Recently, we put out our two-part episode on Palestinian statehood. And like I said then, there was way more in our interviews than we could possibly fit into those two episodes. But, each conversation was fascinating and instructive on their own terms.
So we’re starting with the first interview we recorded: my conversation with Michael Koplow. Michael is the chief policy officer at the Israel Policy Forum, and he came in ready to ground us in history. He walked me through all the different attempts at Palestinian statehood, his understanding of each one fell apart, and what lessons we might take from those failures.
Michael doesn’t pull any punches. As you’ll be able to tell from the conversation, he isn’t optimistic about the UN’s recent recognition vote. It’s not, in his view, going to transform realities on the ground. But at the same time, he’s deeply committed to the idea of two states. In fact, he’s devoted his career to making that future possible. Something that some people view as naive and others view as heroic.
This conversation really set the stage for everything that came after in our statehood series. It gave me the historical frame, the sense of what’s been tried, what’s broken, and what, maybe, can still be fixed.
So let’s get into it.
So it’s the end of the summer of 2025. Why are we now hearing about Palestinian statehood right now?
Michael: There are reasons that I think we’re now hearing about Palestinian statehood. The first, of course, is October 7th, which I think at this point is fair to say is the most significant event in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Maybe eclipsed by 1948, but I think you can make an argument either way.
Noam: So Michael, October 7th is the biggest day in Israeli Palestinian history since 1948, maybe including 1948, you’re including 1967 in that statement. Can you just say a little bit more about that?
Michael: I am. Obviously, 1967 is a huge deal, transformed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in all sorts of ways. I think that five years from now, 10 years from now, when we’re looking back at October 7th, it will have transformed the conflict and transformed the ground in even more significant ways. And at the moment, we’re at an inflection point. I actually don’t know in which direction this transformation is going to go.
I think there are multiple plausible pathways. One of those pathways we’re seeing unfold now diplomatically, which is a push for a Palestinian state, I think a more serious and widespread push than we have seen in decades. And there’s another pathway, which is that Israel might finally transform its military occupation into a permanent annexation.
So I do think that October 7th is going to end up being more impactful.
Noam: Do you view this, someone who is mortified by what took place on the 7th of October, which is I think a large portion of the world would say, or they might say, wait a second, did you just say that the 7th of October where, you know, Israelis were massacred, 1200 or so killed, 250 or so taken hostage. Did you just say that that, October 7th, would lead to the Palestinians who committed this crime, right, Hamas specifically, but from the Palestinians, committed this crime on the 7th of October, that led to the creation of a Palestinian state? Like put aside Israel, that doesn’t seem to be a great way to lead the international world. Hey, listen, commit the worst crime of all time or one of the worst crimes in one day. You know, get on the phone, start telling your moms and dads like you just killed 10 Jews. You’re so proud. And that should lead to the creation of your own self-determination. Could you hear how that is like bad for the international world, potentially?
Michael: Unquestionably and, let’s take a step back for a second. I’m not advocating for Palestinian statehood come September at the United Nations. I actually think this is a colossally bad idea, but I do think it’s important to understand why, for many countries, they view this as the answer, and why many countries are moving in this direction. And I think that it’s a combination of October 7th, a combination of trying to deal with the Israeli response to October 7th, and in some ways, enormous frustration over the last at least 30 years, if not more, of the diplomatic efforts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What I’m saying is, analytically, I can explain why things are moving in this direction.
Do I think it’s a great idea? I do not, even as I’m someone, as you know, who absolutely wants to see at the end of the road, a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Is now the time for it? No, I definitely do not think it is. And a big reason why it’s not is because of the reaction that you described, which is that this isn’t just about the Palestinians. It’s also of course about Israelis and saying this right now to Israelis, even just using the phrase two states right now with Israelis comes off to most of them as complete delusion. And I understand completely why that is.
Noam: Right. Okay, so what makes the recent moves from France, especially different from past recognitions from Ireland, from Spain, from Sweden? Why does this matter now?
Michael: First of all, I think that this is a more widespread and organized effort that has more consensus from more states. If you look at the UN at this point, there are something like 130 states that already recognize a state of Palestine. But I don’t think we’ve ever seen a move like this from Western states. And that makes it different.
Second, this isn’t just France, it’s not just the UK, it’s not just Canada. They’re doing it in conjunction with Saudi Arabia. And that makes it important too, because this is the most important country in the Sunni world. And it’s also a country that Israel desperately wants to have relations with. It’s a country that’s central to Israel’s diplomacy. When we think about what it means to have Israel really accepted in the region and what it will mean to extend the Abraham Accords, Saudi Arabia is literally the central player in that. So to have Saudi Arabia, which Israel desperately wants relations with and which this Israeli government now for a while has pointed to as an example of a responsible Sunni Arab actor, to have them be one of the two main players in this push, I think also makes it more significant than things we’ve seen in the past.
Noam: So let’s go through what we’ve seen in the past. Let’s go through the long arc of Palestinian statehood attempts. I want to hear from you a quick history of serious opportunities for Palestinian statehood. What were the first serious moments Palestinian statehood was actually on the table? Maybe it’s 1937 to today of great moments in the potential or serious opportunities for Palestinian statehood.
Michael: So you bring up 1937, that’s precisely where I would have started. 1937 is the Peel Commission, which is the first time that you have this recommendation to create two states in the land of Israel or greater Palestine, whatever term you’d like to use from 1937. And this obviously did not go anywhere, but it was the birth of an idea that proved to be incredibly resilient. And then in 1947, you had the UN vote for partition into two states. As probably everybody listening to this podcast knows, the Zionist leadership accepted the partition plan, even though the partition plan maps were seen as problematic. The Arab states did not.
Noam: I want to pause you there for one second. For 37 and 47, was there going to be a Palestinian Arab state or was it going to be an Arab state?
