A senior Fatah official has openly declared that the Palestinian demand for a two-state solution is a strategy to destroy Israel. “We know the trap we have set for Israel by demanding a two-state solution,” Basel Abu Shahab, Fatah secretary in Lebanon’s Burj al-Shemali refugee camp, said in an interview with the Palestinian Authority’s official Palestine TV earlier this month. “The establishment of a Palestinian state would mean the disappearance of the Israeli entity and the end of global Zionism.”
Abu Shahab, the son of Fatah Maj. Gen. Jalal Abu Shahab, warned that Israel “has reason to fear us.” His remarks aired on the official broadcaster of the Palestinian Authority, the body Western governments have designated to lead the Palestinian state they are promoting.
The admission comes as support for the two-state solution has collapsed among the very people it is supposed to serve. A Gallup survey released on October 6 found that only 26 percent of Israelis support a two-state solution, while 65 percent oppose it. Among Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem, support stands at roughly one third, with 58 percent opposed. In 2012, 61 percent of Israelis and 66 percent of Palestinians supported the idea. Gallup was unable to survey Gaza, which it has not polled since 2023 because of the security situation.
Only 22 percent of Israelis and 21 percent of Palestinians believe permanent peace will ever be achieved. Among Israelis who approve of their current leadership, support for a Palestinian state stands at just 5 percent, with 91 percent opposed.
The collapse in public support comes one year after a wave of Western governments, led by France, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, formally recognized a Palestinian state in September 2025. The two-state solution these governments are promoting calls for the creation of an unprecedented Palestinian state inside Israel’s borders, militarized and ethnically cleansed of Jews, with its exclusively Muslim capital in Jerusalem, centered on Judaism’s holiest site, the Temple Mount. Israel has already tested the land-for-peace formula. The Oslo Accords were followed by three intifadas, thousands of terror attacks, the rocket fire that followed Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and the October 7 massacre that launched the war against Hamas.
The Fatah official’s words and the polling numbers point in the same direction. A question arises that Jewish tradition answered centuries ago: what gave the descendants of Ishmael their hold on the Land of Israel, and when does it end?
Among the major Jewish parties, only Yair Golan’s Democrats continue to openly campaign for a two-state solution. The most prominent support for a Palestinian state in the campaign has come from Abbas, who told his party’s conference that “the State of Palestine exists and is recognised by most of the world.”
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