Writing in the opinion pages of American Thinker on September 10, 2026, Deborah C. Tyler argues that the push for a Palestinian state rests on a false premise — and that “the ‘Palestinians’ will remain stateless because no nation can grow upon such a poisonous stalk.”
Tyler opens by sketching what she calls a predictable cycle: major attacks by Arabs against Israeli civilians, followed by what she describes as open or covert jubilation among a left-wing, Islamophilic world at the murder of Jews; then a period of quiet; and finally a renewed call for statehood for what she terms the “victimized, dispossessed Arabs of Gaza and Judaea-Samaria.” Following the October 7, 2023 attacks — which she characterizes as the most barbaric of all — Tyler contends the world has now entered that final stage again.
Two arguments against statehood
Tyler lays out what she calls two insurmountable psychological reasons that these Arab groups have no path to stable, democratic statehood. The first, she says, is widely understood: the Arabs of Gaza and Judaea-Samaria have never wanted to be a sovereign state. Providing the world with a pretext to hate and murder Jews has instead been a lucrative occupation, she writes. Before 2023, she says, Gazans enjoyed a comfortable, economically secure coastal lifestyle — with almost no one (she cites a figure of 0.2%) living in tents, first-cousin marriages making dating easier, and an extremely high birthrate. Hamas, she argues, functioned as a satisfactory “thugocrat” enforcer for that population, and she describes the current diplomatic push toward peace as a “fraud” that replenishes that lifestyle.
She notes that the Hebrew word “hamas” means violence, cruelty, or injustice, while in Arabic it is often described as an acronym for Islamic Resistance. Either way, she writes, the militia that Arabs elected two decades ago was “a coiled cobra digging its nest and waiting to strike Israel, not a functional government,” and she asserts that these Arab populations have shown no desire to trade the “profitable solidarity of obsessive hate” for a self-supporting democracy.
The second reason, which Tyler considers more profound, is what she describes as the forest of Islam rather than the individual trees. In her telling, no overwhelmingly Islamic nation has achieved the freedoms and opportunities of a modern democratic state, and many Islamic states cannot properly be called states — describing them as ongoing conflict zones that periodically convulse into new, illegitimate rulerships. Even the more stable ones, she writes, are repressive enough to fall short of modern nation-state status. Tyler argues the Arab rulers pay extravagantly for death to Israel as a distraction from their own abuses, and that the Arabs of Gaza and Judaea-Samaria have submitted to the same kind of autocratic, repressive government that she says characterizes more than 90% of Islamic nations. No constitutional democracy has emerged, she argues, because their religion has yet to support the moral and philosophical framework of self-determination and unalienable rights necessary to sustain one.
Citing a population figure of 4,780,978 for Gaza that is 97.5% Muslim, Tyler asserts that no nation with such a large Muslim majority has a stable government directed by written law offering separation of powers within a framework of universal justice. In her view, that kind of constitutional republic — or its figurehead-monarchy equivalent — descends from only one religion: Christianity.
The Puritan comparison
To make the point concrete, Tyler reaches back four centuries. She invokes Christian refugees persecuted in their native land who made hazardous sea voyages to Massachusetts in search of religious freedom. She recalls that roughly 100 Puritans separated into the Connecticut colony and soon after composed a plan of self-governance that separated governmental powers and granted voting rights to all freemen without a religious test.
The “religious refugees now misnamed ‘Palestinians,'” she writes, could have done the same thing. Nothing stopped them from convening a constitutional convention to establish a law-abiding sovereign nation with religious tolerance and its own distinct economy. In her assessment, it is their religion that renders them incapable of tolerance and easily exploited, and she concludes that the Puritan refugees of four hundred years ago were more politically advanced than the Arabs of Gaza and Judaea-Samaria are today.
She offers a list of what she describes as every constitutional republic or monarchy more than a century old — the United Kingdom, San Marino, the United States, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, New Zealand, Argentina, Canada, Luxembourg, Iceland, Switzerland, Tonga, Australia, and Mexico — noting that each was established in a predominantly Christian country.
A survey of abuse reports
Tyler then turns to human rights documentation, writing that major international organizations cite torture; cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment; extrajudicial killing, arrest, and detention; restricted expression; and mistreatment of women and children — including the use of child soldiers — as recurring abuses. She lists 28 countries with populations that are 90% or more Muslim and asserts that, according to the U.S. State Department, every one violates these human rights standards. Her roster of alleged violations spans the Maldives (non-Muslims barred from citizenship; same-sex activity punished by years in prison and lashes), Morocco, Mauritania, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iran, Tunisia, Yemen, Algeria, Iraq, Niger, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkey, Oman, Djibouti, Libya, Senegal, Pakistan (which she notes punishes “defiling” the Prophet as a capital offense), Mali, Bangladesh, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Gambia, and Guinea.
The core of her argument returns to national purpose. The “Palestinians,” she writes, have no national constitution, but since the inception of what she calls Palestinianism they have had a singular national goal: the hatred and destruction of Israel. That, in her view, is why they will remain stateless. She also points to Iranians attacking other Islamic nations as evidence that self-devourment is the price of a national purpose built on hatred and violence toward Israel.
A closing qualifier
Tyler allows a note of historical humility at the end. Christianity, she observes, has a six-hundred-year head start on Islam, and six hundred years ago Christianity was, in her words, a hot mess — St. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, along with many labeled heretics and later “witches,” while the Spanish Inquisition and Europe’s religious wars loomed. It is possible, she suggests, that God will in coming years “turn His key” for Muslim nations and advance them beyond violence and institutionalized barbarity, as she believes He did for Christians.
Tyler’s essay is a polemic rather than a reported news account, and its central claims — about the intentions of Palestinians, the compatibility of Islam with constitutional government, and the uniformity of human rights abuses across Muslim-majority states — are contested and contested sharply by critics of her position. It appears in an opinion venue that presents itself as a home for conservative commentary, and Tyler closes by inviting readers to follow her work on Substack, where she publishes a piece titled “Jew Derangement Syndrome is not Your Grandfather’s Antisemitism.”
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/why-the-palestinians-are-stateless/