Michael: It was going to be an Arab state. And at that point, there’s all sorts of historical debate as to whether there’s actually a Palestinian national identity. I think that there are all sorts of historical questions as to whether the Arabs living in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s thought of themselves as Palestinians. They certainly thought of themselves as being a group of Arabs who were living in a distinct place. Again, I’m not a historian and there’s all sorts of historical debates and people should go find them and read them. But it would have been an Arab state comprised of what are today Palestinians.
So we’ve got the Peel Commission and we have partition. And after that, this idea of a Palestinian state gets dropped because, or shouldn’t say drop, but it’s certainly on the back burner because we have Jordan controlling the West Bank, have Egypt controlling Gaza.
And after 1967 and the Six Day War, when you have Israel conquering both of these places and serving as the military occupier, there are all sorts of famous cabinet debates in the aftermath, immediate aftermath, of the Six Day War about what Israel should do with these territories and whether they should trade them for some sort of peace, this idea of land for peace that we’ve now been living with since.
But there isn’t really serious consideration of Palestinian statehood again until we get to the 80s and 90s, when you have various plans that are floated. Most of these plans aren’t exactly statehood. They’re confederation plans, some sort of confederation between Jordan and the West Bank that would not be the sort of Palestinian state that we’ve come to think of since the 1990s. But these discussions about what you do with the Palestinians living in these areas and under whose sovereignty they should be and what that entity should look like really does start up again in earnest in the 80s and 90s.
And there’s an episode in the 1980s where Shimon Peres as foreign minister actually successfully negotiates a deal with the Kingdom of Jordan to have Jordan take the West Bank and have there be this Jordanian Palestinian confederation. And he brings it to Yitzhak Shamir, who is serving as the prime minister because there’s this unity government at the time and Shamir says no. When we think about when we think about kind of missed opportunities that that many people don’t know about that, I think in many ways is the biggest one, especially because today you hear a lot on the right about this idea of Jordanian Palestinian Confederation, something that I think is never going to happen, certainly not under the current Jordanian leadership, but it was on the table in the 1980s and could have happened.
At that point, we then moved to Oslo and that’s when we really start in earnest to hear these ideas about a Palestinian state.
Noam: So now we’re in 93 to 95. Now that’s where we are in. Okay, fine.
Michael: Correct, correct. We’re now in 93 to 95. Now there are things about, about Oslo, misconceptions about Oslo that I think should be cleared up. So on the left, you often hear people pointing to Oslo as some sort of Palestinian statehood process. It actually was not. The Oslo Accords don’t say anything about a Palestinian state. They were supposed to be a temporary five-year accord. And at the end of that five-year period, Israel and the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people were supposed to negotiate over some sort of permanent status. What that permanent status was going to be is not set.
Now, it’s, again, I think, assumed today that it would have been a Palestinian state. I think that’s a reasonable assumption in an alternate version of history, but Oslo did not explicitly call for Palestinian statehood. People like to often point out that Prime Minister Rabin’s last political speech in the Knesset before he was assassinated took place in October 1995. And he talked about a Palestinian entity that would be something less than a state. So, you know, we think of Oslo as the beginning of real Palestinian statehood, but it obviously didn’t go in that direction. And it certainly wasn’t a fait accompli. And the first Israeli prime minister to actually negotiate with the Palestinians and offer them statehood was not Yitzhak Rabin and it was not Shimon Peres. And it certainly was not Benjamin Netanyahu. It was Ehud Barak, when he went to Camp David with President Clinton and Yasser Arafat in 2000.
Similarly, people think of Bill Clinton as being the US president who supported Palestinian statehood, but the first US president who actually came out explicitly in favor of a Palestinian state was President George W. Bush.
Noam: That’s right.
Michael: So Oslo is absolutely critical and I would argue it is the beginning of this now three decade push for a Palestinian state, but Oslo was not technically a statehood process.
Noam: So Michael, I feel like you were leaving something on the table by saying people think it was Bill Clinton, but really it was George Bush. What point are you making by saying that?
Michael: People point to Oslo on both sides. You know, there were people who are on the left who point to it and say, and say, this is proof that everybody was, was absolutely moving toward Palestinian statehood and it got derailed and we should go back to that. And I think that going back to Oslo doesn’t necessarily lead to Palestinian statehood. I would argue that it absolutely would have gotten there and, and I have and do argue that at least on October 6th, 2023, I think if Prime Minister Rabin were alive in October 2023, he would be supporting Palestinian statehood, notwithstanding his last speech in the Knesset. But again, Oslo was not something that was going to automatically lead to a Palestinian state.
And on the right, people, love to point this out and say, Hey, look, even Rabin didn’t support it. And, you know, the Trump peace plan, for instance, that was released in 2020 looks a lot like what Rabin would have supported. And, like I said, I don’t think that’s correct. So I think on both sides, people like to use Oslo and Rabin to get to whatever sort of conclusion they want to get to. But I think that it’s a lot murkier than that, whether you’re making claims from the left or making claims from the right.
Noam: You stopped with Ehud Barak, but there was another major moment called the Saudi proposal of 2002. Could you just tell me about what this Saudi proposal was? And let me, as you answer this, I’m going to be the cynic in the room, isn’t the story of Palestinian nationalism basically one long story of rejectionism? The Peel Commission, like you said, in 37, the Arabs rejected. UN partition plan 47, rejected. Camp David in 2000, rejected. So every single time there’s been an offer of statehood, the answer has been no. And the result is actually worse circumstances for Palestinians themselves. So why should anyone believe that this time or any time in the future, Palestinian leadership would actually say yes, isn’t rejectionism baked into the DNA of the Palestinian movement as a movement?
So I asked you two questions there, one with regard to the Saudi proposal, maybe as a leading question, but tell me about that. How do you think about this issue of Palestinian rejectionism and how you reflect on this?
