Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. He has an MA and Ph.D. in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
On September 8, 2026, British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced that the United Kingdom would prohibit trade in goods produced in Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, which Britain regards as "settlements" in the occupied “West Bank." The measures were coordinated with France and Canada and aligned Britain with the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Spain and Norway, which have implemented or proposed similar restrictions.
Although the commercial impact is expected to be limited, the political message is unmistakable. “Today we refuse to be bystanders to further suffering and to the destruction of the two-state solution," Miliband told the House of Commons.
He sharply criticized Israel on September28, during the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, accusing the Israeli government of causing suffering to Palestinian Arabs and describing the situation as “a stain on the conscience of the world," adding that the government led by Prime Minister Andy Burnham had changed its approach toward Israel.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog called the policy a “grave miscalculation" and “gross interference" in Israel’s forthcoming elections. Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, had already warned that the sanctions would be counterproductive, could spread into a de facto boycott of Israel and could damage the livelihoods of thousands of Arabs employed by Israeli businesses in Judea and Samaria.
The policy rests on a familiar assumption: that Israeli communities are destroying an otherwise attainable two-state solution. Yet this explanation reverses the historical chronology. Arab leaders rejected partition in 1937 and again in 1947-decades before Israel gained control of Judea and Samaria in 1967 and before the communities now being sanctioned existed.
Every time American and European leaders insist that Israel embrace a two-state solution, several questions arise. Are they acting from a realistic assessment of Arab political conduct, or responding to domestic electoral pressures and sustained anti-Israel agitation? More fundamentally, do they understand why partition was originally proposed, why it was repeatedly rejected and why Arab leaders have so often treated statehood as subordinate to the continuing struggle against Israel?
The relevant question is not simply whether a Palestinian Arab state can be drawn on a map. It is whether Arab leaders are prepared to regard such a state as the conclusion of the conflict rather than another stage in it.
What is rarely understood is that this is inherently an existential religious war rather than a political impasse. By projecting Western political models onto a conflict driven by deeply rooted theological mandates, international peace initiatives consistently craft solutions that are entirely detached from the ideological reality.
The First Partition Proposal
In response to the six-month Arab general strike of 1936, which demanded an end to Jewish immigration, the British government appointed the Palestine Royal Commission, commonly known as the Peel Commission after its chairman, Lord Peel. The Commission was instructed to investigate the causes of the conflict between Arabs and Jews living in Palestine and to recommend changes to the British Mandate.
Its report, issued in July 1937, concluded:
“An irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country. There is no common ground between them. Their national aspirations are incompatible. The Arabs desire to revive the traditions of the Arab golden age. The Jews desire to show what they can achieve when restored to the land in which the Jewish nation was born. Neither of the two national ideals permits of combination in the service of a single State."
The Commission recommended partitioning Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab political entities. Although Zionist leaders had serious reservations about the proposed boundaries, they accepted partition in principle as a basis for further negotiations. The Arab Higher Committee rejected it.
Amin al-Husseini, the virulently antisemitic Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, asserted the partition proposal would not end the Arab campaign. The struggle would continue, he said, until the Zionists had been eliminated and Palestine had become an entirely Arab state. In explaining why Israel’s 1948 War of Independence was a war against the Jews, German historian Matthias Küntzel quotes him as saying: “Our battle with world Jewry is a question of life and death, a battle between two conflicting faiths, each of which can exist only on the ruins of others." Nothing would divert the Arab leadership from that objective.
The Muslim Brotherhood likewise declared that partition would deprive the Arabs of their rights. “No single Arab will ever consider, let alone accept it." The Jews were not regarded as “a party to the problem"; they were described as “mere thugs and usurpers who came under the shadow of spears and trickery to a land which does not belong to them.…"
In this way, the Arabs transformed a political dispute into an “antisemitic war" to ensure that a Jewish state would not be created, Küntzel asserts.
The dispute was therefore not merely about where a border would be drawn. The Arab leadership rejected the legitimacy of Jewish political sovereignty in any portion of Palestine.
Partition Rejected Again
Ten years later, the international community made another attempt. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, recommending the creation of independent Arab and Jewish states. Thirty-three countries voted in favor, 13 opposed the resolution and ten abstained.
