For peace, Palestinians must accept Israel as a sovereign Jewish state - opinion

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong recently declared that there is no peace without two states, a formulation that has guided Western diplomacy for years and continues to shape the policies of governments that still treat a Palestinian state as the indispensable key to quiet.Living in Mitzpe Yeriho, 20 minutes from Jerusalem, I have spent more than a decade watching this assumption collide with the daily realities of security, housing, and the lives of families who simply want to raise children without the constant threat of attack.The premise rests on the hope that Palestinian leadership will one day accept the permanence of Israel and redirect its energies toward building a functioning society of its own, yet the historical record shows a consistent preference for rejecting compromise and returning to violence.Palestinians have chosen violence over peace for decades, refusing every major offer of statehood that was placed before them. The 1947 United Nations partition plan, which would have created an Arab state alongside a Jewish one, was rejected by Arab leaders who launched war instead.Decades later, at Camp David in 2000, Yasser Arafat walked away from a proposal that included a capital in east Jerusalem and the large majority of the West Bank, and the subsequent second intifada killed thousands.