For over a decade, elite opinion in the West has been warning that Israel, through its actions, is slowly making the two-state solution impossible, or that the “window” for such an arrangement is “closing” unless Israel takes some dramatic action. More recently, we have heard that the U.S., by moving its embassy to that part of Jerusalem that has been under Israeli control since 1948, has somehow made Palestinian statehood less likely. These dire warnings omit the simple fact that it was Palestinian leaders who have prevented the emergence of a Palestinian state, as Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf write:

Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), walked away . . . from Ehud Barak’s [July 2000] proposal at Camp David, and he walked away from President Clinton’s proposal which set the parameters for peace.

The overriding Palestinian demand, more important than the explicit demand of statehood, has always been the innocuous sounding right of return—the demand for millions of Palestinians, descendants of those who fled or were expelled in the 1948 war, to be recognized as possessing an individual “right” to settle inside the state of Israel. . . . What this means is that when Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, the [current] head of the Palestinian Authority, spoke of their support for a two-state solution, they actually envisioned two Arab states: one in the West Bank and Gaza, and another one to replace Israel.

The refusal on the part of the international community to engage these simple truths is telling. In 1947, the British foreign minister Ernst Bevin summarized the essence of the conflict in the British Mandate territory as boiling down to the fact that the Jews want a state in the land, and the Arabs want the Jews not to have a state in the land. He has only been proven right ever since. More than the Palestinians wanted a state for themselves, they still want the Jewish people not to have their own state in the land, in any borders.

Here at Mosaic, we’ve published quite a lot about many Arab states, but one that’s barely received mention is Oman, located at the southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula. The sultanate has stayed out of the recent conflicts of the Midde East, and is known to have sub-rosa relations with Israel; high-ranking Israeli officials have visited the country clandestinely, or at least with little fanfare. For precisely this reason, Oman has held itself out as an intermediary and host for negotiations. The then-secret talks that proceeded the Obama administration’s fateful nuclear negotiations with Iran took place in Oman. Ari Heistein explains the similar, and troubling, role Muscat is playing with regard to the Houthis in neighboring Yemen:

For more than three decades, Oman has served in the role of mediator for the resolution of disputes in Yemen. . . . Oman allows for a Houthi office in the capital, Muscat, reportedly numbering around 100 personnel, to operate from its territory for the purported function of diplomatic engagement. It is worth asking why the Houthis require such a large delegation for such limited engagement and whether there is any real value to engaging with the Houthis.

Thus far, efforts to negotiate with the Houthis have yielded very limited outcomes, primarily resulting in concessions from the Saudi-led coalition and partial de-escalation when it has served the terror group’s interests. Rarely, if ever, have the Houthis fully abided by their commitments after signing off on international agreements. Presumably, such meager results could have been achieved through other constellations that are less beneficial to the recently redesignated foreign terrorist organization.

In contrast, the malign and destabilizing Houthi activities in Oman are significant. They include: shipment of Iranian and Chinese weapons components [and] military-grade communications equipment via Oman to the Houthis; the smuggling of senior officials in and out of Houthi-controlled areas via Oman; and financial activities conducted by Houthi shell corporations to consolidate the regime’s control over Yemen’s economy and subsidize the regime.

With this in mind, there is good reason to suspect that the Houthi presence in Oman does more harm than good.