Michael: Yeah, I think these are actually connected because I agree with your characterization. I think that if we’re looking across seven or eight decades, then we do see lots of Palestinian rejectionism and people correctly point to the Peel Commission and correctly point to the partition plan and correctly point to the infamous Khartoum “three nos” after 1967, you know, which was no, recognition of Israel and no negotiations with Israel.
Noam: And no peace, and no peace with Israel. Right, right, right, right.
Michael: And people point to Camp David in 2000 and say, look, correct. I know he’s with Israel. Sorry. I only had, I only had two nos there. Um, and people also point to Camp David and understandably say, Hey, Palestinians are, are they reject everything? They’re, never going to say yes. The only thing that they will accept is the end of the state of Israel.
This is the backdrop to October 7th, which is of course an annihilationist movement, an effort to eliminate the state of Israel. That’s what Hamas was trying to do, even though they didn’t view it as something that they could accomplish in one day on October 7th. And it’s what they’re still trying to do. And I don’t think that they’re going to drop that. So yes, there’s an absolute understandable and I think in many ways, supported, narrative of Palestinian rejectionism.
With that said, I don’t think that all Palestinian rejectionism is the same. And when we look at 1937 and 1947 and 1968, these are rejections that are steeped in this idea that there can be no acceptance of Israel. There can be no acceptance of quote unquote Zionist interlopers and a Zionist entity. Palestinian rejectionism after that, I actually think is a little more complex. And you raised Camp David, that’s where I think we’re actually getting into more complexity and people point to that as one of the most recent and in many ways the definitive rejection, you know the idea being that Ehud Barak was given a big electoral mandate to negotiate with the Palestinians. He came and he said hey, you know for the first time from an Israeli prime minister, you can have a state, we will divide Jerusalem. You’ll get some sort of sovereignty on the Temple Mount. This is everything that you could have wanted and actually when Mike Huckabee was In his confirmation hearing before the Senate to be ambassador to Israel. He raised this very episode and he characterized it as Israel saying to the Palestinians, here’s everything that you’ve ever asked for. And the Palestinians still said no.
The reason I say it’s more complex is that yes, it was the first time the Palestinians were offered a state from Israel. And yes, Jerusalem would have been divided. And yes, they would have had sovereignty over parts of the Temple Mount Haram al-Sharif. But Palestinians view that as a very subpar offer. And the reason that they view that as a subpar offer is because in 1988, the PLO, and we can go into the debate as to whether people believe it or not, whether this was sincere or not, but the PLO took an official position and what their official position was, and this was also formalized in Oslo, was we are going to give up our claims to quote unquote 1948 Israel. We want a state on the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. That is 22% of mandatory Palestine.
And so the Palestinians looked at that and said, we just made this giant unilateral concession, basically in return for nothing. We will accept 22% of what we wanted before. We had a very maximalist vision and now we’re down to 22%. And so when Ehud Barak came to Camp David and said, thank you very much for your concession where we get 78% and you get 22%, but that’s not enough. We’re only going to give you 90% of the West Bank and it’s going to be divided into three separate non-contiguous territories because we need to have permanent Israeli security corridors going through it. And we’re not going to discuss right of return. The thing that for the Palestinians, I would argue is their most unreasonable demand, but also the one that in many ways they hang onto the most. It’s the one that’s the most emotionally resonant for them.
So Israelis and many American Jews look at this offer and they say, you got everything you ever wanted. Whereas Palestinians look at it and say, this was a particularly subpar offer that we could not accept. And I think that this is why we’re now almost, not almost, a quarter century later, we’re stuck in this cycle where on one side, the narrative is Palestinians always have and always will reject any offer no matter what it is. And the Palestinian narrative is the Israelis keep coming here and offering us things that they know we can’t accept. And they’re basically playing a shell game with us.
And frankly, I don’t know how we break out of this cycle. I’m not even talking about the actual diplomatic cycle. I’m just talking about the narrative cycle. But, I think this is, this is where we get hung up.
You asked about 2002 and what’s now known as the Arab Peace Initiative. And this is where I actually think that we maybe start to flip what’s actually going on. Because, if, up until then, it was constantly Israel making offers or accepting international offers and Palestinians saying no. Since then, we oftentimes have the opposite. And 2002 is an example.
2002, I would argue, was the first serious Arab offer, not a counter to something that Israel had put on the table or a counter to a U S offer. It was the entire Arab league coming and saying to Israel, Palestinian state on West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and you will get recognition from the Arab world. Effectively, the formula that we’re still talking about today when we talk about expanding the Abraham Accords in return for something for the Palestinians.
Now, the Arab Peace Initiative is viewed by Israelis a lot like Palestinians view the Camp David offer, as something that they couldn’t really accept because it called for right of return. It wouldn’t have explicitly recognized Israel as a Jewish state, things that are very important to Israelis. But we have at the time, the Israeli government basically ignoring it and not engaging with it. And we still have this formula here today. And I think that the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative is going to end up being so enduring, at least as a framework, because at some point, even right-wing Israeli governments including the current government, have come around to the idea that regional normalization is achievable and something that they want, but that they’re going to have to give something to the Palestinians for it.
And now the debate is over what that something is going to be. It was a robust debate before October 7th. You, now, I think it’s a far more difficult debate, certainly from the Israeli side, about what that thing is going to be, where you have the Arab states and now much of the US saying Palestinian state, and you have Israeli leadership saying some sort of Palestinian entity that we’re going to have to determine what it looks like. But this idea that at the end of it, you have this carrot of regional normalization, I think is important because in the past, in what we’ll call strictly the land for peace era, the idea was Palestinian state and Israel will finally put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to bed. And maybe it will bring normalization with the rest of the region and maybe not. It wasn’t explicitly baked into the formula. Now it’s being explicitly baked into the formula.
