refrain from massacring their neighbors. Here alone, in the Palestinian territories, it is treated as an entitlement that no amount of conduct can forfeit and no amount of conduct is required to earn. Ninety years of refusals, three wars of annihilation, two intifadas, the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust \u2014 and the British position is not merely unchanged but hardened, with the sanctions falling on the people who were invaded.<\/span><\/p>\n Keir Starmer, remember,\u00a0already recognized the \u2018State of Palestine,\u2019<\/a>\u00a0waving it into existence with the flourish of a man opening a garden center. There are, then, already two states for Britain\u2019s Labour Party. What did Britain receive in exchange? Nothing was asked for and nothing was given. No disarmament, no election, no end to pay-for-slay. Recognition was handed over as a reward for Oct. 7 and produced precisely the improvement you would expect. Miliband\u2019s answer to that failure is a larger version of it.<\/span><\/p>\n A policy which has failed continuously since 1937 is not made viable by British anger. A solution requiring the enthusiastic participation of a party which has refused it at every opportunity is not a solution at all. It is a wish, dressed as a plan, enforced against the only participant who ever said yes. In reality, there is no two-state solution to this problem because there is no solution at all to a problem which nobody will even have the courage to describe accurately. People who want solutions should stick to crossword puzzles.<\/span><\/p>\n You can\u2019t navigate in a new world with an old map. Miliband chose his metaphor better than he knew. A North Star is a fine thing to steer by, but something by definition you never reach. It gives you your latitude and never your longitude. It is invisible from half the planet. And it disappears altogether under cloud.<\/span><\/p>\n Sailors understood these limits, which is why they built chronometers, then radio beacons, then satellites, and stopped betting the ship on a single point of light. Only in the Foreign Office is a man still on deck at midnight, rejecting the progress of modern developments and staring up into the overcast, insisting the star is there somewhere and that this amounts to knowing where he is.<\/span><\/p>\n Jonathan Sacerdoti<\/strong>, a writer and broadcaster, is now a contributor to\u00a0The Algemeiner.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion’68,<\/em> What if the Palestinians Don\u2019t Want Two States, Mr. Miliband? Jonathan Sacerdoti Britain\u2019s Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband speaks at the House of Commons in London, Britain, Sept. 8, 2026. Photo: HOUSE OF COMMONS\/Handout via REUTERS Britain\u2019s Foreign Secretary Edward Miliband told the House of Commons on Tuesday that securing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[33,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133672"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=133672"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133696,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133672\/revisions\/133696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=133672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=133672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=133672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n![](\"https:\/\/www.algemeiner.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/2026-09-08T160645Z_869989208_RC21FNABVR42_RTRMADP_3_ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS-SETTLERS-BRITAIN-1.jpg\")
Britain\u2019s Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband speaks at the House of Commons in London, Britain, Sept. 8, 2026. Photo: HOUSE OF COMMONS\/Handout via REUTERS<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
\n\u201cpeace.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n
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