What everyone still doesn't know

It is popular among the peace processors to claim that 'everyone knows' what a 'final settlement' between Israel and the 'Palestinians' will look like. It's roughly the Clinton parameters.

This week, we had yet another survey that claims that most 'Palestinians' accept a 'two-state solution.' Or at least that's how Israel's largest English language daily chose to headline it.

But as Rick Richman points out (and not for the first time), the 'Palestinians' might say that they accept a 'two-state solution,' but they don't accept the Clinton parameters, which makes you wonder if everyone really knows how a 'two-state solution' would look.

The PCPSR has been releasing these polls since 2003, and they always lead to misleading headlines such as the one in the Jerusalem Post–because a “two-state solution” as used in the polls doesn’t mean what you think it means.

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In the January 2013 PCPSR poll, only 43% supported [the Clinton parameters]. 

Moreover, in every poll PCPSR poll since 2005, that package has failed to generate Palestinian majority support. While a slight majority of Palestinians may support a two-state solution in the abstract, what they mean is a militarized Palestinian state, next to an Israel pushed back to indefensible borders, with retention of an asserted Palestinian “right of return” to Israel. Such a state would “live side by side, in peace and security”® with Israel for about a week–the period it took to turn Gaza into Hamastan after Israel left in 2005. The new PCPSR poll also found that “only 42% support and 56% oppose mutual recognition of Israel as the state for the Jewish people and Palestine as the state for the Palestinian people.” In other words, the Palestinians want a state, but not if it involves recognition of a Jewish one. 

Israel is constantly warned it will eventually be faced with a demand for a “one-state solution” if it does not make the concession du jour to the Palestinians, but the January PCPSR poll found that “despite the belief that the two-state solution is no longer practical, a large majority of 71% opposes the alternative one-state solution” (emphasis added). That is not surprising: the peace-partner Palestinians demand a Judenrein state in Judea and Samaria; the last thing they want is to be in a state with Jews in it. Fatah and Hamas cannot even live side-by-side with themselves.

What could go wrong?