And I think that it, when the dust from October 7 settles, which by the way, may not happen for decades, I think that that carrot will be very important for Israelis to absorb, I also think that it means that the issue of Palestinian statehood, because it’s now been diplomatically internationalized, isn’t going to go away anytime soon. And it’s something that in a post-October 7th world, Israelis are going to have to grapple with and are going to face some hard choices.
Noam: You said that the right of return for Palestinians, which is this idea that Palestinians and their descendants who either fled or were expelled in 1948 would have a right to return to the land. You said that that is the thing that is most precious to them and also their most unreasonable request. So why is it unreasonable?
Michael: It’s unreasonable because the state of Israel exists. It’s here. It’s not an idea. And it exists as a Jewish state. And that’s something that I absolutely support and will defend to my dying breath. The fact that other people around the world don’t see the idea of a Jewish state as legitimate, it doesn’t matter to Israelis. They have fought for this Jewish state in every single way for well over a century, actively on the ground. So Israelis are not going to give up that Jewish state. They’re just not. I also, even if you somehow think that it’s unjust, I would argue it’s unbelievably naive and unreasonable to think that you could just unwind Israel as a thing that actually exists in the world.
So with that as a fact, the idea that Palestinians will get a Palestinian state alongside Israel and also have the right to then return to their previous homes inside of Israel and effectively create possibly a second Palestinian state. That’s not a reasonable demand. If Israel is going to cede territory and live with what will of course be a real security risk of a Palestinian state alongside them, filled with Palestinians who are not and will never be Zionists and many of whom will live their entire lives with burning anger toward Israel. I think that it’s a reasonable thing to say, if you want to go somewhere and you want to have Palestinian sovereignty, do it in the Palestinian state.
I think that in any deal, there’s likely to be some sort of token right of return. I also think that it’s reasonable to give Palestinians who were expelled in 1948 or who fled in 1948, and there were about 750,000 of them, I think it’s reasonable to give them and their descendants some sort of acknowledgement of the right of return, could be Israel acknowledging this is a thing that happened and apologizing, it could be monetary reparations. There are all sorts of ways to do it. But I don’t think that having millions of descendants of those 750,000 Palestinians going to Israel and saying, all right, we’re now full Israeli citizens, when Israel is also granting a Palestinian state in the process, is a fair or just or reasonable thing to ask for.
Noam: Let me ask you this question then. You made the argument that Israel is a state, it exists, it is, Israelis are not going to give up on their dream of having the state that they’ve developed that they’ve created. Well, Palestinians will say we’re never going to give up on our dream. And I’ve heard of a Palestinian poet who said, you know, you got to give up your big dream for small hope. and yeah, how do you think of that? Is it different? Is it the same?
Michael: It’s not different in an emotional sense. The difference is that whether anyone likes it or not, Israel exists and there’s a giant power imbalance. So if this conflict continues until the end of time and we’re frozen where we are, where Israel exists and it controls the West Bank and Gaza and the places that would be a potential future Palestinian state. So the Palestinians can harbor their dreams to return to mandatory Palestine forever, but it’s not going to happen. So I think that this is where we get into sort of just brass tacks, realpolitik.
Noam: Reality.
Michael: Right. You can have as many dreams as you like. And I don’t expect Palestinians to just give up those dreams. You know, of course, I mean, I always find it bizarre when Jews who for 2000 years, as we know very well, harbored dreams of returning to Zion, returning to what is modern day Israel, and thought about it and talked about it and davened about it three times a day for 2000 years. Why anybody in our community would think that Palestinians, who only lost what they believe they lost not even a century ago, why people think that they’ll just drop it tomorrow, I just don’t understand. They won’t.
Now, the same way that there will always, no matter what the political situation is on the ground, there will always be Jews who would like to control and have dreams of Eretz Yisrael Hashleimah, which by the way,
Noam: Greater Israel.
Michael: Greater Israel, which by the way is not Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. It’s Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and parts of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, much farther afield. People are always going to have those dreams.
Noam: Yeah, but how many people have those dreams? I grew up pretty Jewish. I don’t remember hearing my teachers talk about those areas. Maybe, no?
Michael: No, neither did I, but Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s current finance minister, gave a speech in France as finance minister just a couple of years ago standing in front of that map, not the Israel-West Bank-Gaza map, the much more expansive map. So those dreams still exist.
Now, I think we have to separate between what you dream about and what exists in the world. And ultimately for this to get solved, I firmly believe that both sides are going to have to walk away very disappointed. Israelis and Jews are going to walk away very disappointed that the heart of the biblical land of Israel, the West Bank is, is most of it will be a Palestinian state and Palestinians are going have to walk away very disappointed that they do not have the right of return to mandatory Palestine and they’re going to be in a Palestinian state.
Something I joke about all the time is that in a lot of ways, this would be much easier if you flipped Israel and the West Bank and Gaza, if the state of Israel were the heart of the heart of the Tanakh, right? Judea and Samaria, Yehuda, Judah and Shomron. I think that would satisfy.
Michael: Maybe more people and Palestinians talk about the right of return. It’s because they were, I mean, of course they were living in the West Bank too, but you know, they were living in the coastal plain. Exactly.
Noam: That’s interesting.
Michael: So in some ways I almost wish we could flip this, but we can’t. And I think everybody is, it has to walk away not getting everything they want. If this is ever going to get resolved, if Israelis are ever going to be able to live in peace and if Palestinians are ever going to have their very legitimate national aspirations realized, nobody’s going to get what they want.
Noam: I have an existential philosophical question for you.
Michael: Shoot.
