20/08/2026
The Missing 19 Years
The strangest part of the “Israel prevented a Palestinian state” argument is that it comes with a 19-year loading screen nobody wants to discuss.
From 1948 to 1967, Egypt controlled Gaza. Jordan controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem, formally annexing the West Bank in 1950.
Israel controlled neither territory.
No Israeli settlements.
No Israeli checkpoints.
No Israeli military administration.
These were the territories we are now told were desperately waiting to become the Palestinian state Israel refused to allow.
Except Israel was not there.
And no Palestinian state emerged.
There was an attempt to create an All-Palestine Government in Gaza in 1948, under Egyptian auspices. It was moved to Cairo within months and never became an independent sovereign state. Jordan went in the opposite direction, annexing the West Bank and extending Jordanian citizenship to its Palestinian population.
That history matters because it reveals something much more complicated than the modern story of “Palestinians wanted a state and Israel prevented them from having one.”
For 19 years, Arab governments controlled the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Creating an independent Palestinian state in those territories somehow never became the great moral emergency we are told it always was.
Then something even more revealing happened.
The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964. Not 1967. 1964.
Three years before Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza.
And the original Palestinian National Charter did something rather extraordinary. It declared the establishment of Israel null and void while explicitly disclaiming PLO territorial sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza, which were still controlled by Jordan and Egypt.
The organization created to “liberate Palestine” was founded while Israel did not control the West Bank or Gaza, and its charter was aimed at undoing Israel while specifically not claiming sovereignty over those territories.
That is a fairly inconvenient detail if your entire understanding of the conflict begins with “occupation” in 1967.
Apparently the liberation problem was not primarily that Palestinians lacked sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza.
The problem was that Jews had sovereignty next door.
Then came 1967.
Israel survived another war and took control of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Suddenly the territories that had spent 19 years under Arab rule without becoming an independent Palestinian state became the center of an international crusade for Palestinian self-determination.
Mazel Tov! Very moving. Remarkable timing.
There had been no comparable international movement demanding that Egypt “Free Gaza” or that Jordan surrender the West Bank for an independent Palestinian state. Once Jews controlled those territories, however, Palestinian sovereignty acquired an urgency it somehow never possessed under Arab rule.
Funny how that works.
This does not mean Palestinian identity did not exist. It means the neat historical story we are constantly sold is backwards.
The conflict was never simply about Palestinians wanting sovereignty and Israel refusing to give it to them.
For much of the Arab world and the Palestinian national movement, the struggle was also about preventing or reversing Jewish sovereignty.
That distinction changes the entire conversation.
Because “Palestinians should have a state” and “Jews should not have a state” are not the same proposition.
The first is an argument about Palestinian self-determination.
The second is an argument against Jewish self-determination.
And for decades, the two have been conveniently packaged together as though nobody should notice the difference.
Pretending the Arab world spent 1948 to 1967 patiently waiting to construct Palestine until Israel arrived and ruined everything is not history.
It is fan fiction with footnotes.
Jordan had the West Bank. No independent Palestinian state.
Egypt had Gaza. No independent Palestinian state.
The PLO appeared in 1964 and directed its liberation project toward the territory where the Jewish state already existed, while disclaiming sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza.
Then Israel took those territories in 1967, and suddenly the world discovered an almost theological devotion to Palestinian sovereignty there.
Baruch Hashem for timing.
Because geography was never the entire issue.
Jewish sovereignty was.
And somehow, after 3,000 years of Jewish history, exile, return, prayer, archaeology, language, memory, and blood, the Jewish people are still expected to stand before the world and justify why we are entitled to exist as a sovereign people in our ancestral homeland.
No.
We are not guests in our own story.
We are not squatters in our ancestral home.
And we are not going to apologize because Palestinian statehood became infinitely more urgent to the world once it could be wielded against Jewish statehood.
