A Potential Palestinian State: Will It Be an Ally or Enemy of the United States?

Yoram Ettinger | EMET | March 6, 2024

After the worst massacre of Jews on a single day since the Holocaust, many members of the international community have arrived at a single-factor conclusion of how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, combined with grandiose plans of how to finally bring peace to the Middle East: the rewarding of this violence with the creation of a contiguous Palestinian state, stretching from Judea and Samaria, (the West Bank) through Gaza. The “dusting off” of this solution, which has been tried, stretches back to the 1937 Peel Commission, the 1947 UN Partition Plan, the 1967 Khartoum Conference, the Oslo Accords of 1993, the Roadmap for Peace in 2002, and the Gaza Withdrawal of 2005.

Before we launch into this, it is important to explore the following questions: Have the Palestinians behaved as a friend or ally to the United States in the past? How have the Palestinians behaved in their host Arab countries? Have they been a stabilizing influence or a destabilizing influence? What have the Palestinians, themselves expressed in terms of their affinity towards Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as opposed to the “so-called” more moderate groups of the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, and what is the real distinction between them? If established, how stable would a Palestinian Authority government be?

Here to answer these questions and more is Ambassador Yoram Ettinger.