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?
The rejection now spans Israel’s political map. With Israelis heading to the polls on October 27, the two leading candidates for prime minister are competing over who opposes a Palestinian state more firmly.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has framed the election as a referendum on Palestinian statehood. “It’s either right-wing or Palestine,” Netanyahu posted on X this month. He has warned that “a left-wing government of Eisenkot and Lieberman that will establish a Palestinian state” would come to power with the support of Arab parties, adding, “Only a vote for Likud will stop this.”
His main challenger, former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, leader of the Yashar party, has answered by staking out the same position. “There is no Palestinian state, and under a government we form, no Palestinian state will be established,” Eisenkot wrote on X in August, after Ra’am party leader Mansour Abbas called on Israel and the United States to recognize a Palestinian state. Days later, Eisenkot told Channel 13, “I am against the establishment of a Palestinian state,” adding, “I have never said that the solution is two states for two peoples.” Eisenkot has gone on the attack, accusing Netanyahu of having spoken in favor of two states “dozens of times,” a reference to Netanyahu’s 2009 Bar-Ilan University speech endorsing a demilitarized Palestinian state.
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.”
The Merit of Ishmael
The answer begins with Ishmael’s circumcision. The Bible records that Abraham circumcised his son Ishmael at the age of 13, on the same day Abraham himself entered the covenant of brit milah, circumcision (Genesis 17:25-26). Isaac was circumcised at eight days old, as the Bible commands for Abraham’s descendants. Ishmael, though he received the covenant late, still received it.
The Zohar (II:32a), the central text of Jewish mysticism, teaches that this act earned Ishmael’s descendants a reward. According to the Zohar, the heavenly prince of Ishmael stood before God and argued that one who is circumcised deserves a portion in God’s name. God granted Ishmael’s descendants a portion below, in the Holy Land. The reward came with a limit built into it. The Zohar explains that Ishmael’s descendants perform circumcision without priah, the uncovering that completes the commandment, and that their circumcision is therefore incomplete, or “empty.” As a result, the Zohar teaches, the children of Ishmael would rule the Holy Land for a long time while it lay empty, and they would hold back the children of Israel from returning to their place until the merit of Ishmael’s circumcision was used up.
Rabbi Baruch Abuhatzeira, son of the renowned Moroccan sage the Baba Sali, taught that the reward was precisely measured. As he explained in a 2016 interview with Israel365 News, God granted Ishmael 100 years of rule in the Land of Israel for each year he lived before his circumcision. “God gave Ishmael 100 years for every year until he was circumcised; 1,300 years to rule in the land of Israel,” Rabbi Abuhatzeira said, declaring that the period of Ishmael’s rule is over. Rabbi Pinchas Winston has taught the same calculation, describing a reward granted for a land that was empty of its people.
The timeline matches history. Muslim armies conquered Jerusalem in 638 CE. For roughly 1,300 years, the land remained under the rule of the descendants of Ishmael, through a succession of caliphates and empires, while the Jewish people lived in exile and the land lay desolate. In 1948, the State of Israel was reborn, and the land that had been empty began to fill again with the children of Israel returning home.
The Bible described Ishmael’s character before he was born. The angel told Hagar:
“Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son; and thou shalt call his name Ishmael, because the LORD hath heard thy affliction. And he shall be a wild ass of a man: his hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the face of all his brethren.” (Genesis 16:11-12)
The Hebrew phrase translated as “a wild ass of a man” is pere adam. The name Ishmael, Yishmael, means “God will hear.” The midrash Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer (chapter 32) teaches that the name points to the end of days, when God will hear the cry of the Jewish people over what the sons of Ishmael will do to them, as Israel365 News reported in its coverage of the riots driving France’s Jews toward aliyah, immigration to Israel.
An Expired Reward
According to the Zohar, Ishmael’s claim on the land was always conditional. It applied to a land empty of Jews, and it was measured to run out. Today the land is no longer empty. Nearly half the world’s Jews live in the Land of Israel, more than half a million Jews live in Judea and Samaria, and Jews pray openly on the Temple Mount.
The Palestinian state is an attempt to extend a reward that has expired, to keep the land in the hands of Ishmael’s descendants after the merit that granted it has been spent. The Fatah official on Palestine TV described the goal plainly: a state whose purpose is “the disappearance of the Israeli entity.” The Israelis who reject that state by a margin of more than two to one have reached the same conclusion the Zohar recorded centuries ago. Ishmael’s time in the Land of Israel was a reward with an end date, and the end has arrived.
