Ignorant to human complexity and the march of history, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is hoping to convince the world that a Palestinian state is nothing but a 'reward for terror'

In late January, more than three months into the Middle Eastern war to end all wars, Israel's foreign minister, Israel Katz, attended a meeting of his European Union counterparts in Brussels.

While EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell somberly elaborated on his 10-point plan for a two-state solution, Katz screened a seven-year-old video with futuristic images of an artificial island he proposed to build off Gaza, to provide an airstrip, a cargo terminal and energy solutions. Ever since then, diplomats have been fuming about Katz's island fantasies and I've been thinking about "Swan Lake," the evergreen symbol of delusion and distraction as the Soviet empire crumbled.

No more. This week, Israel is suddenly awash in Palestinian state fever. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is treating the acceleration of U.S. efforts to advance both a cease-fire and a big regional deal that hinges on a two-state solution, or the specter of other countries recognizing an independent Palestinian state, as a shocking new existential threat. He had his government express its adamant rejection of "international diktats" on Sunday, while intoning his trope that a Palestinian state would be a prize for terror.

Like so much else about Netanyahu's thinking, he's dead wrong about both the shock, and the threat.

Historic disconnect

For observers of global affairs, even for just the last 35 years, resurrection of the Palestinian state is only shocking if the globe you're observing represents some other planet. While "Swan Lake" played for three days on Soviet television in 1991, violent ethno-nationalist conflicts were brewing or already erupting. National groups such as Georgians sought independence from a short century of Soviet dominance, while sub-national minorities, like Abkhazians or Ossetians, feared the nationalist currents of newly independent republics. Each now clamored violently for national self-determination, in the form of states. If they didn't get it by agreement, they took it through referendums, wars or declarations, whether or not anyone was listening.

Similarly, the republics of then-Yugoslavia feared the virulent rising nationalism of the strongest state in their union, and began to secede. The furious rump federation dominated by Serbia then cannibalized its erstwhile partners in "brotherhood and unity" (as per Tito's slogan), to keep them. Ultranationalist Bosnian-Serb forces backed by Belgrade even committed genocide against Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica; Bosnia still became its own state.

Bloodletting in these cases often went both ways. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia found someone to indict or punish from all major parties to the war. For every Armenian who remembers the 1988 pogrom against them in the city of Sumgait outside Baku in Azerbaijan, there is an Azeri who remembers the Armenian attacks on them in Khojali a few years later.

Palestinians have sought a state limited to the occupied territories since 1988, when the PLO renounced terrorism and recognized Israel, if grudgingly. But states are often born in blood, so an unnaturally long birth process (36 years and counting) is bleeding everyone to death. Even Kosovo, the last unresolved conflict of the former Yugoslavia, struggled from roughly 1991 (the first referendum on independence) to just 2008 when it declared independence again and became a state in all but UN membership, despite feverish Serbian efforts to have it de-recognized (there's a reason Serbia and Israel like each other).

It's strange that Netanyahu, with his strong grasp of global affairs, has impaired vision when it comes to placing Palestinians in this broad historical context. In fairness, he did almost outsmart history. The two-state peace process has been moribund for over a decade; the last talks in 2013-14 ended with a whimper, and the only bang was the occasional Iron Dome interception that made Israelis feel safe, as long as they ignored the suffering of their fellow citizens in the south.

Meanwhile, Palestinian society festered. Nations never stop wanting freedom, and Israel's attempt to portray the world as out of touch for advancing a Palestinian state is itself frightfully out of touch.

The wrong anti-Palestine arguments

Certain arguments against Palestinian independence are bunk or dumb. Take the government's decision on Sunday railing against unilateral action: is this a joke? Israel has championed unilateralism for most young people's lifetime, from dismantling Israeli settlements in Gaza in 2005 to the right-wing's normalization of annexation (territorial annexation is unilateral by definition).

Netanyahu was the recent ringleader: under his leadership, Likud committed to West Bank annexation in 2017; he later encouraged radical annexationist parties to merge and surge in Israeli elections; and in 2020, Netanyahu practiced double-unilateralism, declaring Israel's intent to annex parts of the West Bank with neither Palestinian nor, it turned out, American approval (nor that of any other country).

