For peace, Palestinians must accept Israel as a sovereign Jewish state - opinion

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong recently declared that there is no peace without two states, a formulation that has guided Western diplomacy for years and continues to shape the policies of governments that still treat a Palestinian state as the indispensable key to quiet.

Living in Mitzpe Yeriho, 20 minutes from Jerusalem, I have spent more than a decade watching this assumption collide with the daily realities of security, housing, and the lives of families who simply want to raise children without the constant threat of attack.

The premise rests on the hope that Palestinian leadership will one day accept the permanence of Israel and redirect its energies toward building a functioning society of its own, yet the historical record shows a consistent preference for rejecting compromise and returning to violence.

Palestinians have chosen violence over peace for decades, refusing every major offer of statehood that was placed before them. The 1947 United Nations partition plan, which would have created an Arab state alongside a Jewish one, was rejected by Arab leaders who launched war instead.

Decades later, at Camp David in 2000, Yasser Arafat walked away from a proposal that included a capital in east Jerusalem and the large majority of the West Bank, and the subsequent second intifada killed thousands. Former president Bill Clinton has stated repeatedly that Arafat turned down a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and that the Palestinian side bears primary responsibility for the collapse of those talks.

World leaders from George W Bush to Clinton have identified Palestinian terrorism and the refusal to negotiate in good faith as the central reasons peace has remained elusive, even when Israeli governments offered territorial concessions and recognition.

An obstinate and violent people who have lost continuous wars should not dictate the terms of any settlement that follows, yet that is precisely the pattern that has been allowed to continue. In ordinary conflicts, the side that initiates hostilities and loses must accept the consequences of its choices, and the victors establish the conditions under which peace can be restored.

It is often observed that only in the Israeli-Palestinian arena do the victors appear to sue the losers for peace at the end of each war, offering territory, recognition, and economic aid even after repeated rejections and campaigns of terror.

Families experience the results of that pattern when rockets fall, when buses are bombed, and when children grow up knowing that the same leadership that rejected earlier offers continues to celebrate those who carry out attacks.

If Palestinians refuse to make peace with Israel, they forfeit any reasonable claim to the benefits that peace would bring.

Alan Dershowitz has written that the Palestinians must pay a price for rejecting generous offers and answering them with intifadas that killed thousands, and that returning to the precise armistice lines of 1967 would reward aggression rather than impose any cost for it.

He has argued that a price must be paid for violence so that further campaigns of terror are not encouraged, and that the laws of war require consequences when one side consistently chooses to kill civilians and reject negotiated settlements.

Dershowitz has noted that every act of terrorism should result in the permanent reduction of territory that might otherwise form part of a future Palestinian entity, sending a clear signal that violence damages the Palestinian cause rather than advancing it.

We all deserve quiet

Majorities of both Israelis and Palestinians no longer support a two-state solution, according to recent polling that reflects the cumulative effect of decades of rejection and the violence that followed October 7, 2023.

A Gallup survey conducted in 2026 found that only 26% of Israelis and 32% of Palestinians in the West Bank and east Jerusalem still back the creation of an independent Palestinian state, while clear majorities on both sides oppose the idea.

European countries that recognized a Palestinian state this past summer did so based on explicit conditions the Palestinian Authority promised to uphold, including governance reforms, an end to payments that reward terrorism, and the holding of elections.

Those promises were broken when elections scheduled for late 2026 were postponed until 2027, leaving governments in France, Australia, and elsewhere looking as though they had extended recognition without receiving the reforms they had required.

The PA has now delayed both legislative and presidential votes, extending the rule of a leadership that has not faced the voters in nearly two decades.

It is time the world recognizes that Palestinian leadership has shown greater interest in dissolving an Israeli state than in establishing a viable one of its own.

Decades of offers have been met with war, intifada, and the celebration of attackers, while resources that could have built schools, hospitals, and functioning institutions were directed toward tunnels, rockets, and payments to the families of those who carry out attacks.

If Palestinians are truly interested in peace, they will reverse that course, abandon the shortsighted insistence that a Palestinian state is the only possible pathway, and begin exploring other arrangements that can provide security and ordinary daily life without rewarding repeated rejection and violence.

Families on both sides of the current lines deserve quiet, which will arrive only when the side that has consistently chosen violence decides that building something real is preferable to the endless attempt to destroy what already exists.

Jewish rights to the Land of Israel rest on continuous historical presence, ancient sovereignty, and the unbroken connection of a people to its ancestral homeland across millennia of exile and return. True justice requires that the Jewish people exercise full sovereignty and self-rule over that land, free from external demands that they relinquish control as the price of temporary quiet.

Decades of offers to divide the territory have produced only further rejection and violence, confirming that any arrangement which denies Jewish sovereignty simply repeats the same failed pattern.

Families in the region, building homes and raising children on the same hills that appear in the biblical record, embody the plain fact that this land belongs to the Jewish people by right of history, law, and survival.

Peace will arrive when the world, and especially the Palestinians, accept that the Jewish people must rule their own land without apology or partition.

The writer is a certified interfaith hospice chaplain in Jerusalem and the mayor of Mitzpe Yeriho.