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The Media and the Disappearing Palestinian State
The signing of the Oslo Accords in Washington, DC, Sept. 13, 1993. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
In 1973, Israel’s longtime foreign minister, Abba Eban, famously quipped that “the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
Less famously, perhaps, the media never misses a chance to cover for the long history of Palestinian leaders rejecting statehood if it meant living in peace next to a Jewish nation.
Eban’s comment came after the failure of the Geneva Peace Conference, one of numerous international initiatives aimed at resolving what is commonly referred to as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
For nearly a century such efforts have resulted in failure. And the reason is simple: rejectionism, first by Arab states and later by Palestinian leaders themselves. Yet, with growing frequency many in the press, while lamenting the lack of a Palestinian state, omit this relevant history.
Take, for example, The Washington Post. The newspaper has run dozens of articles in recent years claiming, if implicitly, that the lack of a Palestinian state is what drove Hamas and other Iranian-backed proxies to perpetrate the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre. Hopelessness, they assert, was behind the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust.
Nor is the Post alone. Other publications, including those geared towards policymaking audiences, have made the same claim. Foreign Policy is among the worst offenders. On August 4, the magazine published a piece hailing the recent decision by several European nations to recognize a Palestinian state. France and the United Kingdom vowed to recognize a Palestinian state — provided that Hamas sets down its arms. Paris and London didn’t both offering specifics as to how the latter would be accomplished. Nor did they articulate the borders of this state, who would rule it, its currency, etc. But thankfully the days of European powers drawing up borders for failed states in the Middle East is over.
Yet, curiously, Foreign Policy, which has a long history of decrying Western interference and colonialism in the Middle East, found much to like in the idea, with an August 4 report celebrating the move as “an international tipping point on Gaza.” The magazine noted that other countries, such as Canada, Finland, Malta, and Portugal, “have also announced their plans to recognize Palestine this fall.”
The absence of a Palestinian state is something that Foreign Policy has expended considerable column space fixating on. In August 2024, the publication hosted a webinar called “A Future for Palestinian Statehood.” A few weeks prior, in May, Foreign Policy published an op-ed entitled “Why the U.S. Should Recognize Palestinian Statehood.” And in February of that year, the magazine published an op-ed, “A Trial Palestinian State Must Begin in Gaza.” Recent events, Foreign Policy asserted in an Aug. 8, 2025 op-ed, symbolize “The West’s Turn Against Israel.”
Of course, there already been a “trial Palestinian state” and it was in Gaza. In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip. In the first and only elections since, Gazans voted in Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood derivative, whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the genocide of Jews. If one is to treat Gazans like people with independent agency — as one should — it can be surmised that they were well aware of Hamas’ charter. After all: Hamas doesn’t exactly hide its aims.
Unsurprisingly, rockets were subsequently launched from Gaza into Israel, necessitating a blockade by both Israel and neighboring Egypt. Electing a genocidal US-designated terror group is hardly conducive to good governance, and multiple wars have followed.
Hamas, the duly elected government of Palestinians in Gaza, is every bit as cruel and kleptocratic as other Islamist movements. The heads of the terror group live in luxury abroad, many in Qatar and Turkey, launching wars for which Israelis and average, everyday Gazans pay the consequence. Gaza has received copious international aid — including long before October 7 — but Hamas has diverted it, building an extensive underground tunnel system to store fighters, munitions, and hide hostages, while those above ground are used as human shields.
The test case — offering up land for the construction of a Palestinian state — has been tried and found wanting. Gaza is a crystal-clear example.
And the reason is simple: Palestinian leaders, be it Hamas in Gaza, or its rival, Fatah, the movement that rules Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank, believe that Israel is “Palestine.” According to their doctrine, any land once ruled by Muslims is waqf and is forever theirs. Notions of political, social, and religious equality are anathema.
Hamas’ own charter spells this out quite clearly. The official media and educational curriculum of the Palestinian Authority, the US-backed entity that controls most of the West Bank, also presents Israel as “Palestine.” This, of course, is a violation of the Oslo Accords, which created the Authority in the first place. These beliefs are the reason for the lack of an independent Palestinian state.
