Brighton, England
Sunday, September 21st, 2025
https://adamkhan.net/rambles/
Supporting an initiative by France and Saudi Arabia, the Anglosphere (excepting the United States) is today, in the midst of war, recognizing a State of Palestine. Presented as somehow helping bring about a two-state solution, this proclamation in fact rings the death-knell of the actual two-state solution, namely the Oslo Accords, as it dissolves their essence: that the Palestinians renounce violence as their means of achieving a state.
In truth not even Oslo was a two-state solution—at least, not for the Palestinians. While for mainstream Israelis it seemed like peace was finally at hand, for the PLO it was a ruse enabling the establishment of closer quarters from which to attack. This began with the wave of terror bombings that became known as the Second Intifadah. In response to one of the worst of these attacks—Hamas’s bombing of a communal Seder at the Park Hotel in Netanya that injured 140 and killed 30, including elderly Holocaust survivors—Israel under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon launched a large counter-terrorism operation, imprisoned Arafat in Ramallah, and put an end to any thought of implementing the planned withdrawal from Area C as outlined in the Oslo II Accords. The five-year plan for a Palestinian state in the former Jordanian West Bank, Israel’s Biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, was indefinitely suspended. Until then, Israelis were willing to give it up in exchange for an end to the conflict. In retrospect, it’s no wonder the Palestinians thought they could prevail over such patsies.
The USA—the only outside power that really matters in this conflict—came to accept Israel’s de facto abandonment of Oslo when shown Iranian offensive arms captured aboard the Palestinian ship Karine A. These smuggled weapons, including Katyusha rockets and anti-tank missiles, demonstrated that Arafat’s Palestinian Authority was interested less in building a force to police Palestinians than a guerrilla army with which to attack Israel. President George W Bush wrote in his memoir that after this incident he never spoke with Arafat again. Furthermore, there was no reason to doubt that war had in fact been Arafat’s intent all along, that Palestinians had entered the Oslo agreements in bad faith.
In short, what we have been experiencing since Oslo, from the Second Intifadah to the Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th, is the two-state solution. Most Israelis will have no more of it.
How will Israel react to this diplomatic move by France and the Anglosphere that is mainly a punishment for prosecuting the Gaza war? Given Israel’s surging geopolitical power—the joint Israeli-American strike on Iran’s nuclear program; the cutting-edge monopoly on laser missile defence—there is talk of a response: annexing Area C, what was once slated for withdrawal. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu weighed in today: “The response to the latest attempt to force upon us a terror state in the heart of our land will be given after my return from the United States.” Who knows what may come next from the awesome relationship.
But responding would break Israel’s long-held stance of forbearing diplomatic insult, living as it has for decades with nations not recognizing its capital but instead locating their embassies in Tel Aviv while reserving Jerusalem for their consulates to the Palestinians. As of this writing, the British Consulate General Jerusalem website states:
The position of the UK government has remained constant since April 1950, when the UK extended de jure recognition to the State of Israel, but withheld recognition of sovereignty over Jerusalem pending a final determination of its status. We recognise Israel’s de facto authority over West Jerusalem. In line with Security Council Resolution 242 (1967) and subsequent Council resolutions, we regard East Jerusalem as under Israeli occupation.
Israel may absorb this latest nasty fiction, a State of Palestine, indeed perhaps even fares best when abashed rather than atop, choosing not to dignify the declared recognitions with anything more than condemnation. Instead, what comes next may be unrelated to a State of Palestine—yet another Middle Eastern miracle, an agreement say with Syria. And if it comes quickly enough that the deadly appeasers of Paris, London and beyond are still in office, then—with the same unmoored chutzpah that led them to insist this recognition is not a reward for terror—they will claim hollow credit.
Update 2025 Oct 25: A month later, we now know what this surprise turned out to be: the deal with Hamas that brought all the living hostages home upfront in a single day.
