‘Palestine’ Questions the Media Never Ask

There is a peculiar discipline in the way American and European journalists cover the "Palestine” issue. The vocabulary is fixed, the assumptions are inherited, and certain questions are simply not asked – as if merely raising them risks ruining a career.

Here are several questions that ought to be routine.

Begin with the British disposition of the territory placed under the Palestine Mandate. In 1921, Britain installed Abdullah bin Hussein, an Arab prince from the Hejaz, as ruler of the vast territory east of the Jordan River – roughly three-quarters of the area ultimately covered by the Mandate framework. Britain then excluded that territory from the provisions intended to facilitate a Jewish national home. By any modern definition, this was imperial mapmaking: a European power placing a non-local dynasty over most of the territory it had undertaken to administer.

Yet the Palestinian national movement has rarely treated the creation of Transjordan as a grievance remotely comparable to the Balfour Declaration, Britain’s support for a national home for the Jewish people. Why?

The answer is rather obvious. Whereas Arab rule over most of mandatory Palestine aroused little objection, recognition of Jewish national rights in any part of it provoked relentless resistance.

Between 1949 and 1967, Jordan controlled and ultimately annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem, while Egypt administered Gaza. Two Arab states controlled every square mile of the territory now claimed for a Palestinian state. Neither country established one.

Nor did the Palestinian national movement wage an international campaign demanding a state from Jordan or Egypt. The PLO was founded in 1964, three years before Israel took the West Bank and Gaza in the defensive Six-Day War. Article 24 of the PLO’s original charter declared that the organization exercised no territorial sovereignty over the Jordanian-controlled West Bank or Egyptian-controlled Gaza. The proclaimed mission was instead the “liberation” of Palestine – that is, the territory then constituting Israel.

Under the Ottomans, Palestinian Arabs likewise mounted no sustained movement for a Palestinian state. A Palestinian identity was developing, but it existed alongside broader Arab, Syrian, Ottoman and Islamic identities. What increasingly dominated Palestinian Arab politics was a fanatical, uncompromising opposition to Jewish immigration and nation building – and a hatred of the Jews and their communal achievements that repeatedly erupted into violence.

Two ideological currents help explain it. Pan-Arab nationalism regarded any Jewish settlement or city – Tel Hai or Tel Aviv – let alone a Jewish state, regardless of its borders, as an alien presence in Arab land. Political Islam regarded Jewish sovereignty over territory once under Muslim rule as an affront. For both, Israel’s size was secondary to its existence. That remains the premise of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

A Reassuring Promise

For decades, advocates of the so-called two-state solution have maintained that any new Palestinian state would be demilitarized. The phrase is reassuring – and hollow.

Hamas is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, heavily armed and financed by Iran and still the de facto ruler of part of Gaza. After years of devastating war, Hamas has been degraded but not disarmed. Hezbollah, Iran’s principal Arab proxy and another designated terrorist organization, retains a formidable arsenal. The Lebanese Armed Forces, despite years of American training and funding, have been unable to disarm it.

The United States possesses the world’s most powerful military and has spent decades trying to contain Iran and its terrorist network. Yet Washington has been unable – or, at critical moments, unwilling – to compel Tehran to dismantle the armies it has built around Israel. If the U.S. can’t neutralize Hezbollah or disarm Hamas, why should Israel trust a document promising that a state carved from the West Bank and Gaza will remain demilitarized?

Who would enforce that promise? The United Nations? American diplomats? And what would happen after the first arms shipment crossed the border, the first underground factory was discovered or the first Palestinian government committed to demilitarization was overthrown?

Gaza was supposed to demonstrate what Palestinian self-government could become. Instead, after Israel withdrew every soldier and civilian in 2005, Hamas seized control and built an army. Israel is now being pressured to assume that the experiment would end differently on the hills overlooking Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Ben-Gurion Airport.

The next question is even more sensitive: What happens if a Palestinian state seeks to unify with a radicalized Jordan?

This isn’t paranoia. At least half of Jordan’s population is of Palestinian origin. We don’t know the exact number because Amman does not publish an official breakdown. King Abdullah II, in his 2011 memoir, put the figure at 43 percent, but the U.S. State Department has long estimated “more than half.” The Washington Institute and Oxford Business Group put it at 60 to 70 percent.

The range – 43 to 70 percent – is remarkable, and Amman’s refusal to release real numbers is itself a data point. Governments comfortable with their demographics tend to publish them.

How stable is the Hashemite monarchy? Stable until it isn’t. The Shah’s Iran looked stable in 1977. Mubarak’s Egypt looked stable in 2010. Assad’s Syria looked stable in 2011, and again in 2020, and then it wasn’t. Arab monarchies and strongman regimes have a way of appearing permanent until the week they collapse. It isn’t a slight against Jordan’s king to acknowledge this; it’s a slight against the analytical class that hides from it.

Israel would do everything it could to help the monarchy survive an upheaval. Preserving Jordan is a first-order Israeli interest and has been for half a century. But Israel can’t control events in Amman, and it can’t control Washington.

That last point deserves emphasis. Jimmy Carter withdrew American support from the Shah as Iran’s revolutionary forces advanced, badly underestimating the forces that would replace him. Barack Obama pressed Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak to relinquish power even though the Muslim Brotherhood was the country’s best organized opposition movement. Only the Egyptian army ultimately prevented the Brotherhood from consolidating control. In both cases, an American president believed Washington could manage, moderate, or ride out an Islamist wave. In both cases, the belief was wrong. There is no reason to assume the next generation of American policymakers has learned the lesson. A future president may well decide that a Hashemite king is expendable.

A Palestinian state west of the Jordan, later joined to a radicalized eastern bank, would create a hostile power along Israel's longest border, with a Red Sea outlet, far greater manpower and territorial depth than Gaza and the West Bank possess alone. No serious discussion of Palestinian statehood can ignore that possibility.

Respectable Ambiguity

That brings us to American politics. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, has become a test case for respectable ambiguity. He says he supports "equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike." Commentators have treated this as an implicit endorsement of two states.

But his words contain no such commitment.

Asked directly on CNN whether he supports one state or two, El-Sayed refused to choose.

"If they want one state, that's their choice," he said. "If they want two states, that's their choice. It's not my choice to make."

His formulation can describe two states living side by side. It can also describe one binational state in which Jewish self-determination disappears into a demographic contest. El-Sayed will not say which he means, and most interviewers will not insist that he do so.

The ambiguity is politically useful. It permits anti-Israel left-wing voters to hear the maximalist meaning while more moderate voters hear a seeming commitment to coexistence. A rigorous press corps would make the refusal to distinguish between those outcomes the story. Ours largely mistakes it for sophistication.

Each of these questions – about Transjordan, Palestinian fanaticism and rejectionism, the missing Palestinian state between 1949 and 1967, demilitarization, Jordan’s uncertain future, American reliability, and the El-Sayed formula – has a common feature. A truthful answer disrupts the accepted narrative and helps to clarify what contemporary discourse prefers to keep confused.

Policy built on evading these questions is destined to fail. Journalism that refuses to ask them is advocacy presented as honest reporting.