Before the vote, historian Jeffrey Herf notes, Alba M. Kerr, an American research analyst working in Beirut for the Central Intelligence Group-the successor to the Office of Strategic Services and forerunner of the CIA-reported on the growing involvement of the Muslim Brotherhood:
“The significance of this new development is two-fold, for this is the first direct evidence of an organized Islamic movement and therefore it constitutes a threat to permanent peace since no harmony can exist where political differences are based on sectarian differences. Already Maronites are pleading for protection against this absorption, and young progressive Arab nationalists here deplore the rapid growth of the Muslim Brotherhood because they realize the need for Arab unity and want to abolish sectarian bonds; so there is a strong possibility of a Holy War (Jihad)…."
Jewish Agency representatives David Horowitz and Aubrey Eban, later known as Abba Eban, made a final attempt to reach an accommodation with Arab League Secretary-General Abd al-Rahman Azzam Pasha on September 16, 1947. According to Horowitz’s account, Azzam told them:
“The Arab world is not in a compromising mood. It’s likely, Mr. Horowitz, that your plan is rational and logical, but the fate of nations is not decided by rational logic. Nations never concede; they fight. You won’t get anything by peaceful means or compromise. You can, perhaps, get something, but only by the force of your arms. We shall try to defeat you. I am not sure we’ll succeed, but we’ll try. We were able to drive out the Crusaders, but on the other hand, we lost Spain and Persia. It may be that we shall lose Palestine. But it’s too late to talk of peaceful solutions…. At all events, the problem now is only soluble by the force of arms."
The Arab representatives at the United Nations rejected Resolution 181, refused to consider themselves bound by it and reserved the right to prevent its implementation. Cairo’s Al-Ahram announced: “The Palestine Arabs will launch a relentless war to repel this attack [partition plan] on their country, especially as they know that all the Arab countries will back and assist them, supplying them with men, money and ammunition."
After David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, the armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan and Lebanon invaded. A Saudi contingent also participated in the fighting. Approximately 6,000 members of Israel’s Jewish population-about one percent of the total-were killed during the War of Independence.
The Chronology the West Ignores
Neither the 1937 nor the 1947 rejection can be attributed to the existence of Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria. Those communities did not exist. Israel did not control the territory.
From 1949 until 1967, Jordan controlled and annexed Judea and Samaria, while Egypt administered the Gaza Strip. No independent Palestinian Arab state was created in either territory.
The original 1964 Palestinian National Charter was particularly revealing. At a time when both areas were under Arab control, Article 24 declared: “This Organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or the Himmah Area."
Whatever institutional considerations produced this wording, the historical point remains: the campaign against Israel existed before the alleged obstacle of post-1967 “settlements." The principal conflict concerned Jewish sovereignty-the Jewish people’s right to live in their ancestral homeland-not merely the boundaries of a prospective Palestinian Arab state.
This history does not establish that every Palestinian Arab opposes coexistence, nor does it eliminate legitimate disputes concerning borders, security and governance. It does establish that Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria cannot plausibly be presented as the original cause of the failure to create two states.
From Conventional War to Political Warfare
The Arab states’ failure to destroy Israel through conventional war encouraged Palestinian Arab organizations to adopt what historian Joel Fishman describes as a Marxist-Leninist “people’s war" strategy. This approach combined terrorism and military action with political warfare intended to divide Israeli society, isolate the country internationally and transform Israel into a racist and illegitimate state in the eyes of the world.
The methods changed, but the underlying objective did not. Armed attacks were accompanied by diplomatic warfare at the United Nations, international delegitimization campaigns and efforts to present Arab violence as resistance while depicting Israeli self-defense as aggression.
Economic sanctions directed at Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria fit easily into this broader strategy, regardless of the intentions of the governments imposing them.
For much of its modern history, the Palestinian Arab leadership has treated the construction of functioning and accountable institutions as secondary to the struggle against Israel. The population of Judea, Samaria and Gaza could remain dependent and aggrieved while its leaders benefited politically and financially from the international attention generated by the conflict.
As historian Efraim Karsh observed, achieving statehood would have ended this “paradise" by transforming the Palestinian Arabs from the world’s supreme victim into a conventional nation-state, terminating “decades of unprecedented international indulgence." It would also have further weakened the PLO’s claim to be “the sole representative of the Palestinian people"-a claim already challenged by Hamas’s victory in the 2006 Palestinian Authority legislative election-and required a governing authority to accept “for the first time in Palestinian [Arab] history, the principles of accountability and transparency."