Noam: Do you think that Israelis and Palestinians want to solve this? Meaning, I’ll tell you why I frame it like that. There’s something intoxicating about being part of this debate and part of this conflict. And it’s almost taken on its own independent identity. And I’m wondering if people even realize that they have become part of this identity and in order to continue existing as the self that you know, you have to continue to fight this fight. I don’t even remember an identity about Israel that’s not about the conflict and the conflict becomes the identity of Israel-Palestine. Does that make any sense?
Michael: It makes complete sense. I think that for some people, they do thrive on this identity of struggling against the other side. There’s a criticism that’s often aimed at people like me. I work for an organization, we are a policy research organization, but we do have a very clear vision and mission which is to support US foreign policy toward a viable resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is two states. There’s a lot of criticism over “professional peace processors.” The idea that you have a whole class of people who don’t actually want to solve the conflict, they just want to keep on “peace processing,” and that there’s a whole industry around it and that all these people, they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if things ever get solved.
To the extent that I’m lumped into that group of people, I can assure you from my end, I would love to be out of a job tomorrow. If this got solved—
Noam: What would you do instead? What would you do instead? Soccer player?
Michael: I’d go make ice cream somewhere. And certainly, of course, there are Israelis and Palestinians who I don’t think want to solve this. And by the way, not to make any moral equivalence between these two groups I’m about to mention, but certainly Hamas is in that group of people that I don’t think actually wants to solve this. Their entire identity and ideological worldview is dependent on this idea of eternal struggle against perfidious Jews and Zionists. So I don’t think Hamas actually wants to solve it unless solving it means pushing all the Jews into the sea.
I don’t think that Bezalel Smotrich, and Itamar Ben-Gvir and folks like that want to solve it either, unless solving it means expelling all the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and establishing the state of greater Israel. Again, not suggesting moral equivalence between these groups, but…
Noam: Why don’t you make moral equivalence there?
Michael: Because I have not, and I hope we never get to this day, I have not yet seen Smotrich, Ben-Gvir or their followers go out and in a mass way like we saw on October 7th, slaughter Palestinian men, women, children, civilians, innocents. There’s plenty of horrible Israeli behavior that takes place against Palestinians, much of it pushed by Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. And there have been Palestinians killed, including a few weeks ago, a guy named Awdah Hathaleen, who, who I knew, in the town of Alkhir, a guy named Yenon Levy, who was sanctioned by the Biden administration and his sanctions were removed by the Trump administration, went to Alkhir with heavy equipment to knock down structures there in a Palestinian village. And he shot at Palestinians and he killed this, guy, Awdah Hathaleen, who was a lovely guy who, who taught Palestinian kids English.
So yeah, all sorts of horrific stuff takes place. It’s not the same as the outburst of genocidal violence that we saw on October 7th, purposely directed at Israeli civilians for the purpose of nothing more than killing, massacring, raping, and terrorizing them. Not the same thing.
Noam: Got it. Okay. So let’s go back to Palestinian statehood. I want to understand if you see a parallel between the Jewish state that started to exist in 1948, May of 1948, and a potential Palestinian state.
So a Jewish state before 1948, you know, I spent years like teaching the history of Israel to students and the like. And so we, one of things that we would do is we would say, okay, there was a Jewish Agency that already existed. There was a national council that already existed. There was a Histadrut, which was a general federation of labor that already existed. There was a Haganah, there was a Palmach, there was an Irgun, there was a Lehi. There were all different militant groups fighting already that existed eventually would become under under Tzahal in the middle of 1948. They had economic and social infrastructure, had banking and finance, had healthcare, they had education, they developed settlements, yishuvim, settlements like Moshavim and Kibbutzim and the like. They had administrative setup, they had courts and municipal councils, had taxation, they had services.
And what I would always say to my students is, the Jewish state existed before the Jewish state existed. Can you make the same argument that a Palestinian state existed, exists before a Palestinian state exists? Or have they not done a good enough job setting up these structures?
Michael: I think the answer is both. You can make an argument that they have tried to do the same thing that the Zionists did in creating these structures. They have not done nearly as good or robust a job.
Oslo created this thing called the Palestinian Authority. It was not a thing that existed before that. And the Palestinian Authority was supposed to be this temporary five-year entity that would create institutions that would prepare the ground for, again, I would argue a state, even though Oslo was silent on it, but certainly this is what Palestinians thought they were doing. Create the institutions necessary for statehood so that when that final status negotiation with Israel happened, Palestinians would be able to say, we did the same thing that you did in a more condensed period. We are ready to transform these Palestinian Authority institutions into the institutions of the state of Palestine.
The Palestinian Authority did not do a great job of this. And a lot of that is on the Palestinians themselves because they ended up building institutions that were corrupt and non-transparent, and many of them existed to effectively support Yasser Arafat and his band of cronies.
And they were also hampered by the fact that Israel did and still does lots of things to erode Palestinian institutions. So they were operating in a far more difficult environment and they also didn’t do things nearly as well and as robustly as the early Zionist leadership did. And it’s one of the main reasons why I think that this current push for just declaring a Palestinian state is so misguided. There are all sorts of reasons why this is not the time to do it. But to me, and I was arguing this before October 7th even more so, the biggest reason is that the worst thing you could do would be to create a Palestinian state that failed on day one. It’s not even a question necessarily of, do we need another authoritarian corrupt Arab state in the region? It’s, do we need a completely failed state? And if you were to just create the state of Palestine tomorrow, it would absolutely fail. And it would fail for the same reasons that the Palestinian Authority did not do a good job. Palestinians themselves have not created the real institutions they need. And the Israeli government has no interest in giving them the space and ability to do it well, even if they were interested in doing it well.
There was a period under Salam Fayyad, a name that probably many people know, when he was Palestinian prime minister.
Noam: I think a lot of people don’t know this name. So who is Salam Fayyad?