After all, Palestinian leaders have been offered statehood on numerous occasions — most recently in 2000 at Camp David, 2001 at Taba, and 2008 after the Annapolis Conference. Yasser Arafat, the now deceased head of the Fatah movement and ruler of the PA, rejected the 2000 and 2001 proposals. The 2008 offer, presented to PA President Mahmoud Abbas, included 93% of the West Bank with land swaps for remaining areas and a capital in eastern Jerusalem. Tellingly, Abbas turned it down and failed to even make a counteroffer. The 2008 proposal served as the basis for additional US-attempts to begin negotiations in 2014 and 2016. These attempts were similarly rejected by PA leadership.
As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) has documented, Palestinian leaders have been rejecting opportunities for statehood for nearly a century. Indeed, in 1947, the UN put forward a resolution to partition British-ruled Mandate Palestine into two states, one Arab and the other Jewish. The leaders of the Zionist movement voted to support the plan. By contrast, Arab states and leaders of the Palestinian Arab movement like Amin al-Husseini, categorically rejected the opportunity to create something that hasn’t ever existed: a Palestinian Arab state. Instead, less than three years after the Holocaust, they chose to wage war on the fledgling Jewish State, vowing to cast its inhabitants into the sea. They lost and they’ve kept on losing ever since.
Curiously, however, the media continually omits these failed opportunities for Palestinian statehood, choosing instead to cast Palestinians as helpless and without independent agency. This is little more than an updated version of the colonialism that many members of the Western intelligentsia pretend to abhor. But readers of newspapers and once venerable policy periodicals deserve to know relevant history and they deserve to see Palestinians as people with independent agency, not merely as victims.
The writer is a Senior Research Analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis
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Anti-Israel Detroit Event with Keynote Address from Tlaib Draws Condemnation for Extremist Rhetoric
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) speaking at a press conference at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, March 11, 2025. Photo: Michael Brochstein/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
i24 News – A pro-Palestinian conference held in Detroit this week featuring popular influencers and Democratic lawmaker Rashida Tlaib was condemned for the extremist, antisemitic and anti-American rhetoric of its participants.
“We all know who they are, whether they are in Israel, Tel Aviv, in Washington, in Germany, in Europe. They need to be locked up. They need to be taken out. They need to be neutralized to save children, to save humanity,” said Nidal Jboor, an MD.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) hit out at “genocide enablers,” launching broadsides in all directions, including against the United States, which she said was built on on “slavery, genocide, rape and oppression,” and AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Lawyer Huwaida Arraf said “we will continue to globalize the intifada.”
Of the Congress, where she is serving, Tlaib said that “Outside of the decaying halls of the empire in Washington, D.C., we are winning. They are scared.”
Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga. subsequently accused Tlaib of “vilifying her colleagues, endangering the lives of Jewish people, and celebrating terrorism.”
Yet another speaker declared that the word “peace” should not be part of the pro-Palestinian movement’s lexicon as “it is a white word,” in contrast to the “liberation.”
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Israeli Military Warns Gaza City Residents to Leave, Bombs High-Rise Tower
Palestinians inspect the site of an Israeli air strike from earlier today that destroyed a residential building, in Gaza City, September 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
The Israeli military warned Palestinians in Gaza City to leave for the south on Saturday before bombing a high-rise tower as its forces advance deeper into the enclave’s largest urban area.
Israeli forces have been carrying out an offensive on the suburbs of the northern city for weeks after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the military to capture it.
Netanyahu says Gaza City is a Hamas stronghold and capturing it is necessary to defeat the Palestinian Islamist militants, whose October 2023 attack on Israel sparked the war.
The assault threatens to displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians sheltering there from nearly two years of fighting. Before the war, around a million people, nearly half of Gaza’s population, lived in the city.
Israeli military spokesperson Avichay Adraee wrote on X that residents should leave the city for a designated coastal area of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, assuring those fleeing that they would be able to receive food, medical care and shelter there.
The designated area was a “humanitarian zone,” Adraee said.
The military also issued so-called “evacuation warnings” to civilians in certain areas of the city, warning it was about to carry out attacks.
Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz shared a video on X of what appeared to be the multi-story building collapsing after the strike, sending a cloud of dust and debris into the air.
It was not immediately clear if there were any casualties.
The Israeli military said Hamas used the building to gather intelligence and that explosive devices had been planted nearby. Hamas denied using the building for military purposes, and Palestinians said it had been used to shelter the displaced.
“These towers are strictly monitored, entry is permitted exclusively for civilians,” Hamas said in a statement, adding the Israeli allegations constitute “a systematic forced displacement” plan.
