By asserting that recognition of a Palestinian state will bring peace, countries such as Chile, France, Luxembourg, and Mauritania obscure the historical record. They overlook repeated Palestinian rejections of statehood, choosing violence and terrorism over peace.

The Palestinians have been offered a state on multiple occasions and at critical junctures. In 1947, the UN proposed partition into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish leadership accepted the plan; the Arab side rejected it and launched a war aimed at preventing Israel’s establishment. Subsequent peace offers — most notably those advanced by Israeli Prime Ministers Ehud Barak in 2000 and Ehud Olmert in 2008 — were likewise rejected. Repeatedly, rejection was followed not by renewed diplomacy, but by violence.

After rejecting the 2000 Barak plan, Yasser Arafat initiated the Second Intifada, a sustained campaign of suicide bombings and mass-casualty attacks deliberately targeting Israeli civilians. More recently, in October 2023, Hamas responded to the prospect of Saudi-Israeli normalization — a diplomatic development widely seen as a step toward regional peace — by carrying out the October 7 massacre and taking hostages, an effective declaration of war.

The central obstacle to peace is therefore not the absence of Palestinian statehood, but the persistent refusal by Palestinian leadership to accept the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their historic homeland. This refusal is reinforced through state-sanctioned anti-Israel and antisemitic incitement, the glorification of terrorism, and insistence on a so-called “right of return” into sovereign Israel for millions incorrectly designated as refugees by UNRWA — a demand that would dismantle Israel demographically rather than resolve the conflict through mutual recognition and acceptance of Israel’s right to exist.

Recognizing a Palestinian state without requiring any binding commitments from the Palestinians — such as renouncing terrorism, recognizing Israel’s right to exist, ending incitement, abandoning claims to a so-called “right of return” into sovereign Israel, and resolving the conflict through direct negotiations — does not advance peace. It rewards decades of rejectionism and violent aggression while dismissing Israel’s right to security and self-defense.

Doing so in the immediate aftermath of October 7 sends an especially dangerous message that mass murder, hostage-taking, and jihadi terrorism are not impediments to statehood, but effective means of achieving it. This is not a path to peace. It is an incentive for continued violence and perpetual conflict.