Michael: Ah, OK. So Salam Fayyad was a Palestinian prime minister, I believe he took office in 2007. Basically, the George W. Bush administration, in its second term, was making a renewed push on the peace process. Probably the most serious one that we’ve had since Oslo, and I don’t think that it’s been eclipsed since. And one of the things that they forced Mahmoud Abbas to do was to appoint this very capable technocrat, Salam Fayyad, who worked for the World Bank, had a PhD, or still does because he’s alive, has a PhD in economics from UT Austin, they said to Abbas, you need to make this guy prime minister.
There’s an irony in this in that Abbas had previously been prime minister because the US said the same thing to Yasser Arafat, you got to appoint this guy prime minister. And so then it happened to Abbas where he was president and the US said, Salam Fayyad is prime minister. And Fayyad had this program of institution building. He said, I agree with the criticisms, there is no way that Palestinians could possibly establish a successful state, so let’s build up state institutions. And he did a very good job of professionalizing the security services, not surprisingly, since he was an economist, building much more robust economic institutions, cracking down on corruption, all sorts of things. Eventually, Abbas viewed him as a threat and sidelined him.
You hear a lot since then, you know, if only the Palestinians would have Salam Fayyad back. And after October 7th, when there’s been this talk of establishing some sort of administration in Gaza to run things in the day after, you hear Salam Fayyad’s name come up all the time as the guy you should do it because of the success that he had in starting to build actual, transparent and accountable Palestinian institutions within the Palestinian Authority. That’s the sort of thing that you need ahead of Palestinian statehood. There has to be wholesale Palestinian reform.
And, you know, it’s funny. You heard some of this a couple of weeks ago when the French and the British and the Canadians said that they were going to recognize the Palestinian state. Not so much from the French, but the British and the Canadians both made noise about their having to be, Canadians in particular, about their having to be real reform within the Palestinian Authority. And without that, you can’t have any chance of successful Palestinian statehood. And that will be a tragedy for both sides. It will be a tragedy for Palestinians if somehow they manage to emerge with what looks like a state and it completely collapses because there’s really nothing that will set back the cause of Palestinian sovereignty more than that and it will be a tragedy for Israelis because It’s my absolute firm belief that the future of Israel and Zionism, meaning, Israel as a secure Jewish and democratic state in the Jewish homeland, depends on separation from the Palestinians, and that separation is only going to work if there is an independent functioning Palestinian state. So watching this rush to declare a state of Palestine as if you can just declare it into being without actually laying the groundwork, not just the diplomatic groundwork with Israelis, but the actual institutional groundwork, I think is a huge mistake.
Noam: What does it mean that a state exists? Sorry that that sounds like that also sounds existential. What does it mean for a state to exist under international law? Like if they all say, let’s say Britain gets together, the UK gets together with Canada and France, like, Palestine’s a state. Okay, now what? Like what happens now? And then, and I’m gonna build on this by saying, I remember when I was younger and people would be like, you know, as a result of the peace treaties, people will recognize Israel. And I remember as a kid, I’d be like, what does that mean to recognize Israel? It’s been recognized. So now what? Is there a Palestinian state then? Once Canada says there’s a Palestinian state, okay, done. Done, we did it. There’s a state. My bit’s over, my bit’s over.
Michael: So I say this as maybe the least qualified lawyer in the history of the United States to opine on these things. I think international law is silly. What matters is what happens on the ground. So let’s go back to Israel. What actually established the state of Israel? Is it the fact that on May 14th, 1948, David Ben-Gurion stood up and announced the state of Israel and the United States recognized it.
Noam: But it’s certainly not November 1947 when the UN, right?
Michael: Right, exactly. My point is, forget about 1947, forget about partition, right? What’s more important, that Ben-Gurion stood up and said, okay, we have a state and, you know, the United States, the most powerful country on earth, stood up and said, we recognize it, or was it the fact that Israel then fought a war for a year and a half where they actually established that they could stand up, they established nominal borders with the armistice line, what we now today call the Green Line? Which was more important, the international law aspect or the actual practical thing on the ground?
I would argue, the more practical thing on the ground. If you travel around Ramallah and you go to the PA offices and I do it all the time. It doesn’t say Palestinian Authority in Arabic. It says, state of Palestine. So they say that they have a state, and as we talked about a while ago, 130 something countries recognize that state. Is there an actual state of Palestine in existence? No.
Noam: Why do you say that so flippantly? 130 states said yes. Their building says yes. So yes, there’s a state.
Michael: Because they don’t have the ability to operate as a state. They don’t have control over their own borders or even their own border crossings. They don’t have a functioning economy. They don’t control their own trade. The point is the “state of Palestine,” still in the real world, lives under Israeli military occupation and they are not able to carry out the basic functions of a state. And until that happens, every other state in the world can recognize them. could be everybody except for the US and Israel. It won’t make them a state until the actual, in my mind, until the actual situation on the ground changes. And there’s no way around that without a successful negotiation with Israel as the military occupier of the territory that Palestine wants as a state.
Noam: What I just heard you say, Michael, is, correct me, is that the reason Palestine doesn’t exist as a state is because of Israel’s military occupation of it. Is that right?
Michael: Yes, that is the fact that is preventing a Palestinian state.
Noam: So does that mean Israel’s at fault for there not being a state of Palestine?
Michael: It’s not an issue of fault because there’s lots of fault to go around. As we’ve discussed, there could have been a Palestinian state multiple times in the past, well before 1967. So it’s not that this is the only reason. And also there are lots of legitimate security reasons why Israel is in those places. Obviously, October 7th is the most horrific and most recent example. All sorts of good reasons why Israel cannot and should not just pick up and walk away and say, and say, do as you please.
