The two-state solution is about recognising Israel

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has never been about giving Palestinians a state; it is about preventing Jews from having a state. Strictly speaking, it is about denying the political and sovereign existence of the Jews themselves in the region. And this will persist regardless of what we do. The so called Palestina is not a state. What state is this that does not know where it begins, nor who represents it, nor to whom it is accountable—fragmented between those who accuse Jews of perpetrating a new Holocaust and those who deny there ever was one? To recognize Palestine as a state, under these conditions, is to abdicate the very concept of a state.

 The European insistence on a “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in current terms constitutes not a compromise between two peoples willing to coexist, but a diplomatic capitulation before the long pedagogy of rejection, terrorism, and antisemitism. Instead of demanding from the Palestinians what any civilized people would demand from themselves—recognition of the other, renunciation of violence, credible and peaceful leadership—European leaders choose comfortable illusion over uncomfortable truth. They think they are buying peace, when they are merely making, once again, a Faustian pact that will be paid with the blood of others. Before recognizing Palestine, Palestine must recognize Israel. But that demand—simple, fair, and elementary—remains the only step its representatives refuse to take (and whose refusal many Westerners, from the comfort of their historical irrelevance, continue to nurture with almost fanatical zeal).