Statehood or Permanent Struggle
Former Romanian intelligence chief Ion Mihai Pacepa later recounted a revealing conversation between Yasser Arafat and Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in the late 1970s. According to Pacepa, Arafat argued that “the Palestinians lacked the tradition, unity, and discipline to become a formal state" and that “a Palestinian state would be a failure from the first day."
Creating a state, Arafat reportedly said, “was only something for a future generation." A government would be constrained by laws and international agreements, placing limits on “the Palestinian struggle against Israel."
“There is no doubt in my mind that a war of terror is your only realistic weapon," Ceausescu replied. Operating behind a government-in-exile, Arafat could maintain operational groups capable of conducting attacks throughout the world while keeping his own name and government “pristine and unspoiled, ready for negotiations and further recognition."
Muhammad Al-Daya, Arafat’s longtime bodyguard, later offered supporting evidence about this practice. In a BBC Arabic interview, Al-Daya said Arafat would issue carefully worded condemnations following terrorist attacks because of pressure from Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Arafat “would condemn the bombing in his own special way, saying: ‘I am against the killing of civilians.’ But that wasn’t true," Al-Daya explained.
The distinction is fundamental. A leadership seeking statehood must build institutions, accept legal responsibilities and prepare its people for the compromises required by sovereignty. A revolutionary movement committed to an open-ended struggle has an incentive to postpone those obligations while using negotiations, international recognition and Western pressure as instruments against its adversary.
The Opportunity Arafat Would Not Convert Into Peace
Arafat’s intentions were tested directly at the July 2000 Camp David summit. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak accepted the creation of a Palestinian Arab state and offered far-reaching territorial concessions in Gaza and Judea and Samaria. The precise boundaries discussed remain disputed because no final written proposal was produced, but Barak’s willingness to negotiate Palestinian Arab sovereignty was unmistakable. Arafat did not respond with a counterproposal capable of producing an agreement.
President Bill Clinton continued the effort in December 2000. The Clinton Parameters envisioned a sovereign and viable Palestinian Arab state in Gaza and nearly all of Judea and Samaria, with territorial exchanges; Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem as its capital; Palestinian Arab sovereignty over the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif; and several options for resolving the refugee issue without eliminating Israel through an unrestricted “right of return."
Barak’s government accepted the parameters as a basis for further negotiations, subject to reservations. Arafat’s response retained demands incompatible with the proposed framework, and no agreement followed. Clinton later said that Arafat had missed the opportunity to bring a Palestinian Arab nation into being.
The Second Intifada had already erupted while these diplomatic efforts continued. Instead of preparing Palestinian Arab society for compromise, the violence intensified and included suicide bombings and other deliberate attacks against Israeli civilians.
The failure at Camp David was therefore not simply another disagreement over territorial percentages. The unresolved question was whether a Palestinian Arab state would exist alongside Israel and end the conflict, or preserve claims intended to undermine Israel from within while the struggle continued from a new sovereign base.
Preparing Children for Peace-or Continued War
The conduct of the Palestinian Authority after Oslo reinforced these doubts. A leadership preparing its population for coexistence would be expected to remove antisemitism, incitement and the glorification of terrorism from its educational, religious and cultural institutions. Instead, Palestinian Arab children have repeatedly encountered textbooks, official broadcasts and public commemorations that present terrorists as martyrs and national role models.
In 2026, the European Parliament again condemned Palestinian Authority educational materials containing “antisemitic content, incitement to violence and the glorification of martyrdom and jihad." It criticized textbooks that rejected peaceful conflict resolution and called for future European assistance to be conditioned on genuine educational reform. This was reportedly the seventh consecutive year in which the European Parliament had issued such a condemnation.
The problem extends beyond schoolbooks. Terrorists have been honored through Palestinian Authority television, public ceremonies and sermons delivered in or broadcast from mosques. Schools, streets, public squares, youth camps, athletic competitions and other institutions have been named after individuals who murdered Israeli civilians.
One particularly revealing example involved Dalal Mughrabi, who led the 1978 Coastal Road massacre in which 38 civilians were murdered. A Palestinian school constructed with Belgian assistance was subsequently renamed in her honor without the donors being informed. Belgium suspended its support after discovering what had occurred.