HEAVY STRIKES
The Israeli military bombed another high-rise tower on Friday that it had also said was being used by Hamas.
On Thursday, the military said it had control over almost half of Gaza City. It says it controls about 75% of all of Gaza.
Many of those in Gaza City were displaced earlier in the war only to later return. Some residents have said that they refuse to be displaced again.
The military has been carrying out heavy strikes on the city for weeks, advancing through outer suburbs, and this week forces were within a few kilometers of the city center.
ALL-OR-NOTHING DEAL
Palestinian terrorists took 251 hostages into the enclave after a Hamas-led cross-border attack on southern Israeli communities on October 7, 2023 that killed about 1,200 people.
There are also growing calls within Israel, led by families of hostages and their supporters, to end the war in a diplomatic deal that would secure the release of the remaining 48 captives.
Israeli officials believe 20 of the hostages are alive.
Netanyahu is pushing for an all-or-nothing deal that would see all of the hostages released at once and Hamas surrendering.
A video released by Hamas on Friday showed two captives, one of whom said they were being held in Gaza City and that they feared being killed in Israel’s assault on the urban center.
Israeli military officials say they have killed many of Hamas’ key leaders and thousands of its fighters.
Hamas has offered to release some hostages for a temporary ceasefire, similar to terms that were discussed in July before negotiations mediated by the US and Arab states collapsed.
US President Donald Trump said on Friday that Washington was in “very deep” negotiations with the Palestinian militants.
Hamas, which has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades but today controls only parts of the enclave, has long said it would release all hostages if Israel agreed to end the war and to withdraw all its forces from Gaza.
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Antisemites Target Synagogues in Spain, France Amid Surge in Jew Hatred Across Europe
The exterior wall of a synagogue in Girona, Spain, vandalized with antisemitic graffiti. Photo: Screenshot
Pro-Palestinian activists have vandalized synagogues in Spain and France in recent days, sparking public outrage and calls for authorities to step up protections.
These are only the latest incidents in a troubling wave of anti-Jewish hate crimes targeting Jewish communities across Europe which continues unabated.
On Thursday, the Jewish community of Girona, a city in Spain’s northeastern Catalonia region, filed a police complaint and urged authorities to take action after the outer wall of the city’s synagogue was defaced with an antisemitic slogan.
Unknown perpetrators defaced the synagogue’s walls with antisemitic graffiti, scrawling messages such as “Israel is a genocidal state, silence = complicity.”
The city’s Jewish community strongly condemned the incident, urging authorities to conduct a swift investigation, impose exemplary sanctions, and ensure robust security measures.
“Disguised as political activism, [this attack] seeks to stigmatize citizens for their faith — something intolerable in a democratic society,” the statement reads. “Tolerance and respect are values we must defend together.”
The European Jewish Association (EJA) also condemned the incident as a hate crime, urging the Spanish government to ensure the safety and protection of its Jewish citizens.
“This is yet another antisemitic attack, part of a wave we’ve seen daily for nearly two years,” the EJA wrote in a post on X.
This is what members of the Jewish community in Girona found this morning when they arrived at their synagogue to pray.
Antisemitic vandals had defaced the synagogue’s outer wall with the words:
“ISRAEL ESTAT GENOCIDA, SILENCI = CÒMPLICE”
Translation: “Israel is a genocidal… pic.twitter.com/ERj4z1hKOP— EJA – EIPA (@EJAssociation) September 4, 2025
In a separate incident, three pro-Palestinian activists were arrested on Thursday after trying to force their way into a synagogue in Nice, southeastern France, during an informational meeting on aliyah, the process of Jews immigrating to Israel.
According to local reports, several individuals attempted to forcibly enter the place of worship, sparking violent clashes and insults that left a pregnant woman injured.
Shortly after the incident, law enforcement arrested two women in their forties and a man in his sixties, taking them into custody as part of an investigation into aggravated violence.
The charges involve attacks on a vulnerable person, actions carried out by a group, religious motivation, and public religious insults.
Local authorities strongly condemned the act and announced that police officers would remain stationed outside the synagogue for as long as necessary.
Since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, antisemitic incidents have surged to alarming levels across Europe.
Jewish individuals have been facing a surge in hostility and targeted attacks, including vandalism of murals and businesses, as well as physical assaults.