When Children Know Better Than Statesmen (Palestinian Promises)

It’s when a child is in first or second grade that they learn a very simple, and very important, fact of life: promises are never as reliable as actions. By that time, the child has observed that actually receiving a cookie is better than the promise of a cookie. Today, renowned, highly educated statesmen and women have either lost sight of this idea or have willfully disregarded it.

This week, they have given a gift of support to Hamas for its barbarism of October 7.

The halls of the United Nations are alive with pageantry—flags, cameras, speeches, and carefully chosen words. In the midst of all this sordid ritual, something remarkable is happening: France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Portugal have all announced their recognition of a Palestinian state, with France and Saudi Arabia convening the summit that framed these moves.

Recognition is never neutral. It is a reward, and rewards, if they are to mean anything, require conditions. Yet this new momentum comes while hostages remain in captivity and Hamas’s weapons are intact. It comes even though the most basic prerequisite for statehood—monopoly over legitimate force—has not been secured.

This story has a prelude. In 1974 Yasser Arafat—the arch-terrorist and kleptocratic leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization—made his celebrated debut at the United Nations, famously declaring, “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.” Fourteen years later he returned to renounce “all forms of terrorism” and to gesture toward a negotiated two-state solution.

These, like Mahmoud Abbas’s speech this week, were no more than a speechwriter’s hollow lines. They set no definitive or achievable schedule for disarmament, no mechanism to end payments to militants, and no plan to cleanse schoolbooks of incitement. When the international Quartet later outlined the 2003 Roadmap for Peace—demanding the end of terror, security-sector reform, and transparent governance on a timetable that might have led to a Palestinian state by 2005—those benchmarks were not only never met; they were eventually abandoned amid waves of terror attacks inside Israel that over the decades have murdered thousands of Jews in cold blood, including in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Fast forward to the present. Textbooks still carry incitement against Jews. And yet, as Mahmoud Abbas appeared remotely before the UN this week, after the United States denied him a visa, he called for a ceasefire, demanded the release of hostages, and promised that Hamas would have no role in governing Gaza—as if anyone believed he had any means of accomplishing these things. His words were stunning in one regard: they were believed, not by first- and second-graders, but by adults the world over.

Some ask how Israel and the United States can be right to object to so-called Palestinian statehood when so many other nations insist they are wrong. I answer in the age-old Jewish way—with a better question: how have so many countries become so malign, so craven, and so willfully blind that they prefer a promise to the hard facts? Why do they not insist that the promised things—the return of every hostage, Hamas’s total surrender and disarmament, the cessation of pay-for-slay stipends, and a thorough overhaul of UNRWA’s anti-Jewish curriculum—be non-negotiable prerequisites before any discussion of Palestinian statehood even begins?

What is striking is how recognition now risks becoming a prize for October 7 rather than a pathway to peace. The international community is dramatically altering the landscape of legitimacy at the very moment when the most obvious conditions—freeing the hostages, dismantling Hamas’s military infrastructure, enforcing an end to terror-linked stipends, reforming the education system—remain unmet or unverified. Recognition is being treated as an opening bid when it should be the culmination of hard, measurable change.

Diplomacy requires courage, but it also requires patience and moral clarity. To grant statehood before these conditions are fulfilled is to squander leverage and to signal that violence is a viable path to sovereignty. The question that lingers is unavoidable: why is the world rewarding October 7 before even the simplest demands for justice and security are met?

Recognition should never be a gesture of hope alone. It must be a contract, one earned through verifiable action, not merely promised in speeches. Even a child recognizes this.