Naming a school after a terrorist is not merely an offensive commemorative decision. It tells children whom their society considers worthy of admiration. A political culture cannot educate its children to revere those who murder civilians and simultaneously claim that it is preparing them for peaceful coexistence with the victims.
Financial Rewards for Terrorism
The Palestinian Authority has reinforced the same message financially through payments to imprisoned terrorists, released prisoners and the families of those killed while carrying out attacks. Critics have appropriately described this practice as “pay-for-slay" because the payments traditionally increased according to the length of the prison sentence, thereby providing greater rewards for more serious offenses.
The United States enacted the Taylor Force Act in 2018 to restrict economic assistance directly benefiting the Palestinian Authority until it ended these payments. Nevertheless, the program continued.
In February 2025, Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree claiming to abolish the existing payment system and transfer assistance to a needs-based welfare mechanism. Yet an April 2026 State Department report to Congress concluded that the Palestinian Authority “continues to provide a system of compensation in support of terrorism through new mechanisms and under a different name."
According to the report, approximately $156 million was distributed during 2025 to imprisoned or released terrorists and to families of those killed while carrying out attacks.
The Palestinian Authority therefore sends two mutually reinforcing messages. Its educational, religious and cultural institutions teach that terrorists are heroes, while its financial system demonstrates that terrorism will bring substantial material support and public honor.
Western Demands Without Consequences
Western governments have periodically objected to these practices. The United States passed the Taylor Force Act. European institutions repeatedly condemned Palestinian Authority textbooks. Belgium suspended assistance connected to the school named after Dalal Mughrabi.
Yet these objections have generally been treated as secondary compliance matters rather than indispensable conditions for statehood. Palestinian Arab leaders are asked to reform, but when reform fails to materialize, Western recognition, funding and diplomatic support continue. Israel, by contrast, faces sanctions and concrete penalties.
Britain recognized a Palestinian state in 2025 and imposed restrictions on Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria in 2026 without first requiring a verified end to terrorist payments, incitement or the institutional glorification of murderers.
This is the essence of Western indulgence: Palestinian Arab reform is requested, while Israeli concessions are demanded. Palestinian Arab leaders are rarely required to demonstrate that they have prepared their people to accept Israel before receiving the political benefits of statehood. Instead, recognition is granted in anticipation that moderation might eventually follow.
Such policies remove the incentive for reform. Why should Arab leaders dismantle institutions that glorify and reward terrorism when Western governments continue to direct their pressure principally against Israel?
Sanctions Reward the Wrong Conduct
Britain’s settlement policy applies pressure to the party that repeatedly accepted partition or negotiated on its basis, while imposing no comparable consequences on the leadership that rejected partition, refused subsequent peace proposals, glorified terrorists and financially rewarded their actions.
British officials tell Israel where Jews may live and with whom British citizens may trade. They do not condition recognition of Arab Palestine on removing antisemitism and incitement from its schools, ending the public commemoration of terrorists, halting payments connected to acts of terrorism or demonstrating that a Palestinian Arab state would terminate all further claims against Israel.
That is not a serious framework for peace. It is an incentive structure that rewards rejectionism.
Borders are not the only prerequisite for a functioning state.
A peaceful political culture, accountable institutions and acceptance of a neighboring nation’s legitimacy are equally essential. A Palestinian Arab state created without these foundations would not resolve the conflict; it could provide the conflict with a sovereign territorial base.
The question is therefore not whether a Palestinian Arab state can be proclaimed or recognized. Numerous governments have already demonstrated that recognition can be granted by diplomatic declaration. The real question is what kind of state would emerge, what obligations its leadership would accept and whether its creation would resolve the conflict or merely internationalize its next phase.
Until Palestinian Arab leaders prepare their people for coexistence-and Western governments make that transformation a genuine condition rather than a rhetorical request-the two-state solution will remain a diplomatic slogan detached from political reality. Britain’s sanctions will preserve that slogan, but they will not produce peace.
The prospects for long-term peace depend entirely on whether Palestinian Arab social institutions condition the next generation for coexistence or conflict. Achieving a resolution is impossible as long as official media, school curricula, religious and public rituals reinforce violence as the primary language of national struggle rather than preparing children for a peaceful future.