Counting the exact number of times the Palestinians were offered a state depends on how one defines an “offer.” However, focusing on the most significant, clearly documented instances, the number is generally agreed to be eight major offers: 

1. Peel Commission Plan (1937) 

2. UN Partition Plan (1947) 

3. Post-1967 UN Resolution 242 (1967) 

4. Israel offered on 19 June 1967 to give up Sinai and the Golan in exchange for peace (1967)

5. Camp David Summit (2000) 

6. The Clinton Parameters (2000) 

7. Annapolis Conference (2007) 

8. John Kerry’s Peace Proposal (2014) 

Each of these instances presented an opportunity for the establishment of a Palestinian state, although they varied in terms of specifics like borders, sovereignty, and other conditions.* 

Notice the huge gap between the Post-1967 UN Resolution 242 and the Camp David Summit? I am glad you did! You might remember that immediately after the 1967 War, the surrounding Arab States met in Khartoum, Sudan and signed the aptly titled Khartoum Resolution. The 3 No’s. This already sounds like a great prelude to peace and the formation of two states. Let’s see: No peace with Israel, no negotiation with Israel, and no recognition of Israel. Okay, maybe not a great prelude to peace.

So what changed between then and the early 90s through 2000s? Too much to fully explore in this aside — other than to point out that, slowly but surely, the Khartoum signers, after years of failed and costly conflicts with Israel, abandoned the resolution one by one to sign independent peace treaties with Israel. This is likely another reason Palestinian statehood has failed: as each Arab country begrudgingly signed a treaty in exchange for entering the modern supply chain, there was no unified Arab consensus to address this with Israel the way they had violently done so in the past.

If you have made it this far, I want to confess that I am feeling angry. A mental health app I use, Finch, has a feelings exercise where it asks you to dig three layers deep and name how you are feeling; they even provide you with a handy bank of emotions from which to choose. I guess I am less angry than I am outraged. Not a new emotion, really, but I cannot stop seeing that little girl from the West Bank holding the photo of Sinwar. I cannot stop seeing post after post by ignorant Westerners turned antisemites. And I am working through this self-righteous anger, I am. One strategy is to remember the history, remember how often Israel really did offer Palestinians statehood, remember that there is real hate that must be addressed for there to be real peace, and anyone who tries to shame us because they watched a TikTok on Arafat and bookmarked a propagandized AP article, does not speak for the world. 

In other words, a balance: we are not required to complete the work but neither are we allowed to abandon it, right? We are not required to accept even most of the skewed claims. This is not only an intellectual stance — we must also take an emotional stance: we are not required to prostrate ourselves for whatever crimes the mob seems hungry to levy at Jews a la Israel. Instead, we learn to cultivate within us a space where we can do the work without giving unserious people access to our moral compass, our Jewish impulse to find the wrong in the world and then to fix it, even at the cost of ourselves. To realize peace, we must acknowledge Palestinian pain, while also holding our truth — though not so hard that we lose faith. 

A reminder: Deligitimizing Jewish or Palestinian connections to the homeland is a bad look. Peace is the right look. Let’s focus on that.

*I specifically did not include the Trump proposal as everybody knows that was Trump likely doing Putin a favor by sowing more chaos between Israel and the Palestinians.