But we also, again, are living in, in the world, and in the world, Israel does militarily occupy the West Bank and whatever term you want to use for what’s going on in Gaza right now, you know, certainly controls, at least 75% of the actual territory in Gaza and Gaza’s borders. And until that changes, you’re not going to have a Palestinian state. So declaring it into being is just not going to work, not going to change the situation on the ground.
Noam: I want to complicate this further because like I was just thinking as you’re talking, I’m like, wait, you made some really interesting points about the state of Palestine on the official buildings in Ramallah and I’ve been to Ramallah as well and I’ve seen that as well. But then then if you go to Gaza, and now we get into like a very complicated question, which is okay, they view themselves as part of the state of Palestine, but have a different government than the other state of Palestine. They have a different constitution than the other state of Palestine, have a different army than the other state of Palestine. Now it sounds like there are two states of Palestine. So the game sounds silly now to me, a little bit.
Michael: Yeah. And, you know, to complicate things even, even further, so Hamas never, never accepted the Palestinian Authority. They, they would never have said that, those institutions in Ramallah that say State of Palestine are, are their institutions. Palestinians living in Gaza and Palestinians living in the West Bank, for the most part, and this might change over time, but at least now, they don’t, they don’t view themselves as being separate peoples. They view themselves as all being Palestinians who are, who are just living in, in two different territories that are divided by the state of Israel.
And Prime Minister Netanyahu understands this very well, which is why, not conjecture on my part, this has been reported because there’s a recording of it, said in, I believe it was 2019 in a Likud Central Committee meeting that his policy is to purposely keep the Palestinian Authority in charge in a weakened state in the West Bank and Hamas in charge in a weakened state in Gaza. Because so long as these two territories are divided under different leadership, then there can be no Palestinian state.
So, you know, I agree with you that you certainly can’t talk in any robust way about a unified Palestinian state when you have two territories that are separated by geography being controlled by different entities, which is just yet another reason why I think that this push up the UN in September is, it may be rhetorically important and maybe emotionally important, but ultimately it’s a silly semantic exercise.
Noam: I want to go back to something you said earlier. This is like one of the big moments, 2000, in the standard pro-Israel world, it’s that Ehud Barak offered everything, 90-95%, depending on the numbers that you hear, 92% of the West Bank, and the Palestinians rejected it.
And then you mentioned that, well, it’s because they rejected the remaining 22% of mandatory Palestine, which means that, if they gave up on 78%, they’re not going to give up on the 22% any percentage of the 22%. They’re not going to go negotiate down even further. Do you when you talk about mandate Palestine, does that include Jordan or does that not include Jordan?
Michael: No, it’s not.
Noam: It does not include Jordan. Okay. So and the theological point that you were making earlier about the Jewish desire to go, fringe, I would say, Jewish desire to go east of the West Bank. That’s a whole separate discussion.
Michael: Leave that aside. can just talk about the unpopular phrase from the river to the sea.
Noam: Okay, fine. Right, exactly, the river to the sea. Tell me if I’m wrong, I think that’s actually in the Likud platform still, that it says from the river to the sea that there will be a Jewish state.
Michael: I think so.
Noam: With all of this in mind, I’m struggling to understand how with all of that, that this will lead to more concessions from Israel or more negotiations between the PA and Israel. Why would the UK and France and Canada make the argument that it is going to lead to something positive? Could you make that argument for me for second?
Michael: Yeah, their argument is that you need to do something to just shake things up. That Israelis and Palestinians right now are farther away, maybe than they’ve ever been, but certainly in the post-Oslo period from any sort of peace agreement. And so they portray this not as something that’s punitive against Israel, not a way of punishing Israel or rewarding Hamas, portray this as a way of getting the two state narrative back on track and signaling that this is something that they’re committed to working towards and that they believe has to happen.
So, you know, it’s for the international relations scholars out there, this is like a purely constructivist move. They want to basically change the narrative environment and they want this idea of Palestinian statehood and two states to be socialized so that it comes to be seen as inevitable. And then the question is, how do you negotiate the particulars?
Now there’s, there’s also a more, I would argue, and certainly from the Israeli perspective, ominous view of this, which is that once you do this, you’re opening up the door to all sorts of sanctions and, and, and boycotts and consequences on Israel. Because ultimately, if you are the UK or France or Canada or anybody else, and you no longer officially view Israel as having a temporary military occupation in the West Bank, you now view Israel as illegally occupying the territory of another state that you have recognized. I don’t know how you avoid at some point bringing down sanctions and all sorts of harsh consequences.
At some point, whether you’re on the Republican side or the Democratic side, where the energy now in the grassroots and the hardcore base is going against Israel in both parties, I think it would be naive to assume that the United States is always going to be standing there with its finger in the dike and protecting Israel from these international floodwaters. And I think that there’s a much more cynical view of what these other states are doing, which says they’re going to recognize Palestine and it may not make a difference now, but at some point the US is going to be on board and join in.
And at that point, that will really open up the door to massive sanctions that Israel cannot escape and the Israelis will be forced to concede and withdraw and create a Palestinian state. There are definitely some people that view that as the pathway that will start with this.
Noam: If you had to advise the Palestinians, what’s the smartest next move?
Michael: Well, if I were a Palestinian advising the Palestinians, I would tell them two things.
I’d say, A, say to all these states that want to recognize the state of Palestine, that’s great. Thank you. We appreciate this assistance. We could also really use the help in reforming our institutions. Come send us experts, send us your best people, help us to do these things that we haven’t been able to do. The United States right now leads an effort that’s been going on super successfully for 15 years to reform and train the Palestinian Authority security forces, but there really aren’t parallel efforts among other Palestinian institutions. So have the Europeans and the Canadians come in and help perform the economy and actually set up a real political party system and make sure the judiciary is independent. There’s real transparency.
I’ll plug a report that Israel Policy Forum put out a year ago on Palestinian Authority reform. We’ve got all sorts of things in there that need to happen. That would be number one.