In fact, recognition of Palestine is hardly unilateral. Over 100 countries have already recognized Palestine in the past and the current effort would be unusually multilateral; it's more accurate to speak of Israel's unilateral rejection of Palestinian statehood.

To be fair, in recent years, I didn't love the idea of pushing for global recognition of Palestine in the absence of a genuine peace process. Palestine lags badly behind other recognition-hopefuls such as Kosovo, Somaliland, Nagorno-Karabakh (before it was ransacked by Azerbaijan's military assault last September), or even tiny Turkish Cyprus, on any measure of sovereign-like powers. I worried that recognition would be an empty and demoralizing declaration, like the wan bids for UN recognition in 2011 and 2012, which changed almost nothing.

Now I think a political horizon for Palestinians is of the utmost urgency, before Palestinian society implodes in despair. If people think Gaza is bad, there's still the whole West Bank as the next staging ground for hell. A declaration can be an aspirational marker, worth more than past words, if the plans fill up with substance.

Real fears

Supporting Palestinian self-determination in the form of a state is therefore the right historic, moral, legal and political direction. But you'd have to be an October 7 denialist to ignore the extremely real security threats on the tortured road to get there. You'd also have to be a Gaza-destruction denialist not to realize that Palestinian security needs are no less real and urgent; the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed in all rounds of violence is tens to over 100 times higher.

The answer is to jettison the failed notion of exclusive "Israeli security demands" and admit that security is a mutual need whose solutions lie in partnership. Unlike the security cooperation in place for over 30 years in the West Bank, which Palestinians detest as the muscle behind Israel's ongoing occupation, security must serve the peaceful populations on both sides rather than implement control by one side over another. That's why I think a Palestinian state will be the most peaceful and successful (and, g-d willing, democratic) in a confederated association with Israel designed for cooperation on mutual needs, on the condition that the two sides cooperate as equal partners.

But again, Israel's rhetorical arguments are increasingly bizarre, even on the gravely serious question of security. The right wing now argues that a Palestinian state will carry out October 7 attacks every day. As an Israeli citizen, this scandalous view not only absolves the state of its failures that day, but promises to throw my considerable tax money into the toilet by declaring that the state cannot protect us in the future either.

However, one of Netanyahu's favorite lines actually can't be dismissed. The idea that statehood is a "prize for terror" raises concerns that should not be ignored.

It's true that many Palestinians are poised to conclude, even if unhappily, that nothing works except violence and force. Not declarations such as in 1988. Not agreements like Oslo. Not diplomacy in various rounds of negotiations. Not technocratic state-building under Salam Fayyad, around the time when even Israeli sources admit that terrorism was lower.

Rewarding force in politics is in fact disturbing. If Putin keeps Crimea (as he probably will), he shatters a brick in the international order. If Armenia now reaches a deal with Azerbaijan, following September's military assault on Karabakh and fears that Azerbaijan will invade Armenia proper, it might look like brute force worked.

But Palestinians are also paying a terrible price in blood for whatever slow, painstaking and partial gains they might make toward statehood: over 28,000 dead Gazans – even if only 16,000 are civilians (Israel claims 12,000 are fighters) – is still more than 10 Black Saturdays.

Still, if there's progress toward a two-state solution, some Palestinians will see Hamas' strategy as vindicated. Possibly even the very same people who were repulsed by Hamas' actions. People are complicated, but so is reality.

In its struggle for statehood, Israel (and pre-state Zionists) killed civilians and military personnel alike, even a UN mediator. In the early 1990s, Kosovo's leadership mounted the model nonviolent national state-building effort to win independence, and got gurnisht. Only when the Kosovo Liberation Army let loose did things move: Serbia's mad-dog violent reaction to what it saw as a terrorist group sparked the U.S.-led NATO war, leading to partial birth of the future state. It's hard to argue that history must always stop just short of the Palestinians.