Stephen M. Flatow is an attorney and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is author of A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror (now available in an expanded paperback edition on Amazon.com) and is the president of the Religious Zionists of America-Mizrachi. An oleh chadash, he divides his time between Jerusalem and New Jersey.
For decades, the world has insisted that the Palestinian Arabs are ready for statehood. All that is supposedly missing is Israeli consent, another American peace plan, a European declaration, or one more United Nations vote.
But states are not created by slogans. They are not created by flags. They are not created by foreign ministers standing at podiums and announcing that history has been solved.
States require institutions. They require accountability. They require leaders who can govern, educate, compromise, police their own factions, and tell their own people the truth. On those tests, the current Palestinian Arab leadership is failing badly.
That does not mean Palestinian Arabs do not deserve dignity, economic opportunity, honest government, or a better future. They do. Many have achieved that. But it does mean that the Palestinian Arab political system, as presently constituted, is not ready for statehood.
That conclusion is not based only on what Israelis say. Increasingly, it is being said by Palestinian Arabs themselves.
Samer Sinijlawi, a Palestinian Arab political activist from Jerusalem, a longtime Fatah figure, and chairman of the Jerusalem Development Fund, has been sharply critical of Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. The Washington Institute describes him as president of the Jerusalem Development Fund and a longtime activist in Fatah. UCLA’s Nazarian Center describes him as a Fatah political activist from Jerusalem, an opponent of Abbas, and part of a younger Palestinian Arab leadership generation that believes in dialogue and bridge-building with Israelis.
That makes his criticism harder to dismiss. He is not speaking as an Israeli government spokesman. He is speaking from within Palestinian Arab political life.
Sinijlawi points to a Palestinian Authority whose schools in Judea and Samaria (aka the 'West Bank') are open only three days a week, whose state employees have received reduced pay for years, and whose hospitals have seen strikes because medical workers were paid only a fraction of their normal salaries. Yet even amid that hardship, the PA has continued making payments to terrorists and their families.
That is not moderation. That is moral bankruptcy with a payroll office.
For years, Western diplomats have clung to the fiction that Mahmoud Abbas is a moderate. He wears a suit. He does not perform for the cameras as Yasser Arafat did. He speaks in the language of diplomacy. Therefore, the thinking goes, he must be the responsible alternative.
But moderation is not a speaking style. It is not a wardrobe. It is not the ability to meet politely with American and European officials while the Palestinian Authority glorifies terrorists, suppresses dissent, denies Jewish history, and rewards the families of those who murder Jews.
Arafat was sold to the world as a peacemaker after Oslo. I remember a different reality. Yitzhak Rabin once told me that he knew who these men were. He knew they were terrorists. He believed Israel had to test whether an agreement could change the equation. But he was not under the illusion that Arafat and his circle had suddenly become democrats.
Arafat brought terrorism in through the front door of diplomacy. Abbas inherited the system and made it bureaucratic. The fatigues disappeared. The ideology remained.
Sinijlawi’s critique cuts to the heart of the matter. He says that one cannot promote a two-state solution while denying the historical rights of Jews in the land.
Exactly.
That sentence should be placed on the desk of every State Department official, every European foreign minister, every church group drafting another anti-Israel resolution, and every liberal Jewish organization tempted to confuse access to Palestinian Authority officials with wisdom.
The central problem has never been whether Palestinian Arab leaders can say “two states" in English. The question is whether they can say to their own people, in Arabic, that Jews are not foreign colonialists, that Jerusalem is not an exclusively Islamic inheritance, that terrorism is not heroism, and that Israel is not going away.
Abbas has failed that test again and again.
Now comes another revealing development: Fatah’s eighth conference, which concluded on May 16, 2026:
If Fatah were serious about preparing Palestinian Arabs for statehood, this was the moment for renewal. Gaza has been devastated by the consequences of Hamas’s war. Palestinian Arab institutions are discredited. The political system is aging, corrupt, divided, and exhausted. A serious national movement would have used the conference to ask hard questions, broaden representation, and prepare the public for a different future.
Instead, according to a report by Yoni Ben Menachem for the Jerusalem Center for Foreign Affairs, the conference did the opposite. It marginalized Gaza representatives, strengthened the Ramallah-based inner circle around Abbas and Hussein al-Sheikh, and failed to offer “a new political vision or create any sense of renewal."
That is not the behavior of a leadership preparing for statehood. It is the behavior of a ruling faction preparing for succession.
The report notes that many Palestinian Arabs had expected the conference to become a platform for political and organizational self-examination, especially after the war in Gaza. Instead, the results reinforced the belief that Fatah’s leadership chose to consolidate the control of Abbas’s inner circle even at the cost of deepening internal divisions and alienating Gaza.
Think about that. Fatah claims to represent the Palestinian Arabs. Yet at the very moment Gaza should have forced Palestinian Arab leaders to confront Hamas’s catastrophe and rethink the future, Fatah pushed Gaza further to the margins.
Even worse, the conference highlighted the possibility of dynastic politics. Yasser Abbas, the son of Mahmoud Abbas, entered Fatah’s Central Committee for the first time, prompting criticism from senior Fatah figures who saw it as an effort to entrench family-led leadership rather than the leadership of a national liberation movement.
Is this the political system the world wants to reward with statehood?
On one side stands Hamas, which brought destruction upon Gaza through terror, fanaticism, and the massacre of October 7. On the other side stands Fatah, which offers corruption, authoritarianism, pay-for-slay, internal power games, and an aging leadership determined to preserve itself.
Neither is a foundation for a responsible state.
A future Palestinian Arab independent entity, if circumstances ever allow its establishment, and if it is ever to be more than another failed and dangerous Middle Eastern entity, must be built on different foundations. It must reject terror without loopholes. It must end payments that reward violence. It must teach the truth about Jewish history. It must hold real elections. It must protect dissent. It must control armed factions. It must prepare Palestinian Arabs for coexistence rather than eternal grievance.
Those are not Israeli “demands." They are the minimum requirements.
The tragedy is that ordinary Palestinian Arabs are paying the price for their leaders’ failures. They are failed by Hamas’s terror. They are failed by Fatah’s corruption. They are failed by Abbas’s authoritarianism. And they are failed by Western leaders who continue to pretend that international recognition can substitute for political maturity.
Recognition of a Palestinian state today would not solve the problem. It would reward the problem. It would tell Palestinian Arab leaders that they can deny Jewish rights, refuse reform, avoid elections, glorify violence, split between rival regimes, and still receive the world’s applause.
That is not peacemaking. It is diplomatic malpractice.
The Palestinian Arabs are not ready for a state-not because they are Palestinian Arabs, but because their leaders have made sure they are not ready. The world should stop pretending otherwise.
There must be serious Palestinian Arab leadership. Not another slogan. Not another conference. Not another aging strongman in Ramallah. Not another terrorist regime in Gaza.
A real leadership would tell its people the truth: Israel is here to stay. Jews have historical rights in their homeland. Violence has brought Palestinians disaster, not liberation. The future depends not on destroying Israel, but on building a political culture capable of living beside it.
Until that happens, the push for Palestinian Arab statehood is a dead end, not a path to peace. It is a reward for failure.