Number two, I would stress to the Palestinians that French recognition of Palestine is nice, but ultimately the IDF is still sitting in the West Bank. And if you ever want to have a state, you’re going to have to negotiate with the Israelis. And if you think that you’re going to avoid it by just waving it out and hoping that in 10 or 20 or 50 years, sanctions are so crippling on Israel that they’re going to be forced to give up. That’s, that’s a fool’s errand, and you’re much better off by reforming your institutions and then sitting down and trying to have a serious negotiation with the Israelis and come to some sort of thing that both sides can accept. The two sides weren’t that far away from it, by the way, in 2008, when Ehud Olmet was prime minister and Abu Mazen, as he still is, was president. They were really close. Those two guys negotiated an agreement where they were like, one to 2% apart on specifics of territory in terms of mutually agreed land swaps. And I think you can get back there again, but with different leadership, but it’s never going to happen if the Israelis view the Palestinian strategy as just trying to bludgeon them into submission with sanctions and declarations and through international law. So that would be my advice to the Palestinians. Try a different tack.
Noam: And would it be a demilitarized Palestine?
Michael: Yes, it absolutely would. That’s a requirement. And by the way, Mahmoud Abbas has agreed to that multiple times. He has agreed to a demilitarized Palestine.
Noam: And they would get rid of all the militarization of Hamas also in this project?
Michael: Listen, it’s hard to say after October 7th that Fatah, which is Abu Mazen’s party, hates Hamas.
Noam: Yeah, wait, wait, said Fatah. You said a few terms. You said PLO, Fatah, and PA. Just just distinguish between these three.
Michael: Sure, so PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, that’s actually the entity that negotiates with Israel. That is the “legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” But it doesn’t have any governing functions.
The Palestinian Authority was this thing created by Oslo to actually govern the Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza. So it does not negotiate on behalf of Palestinians. But it’s an administrative body that’s effectively the Palestinian government.
Fatah is the dominant Palestinian political party, or I should say one of the dominant parties, the other one being Hamas. Fatah is historically the backbone of the PLO because Fatah was Yasser Arafat. And so Fatah has controlled the PLO and also controls the Palestinian Authority. So you have these different entities. When we talk about kind of the, the civil war among Palestinians, it’s basically Fatah, which is the old school secular nationalist party that was the backbone and still is the backbone of the PLO and the PA against Hamas, which is the Islamist party that ended up forming its own government and taking over Gaza in 2007 in a coup.
Before October 7th, I don’t think you can say since, but before October 7th, Fatah hated Hamas more than I think Israel and Israelis did. They were literally less willing to deal with them. So I think that if you actually have a Fatah-led Palestinian government in a state of Palestine, they will have zero sympathy for having Hamas sitting there as kind of a Hezbollah-like entity where they’re armed and they have their own militia and they control territory.
Noam: So by the way, I’m just thinking about an earlier question that I asked you, when does one become a state? Israel became a state not when the UN declared it in ’47 or when Ben-Gurion declared it on May 14th, but when the Altalena happened, when Ben-Gurion and Rabin made sure that there weren’t multiple militias. There’s one army. When you have one army, you have one set of rules, then maybe that’s when you’re a state.
Michael: By the way, as an aside, I read in the Israeli press this morning that the government is about to allocate money to go find the Altalena and bring it up from the seabed.
Noam: Is that true?
Michael: Yeah, reported literally this morning.
Noam: This is what I nerd out on. So this is great. Last question for you. If you had to advise Israel, what’s the smartest next move?
Michael: The first thing I would say to Israel is, stop going around and saying that under no circumstances will you ever agree to a Palestinian state. It’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull, right? The Europeans are out there saying, we’re going to recognize this thing and we’re not doing it as a way of trying to punish you. And Israel is effectively saying, screw you. We’re literally never going to let it happen. Not in September, not in a year from now, not 10 years from now. So I would stop. I would stop saying that.
Noam: Why? Why would you stop saying that?
Michael: Because the easiest way to make sure that you end up with really crippling sanctions and pariah status is to keep on telling these guys that nothing you do will ever make us change our minds, because then the logical next step for a lot of these states is going to say, oh yeah, well, now we’re going to see what we can do to make you back off that. So I think it’s colossally, colossaly stupid.
Second. Israel has all sorts of new and very understandable security requirements and fears since October 7th. So that’s going to make a lot of this stuff harder, certainly in the short term, but there’s all sorts of, I’ll use a term that I wouldn’t use on many podcasts, all sorts of narishkeit taking place right now in the West Bank that is completely unnecessary. And that also makes things far worse.
So, just to take one example, the IDF yesterday was out there with bulldozers uprooting literally thousands of Palestinian olive trees because they’re near a village where one terrorist came from. To me, forget about even the questions of morality or ethics around this, you do that sort of thing, you’re effectively telling much of the world, this isn’t an October 7th issue. This is about us doing everything we can to punish Palestinians and make sure that they’re never going to get what they want and what you, the rest of the world, wants for them. So just tactically, it’s not smart.
I would never say that the Israeli government right now should be negotiating over anything, there are still hostages in Gaza, there are literally living Israelis who are being held in Hamas dungeons. I do think that the idea of, while that is still taking place, negotiating with the Palestinians and with non-Hamas Palestinians over Palestinian statehood is offensive. Until Gaza is resolved, because of this issue of the territory being split, you can’t possibly have any sort of real negotiation. So the idea of a peace process right now should really be as far off the table as possible. But if I were giving them advice, it should be effectively the diplomatic equivalent of the Hippocratic oath, do no harm. And my concern is that right now Israel is doing itself, let alone Palestinians, immense harm.
Noam: Michael, thank you so much for joining me and for answering all these questions and exploring them with me. I really, really do appreciate it.
Michael: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.