Over the past month, Israelis didn’t need another diplomatic conference to understand why Palestinian statehood remains premature. We got the reminder the hard way – at junctions, checkpoints, and roadsides, where a car becomes a weapon, a knife becomes a “message,” and ordinary life is treated as a legitimate target.
On November 18, at the Gush Etzion Junction, two terrorists attempted a combined ramming-and-stabbing attack that left an Israeli dead and others wounded; explosive devices were reportedly found in the attackers’ vehicle. In early December, there were additional car-rammings and stabbings aimed at soldiers in the Hebron area and near Ateret. None of this is random. It is the predictable output of a political culture that has still not made the moral pivot from “armed struggle” to civil responsibility.
A state is not a slogan. A state is not a UN resolution. A state is not a map on a classroom wall. A state is the boring, necessary discipline of monopoly on force – one law, one police power, one accountable government that arrests terrorists rather than praising them, that confiscates illegal weapons rather than tolerating them, and that teaches children to build a future rather than to die for a cause.
That monopoly on force does not exist today. Not in Gaza, which is ruled by Hamas. And not, reliably, in Judea and Samaria, where armed factions, local militias, and terror cells operate in the seams of weak governance. The month’s attacks matter not only because of the victims – though every victim is a universe – but because they highlight a basic point: a leadership that cannot or will not uproot terrorism is not building a state.
AND HERE is where the Palestinian Authority inadvertently supplies one of the clearest pieces of evidence.
When Jews were gunned down at a Hanukkah event in Bondi Beach, Australia – an attack far from the checkpoints and the security fences – the Palestinian Authority had an opportunity to show moral clarity that would reassure the world: name the crime, name the target, and condemn it without evasions. It did not.
The PA Foreign Ministry issued an English-language condemnation of the shooting, declaring rejection of “all forms of violence and terrorism.” But it did not acknowledge that the attack targeted Jews or that it happened at a Hanukkah event, and it appended a political jab about “Israel’s ongoing killing of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank,” while expressing “full solidarity” with “friendly Australia.” That’s not statesmanship. It’s moral evasion: condemn a massacre in the abstract, then pivot to blaming Israel in the same breath.
Worse still, one of PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s advisers went further, arguing that Israel’s “occupation” bears responsibility for dragging the world into a “cycle of violence.” In other words: even when Jews are murdered abroad, the reflex is still to turn the story into an indictment of Israel – rather than an indictment of the ideology that celebrates killing Jews, wherever it happens.
This isn’t a semantic quibble. It is the core issue. If you cannot say, plainly and consistently, that murdering Jews at a Hanukkah celebration is antisemitic terrorism – if you must dilute it, reframe it, or “contextualize” it – then you are not preparing your public for peaceful coexistence: You are training them to see Jewish blood as propaganda currency.
Some will argue: “But the PA cooperates with Israel on security.” Sometimes it does—often because its own survival depends on it. Yet even where cooperation exists, Israel is still repeatedly forced to do the work that a responsible neighbor would do: raids, arrests, intelligence-driven disruptions, and counterterror operations that fill the vacuum left by an authority that cannot impose law on its own extremists. A society is “ready for a state” when dismantling terror infrastructure is a sovereign priority – not something an outside force must do in spite of it.
STATEHOOD ALSO requires a civic culture that treats terrorism as criminal, not heroic. That means real prosecutions, real disarmament, and real education for life. It means rejecting the glorification of killers and the broader martyrdom culture that has poisoned Palestinian politics for decades. A government that wants borders and flags must first show it can govern, that it will stop incitement, stop armed militants, stop “pay to slay,” stop the normalization of violence – and stop the rhetorical laundering of terror into “context.”
None of this means Palestinians cannot have aspirations. It means aspirations do not entitle anyone to the privileges of sovereignty absent the responsibilities of sovereignty. The international community keeps demanding that Israel take a leap of faith: withdraw, create a border, hand over strategic high ground, and assume the next phase will be peaceful. The past month, and the PA’s own reaction to Jewish victims abroad, offer a more realistic reply: without a decisive transformation in governance and values, the next phase will not be peace. It will be a larger platform for the same violence, closer to Israel’s heartland.
So, what would “readiness” look like?
It would look like Palestinian leaders who draw a bright line – publicly and consistently – between politics and terror, between protest and murder. It would look like systematic disarmament of militants, transparent policing, and prosecutions that aren’t performative. It would look like schools that teach children that building a nation means building institutions, not building legends around martyrdom. It would look like one address, one chain of command, and one accountable authority that can say honestly: “If you stab a soldier or ram a car into civilians, you are not a hero: You are a criminal.”
Until that day, the Palestinian state project is not being blocked by Israeli rhetoric. It is being blocked by Palestinian reality – by a refusal to do the first job of nationhood: protect life, reject terror, and build institutions stronger than the gun.
THE PAST month didn’t create this problem. It simply documented it again.
Statehood isn’t a prize for grievance – it’s a test of responsibility. The Palestinians are not failing that test because of Israeli policy; they’re failing it because their leaders still cannot bring themselves to say the simplest truth: terror against Jews is evil, whether it happens at a junction in Judea or at a Hanukkah celebration in Bondi. When that sentence becomes routine in Ramallah – not as public relations, but as a governing principle – then we can talk about a state. Until then, Israel must insist on the one requirement without which no border, flag, or “peace process” means anything: security first, reality first.
The writer is president of the Religious Zionists of America (RZA). He is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995, and the author of A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.