In “Time for Two States,” Rachel Lu observes that after the shocking events of October 7, “the sequence of events was somewhat predictable. Israel retaliated. It was clear they would win.” Well, maybe not win, exactly. But definitely, “Israel’s war with Hamas is reaching its final stages.” If only it were. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Israelis have made only partial progress in finding and destroying Hamas’s vast tunnel network [i.e., 350 miles of tunnels under an area 30 miles by 8 miles].” It is exceptionally treacherous. No one can reliably anticipate the potential damage, reports the Journal.

Still, Ms. Lu’s optimism is undaunted. She concludes that “however the end game plays out, the IDF should soon have its victory.” I sincerely pray that she may be right. One must hope that Hamas’s Gaza leader, Yahya Sinwar, is wrong to believe that it is Hamas who is actually winning despite the major losses it has clearly suffered. After all, all it has to do, says Sinwar, is “declare a historic victory by outlasting Israel’s firepower and claim the leadership of the Palestinian national cause.”

It is in that context that one must evaluate Ms. Lu’s view that “there is no reasonable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem that does not involve two sovereign states.” Fair enough. But the question is: when and in what circumstances? Definitely not now, argues Israeli historian Gadi Taub. In a powerful article published February 12, 2024, in Tablet Magazine, Taub writes that “compelling as it is as a debating strategy, or a form of self-therapy, [the two-state formula] is no solution at all … a noble dream … but just that—a dream.” A lifelong liberal, he had shared that dream with many other Israelis until October 7, which was the nation’s wake-up call, a living nightmare for all but a negligible number of the mislabeled “woke.”

Palestinian self-rule is undoubtedly preferable to most alternatives. But as the former head of the East Jerusalem mission of the Quartet (consisting of the US, EU, UK, and Russia) Envoy Robert Danin told reporters on March 1, 2024:

[Palestinians] don’t want the Israelis there, but they don’t want the Palestinian Authority either; the PA doesn’t care about Gaza. They don’t want Hamas either. They want to have a voice for themselves.

Will that voice be allowed to be heard? For unless and until it does, any two-state solution is predicated on premises that are at best dubious and at worst delusional.

Recent surveys indicate that a majority of Palestinians support Hamas and approve of the October 7 massacres. These include the populations under the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) jurisdiction, which they detest as corrupt and weak. Hence, the Biden administration’s plan to put the PA in charge of Gaza is utterly unrealistic, argues Taub. “There is no such thing as a ‘revitalized’ Palestinian Authority, because there is no one who wants to ‘revitalize’ it in such a way as to make it conform to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s sales pitch.” Under the circumstances, Israelis “believe that turning Judea and Samaria into another Hamastan to satisfy those who see the massacre as an inspiration and its perpetrators as role models would be suicidal. Who in their right mind would inflict the ensuing bloodshed on their partners, children, friends, and parents?” For Ms. Lu, therefore, to argue that the only way to peace “probably will not be possible without a good-faith commitment on Israel’s part to work towards a two-state solution,” must be seen in the proper context.

Since the 1917 Balfour Declaration proclaimed that the British government “view with favor the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in their homeland,” the Jews have hoped that their two-thousand-year-old exile would finally end. They sought to live alongside their neighbors as best they could. Yet in all that time, writes Taub, “there never was a Palestinian leadership ready to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish nation-state. That is a constant fact of life in the conflict.” Israel never denied the Palestinians a right to govern themselves. By contrast, “the Arab side has rejected any and all partition plans starting with the Peel Commission in 1937, the United Nations partition resolution of 1947, and all the way through the various American mediation plans and Israeli offers, and those offered by Israeli leaders.” Israel’s “land-for-peace” strategy, whereby it relinquished territory it had acquired after pushing back Arab military attacks in exchange for accepting its right to exist, was an utter failure.

Ms. Lu concludes her article by reminding her readers that “we should bear in mind that citizenship, and the basic rights and freedoms that go with it, really aren’t the kind of thing that a person should have to earn.” A commendable ideal, without a doubt. One shouldn’t have to earn rights that America’s founders, invoking the key commandment of Genesis, declared self-evident. But since when have basic rights and freedoms not been earned at the steep price of its defenders’ lives? Since when has freedom, that most fragile of human blessings, not had to be earned again and again?

Palestinians have yet to be given a chance to enjoy those rights by those who use them as cannon fodder, expropriate their food and medicine, and reduce them to misery. Fellow Muslims on Iran’s payroll have shown them far less empathy than do Jewish medical personnel who save Palestinian lives in Israeli hospitals, and soldiers who seek to keep Palestinian civilian casualties at a minimum while fighting to free innocent Jewish hostages, including women, little children, and grandparents, who are severely maltreated in captivity.

Basic rights and freedoms must never be taken for granted. When lost, recovering them is hardly guaranteed. Americans would do well to remember that, because whether we realize it or not, we too are in the line of fire. Iran’s leadership considers Israel merely the Little Satan; Big Satan is none other than America. The growing alliance of this barbaric Islamist regime with Russia, China, and North Korea, all of which deny their own populations the most basic rights, does not bode well. Israel is currently fighting not only for its own survival but also for ours.