AFTER Pope Leo XIV met with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last month, he reiterated what has become one of the most familiar refrains in international diplomacy: The “only solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he told reporters, is the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The pope has said as much before, as have other popes before him and an endless array of presidents, secretaries of state, prime ministers, foreign ministries, UN officials, international organizations, think tanks, academic luminaries, and prominent journalists.

But political doctrines, unlike articles of faith, are supposed to be judged by how they work in the real world. And the doctrine of the “two-state solution” has been tested repeatedly for nearly a century — and it has failed every time.

Indeed, if anything has been made clearer by the horrors of Oct. 7, 2023, and their aftermath, it is that the world’s unshakable attachment to this formula owes more to unexamined faith than to historical fact.

For decades the belief in a two-state solution as the key to peace in the Middle East has been all but unchallenged in policy circles. Diplomats recite it reflexively, as if the mere expression of “two states for two peoples” evokes a truth so self-evident that no rational mind could fail to see it. The historian Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to Washington from 2009 to 2013, recalled in an essay a comment made by President Obama’s national security advisor, General Jim Jones, shortly after taking office: “If God had appeared in front of the president and said he could do one thing on the planet,” Jones declared, “it would be the two-state solution.”

Even divine intervention might not succeed. Because time and again, the Arabs of Palestine have been offered the chance to establish a state of their own side by side with Israel. Time and again they have spurned it.

Over the past century, every serious attempt to partition the land between Jews and Arabs has followed the same script. In 1937, when Palestine was still a British possession, a royal commission headed by Lord Peel recommended a two-state solution on the grounds that only “partition offers a chance of ultimate peace.” Zionist leaders reluctantly accepted the proposal; Arab leaders, more intent on preventing Jewish sovereignty in Palestine than achieving a state for themselves, rejected it out of hand and launched a violent uprising. A decade later, the United Nations tried anew, endorsing a plan to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Again the Jews accepted. Again the Arabs answered with war.

That has been the undeviating pattern. After Israel’s victory in 1967, Jerusalem was ready to exchange land for permanent peace with its neighbors — “everything is negotiable,” Foreign Minister Abba Eban said. The Arab League’s response: “No peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel.”

At Camp David in 2000, Israel offered the Palestinians nearly all of Gaza, most of the West Bank, and a capital in East Jerusalem. Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, walked away and ignited a bloody intifada. And when Israel proposed an even more sweeping two-state solution in 2008, Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas flatly turned it down.

The animating purpose of the Palestinian national movement has never been to construct a sovereign Palestinian homeland. It has been to negate a sovereign Jewish one. That is why no “two-state solution” has ever come to fruition, notwithstanding the earnest backing of popes, presidents, and pundits.

To well-meaning outsiders, “two states for two peoples” may sound like an ideal basis on which to establish lasting peace. But Palestinian strategists have always said that any such formula can only be a temporary — a phase in their inevitable march to a single Palestinian state extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

That explains why Mahmoud Abbas and other Palestinian Authority figures insist that any future Palestine must be explicitly Arab and Muslim, yet categorically refuse to acknowledge Israel as the Jewish state. They aren’t quibbling over terminology. They are denying that Jews have any legitimate connection to the land at all. A two-state settlement presupposes mutual recognition and a permanent end to conflict; Palestinian leaders have never been prepared to grant either.

If all this wasn’t evident before, it is inescapable now. The reaction to Oct. 7 has exposed — in the streets of Western capitals, on university campuses, across social media — how many of Israel’s loudest critics never believed in a two-state solution at all. While Pope Leo speaks of two nations living side by side in peace, the rallying cry that has swept the globe is not “two states for two peoples” but “from the river to the sea.” The old formula of partition has vanished from the vocabulary of the international protest movement. In its place is a strident call for a single Palestine in which Israel — and Israelis — have no place.

Against that backdrop, the pope’s stubborn invocation of the two-state formula sounds almost quaint.

Every time a serious two-state solution has been proposed, Arab leaders have rejected it and resorted to violence instead.

It also sounds oddly selective. Pope Leo never speaks this way about any other conflict. He doesn’t urge Turkey to accept the right of the Kurds to sovereignty in a state of their own, or press Pakistan to establish one for a Baloch homeland. He doesn’t tell Spain that peace and justice require a two-state solution for Catalonia. Only Israel is repeatedly urged to shrink itself for the benefit of a hostile neighbor that has never shown the least interest in peaceful coexistence.

That asymmetry suggests not a consistent moral principle but a reluctance to acknowledge the unique vulnerability of the world’s only Jewish state. Pope Leo speaks from a moral vocation, and his yearning for peace is doubtless sincere. But moral authority entails a moral obligation: to identify clearly the behavior that makes peace impossible.

The Palestinian Authority and Hamas glorify murderers in schools and public squares. They pay stipends to terrorists who kill Israelis. They indoctrinate children in the most grotesque antisemitic libels. They have made it clear for decades that they are irredeemably hostile to peacefully coexisting with a Jewish state. These are not minor obstacles. Calling for a “two-state solution” without addressing them head on is not moral clarity; it is moral evasion.

Peace will never come from pretending that both sides seek it equally. It will come only when the world compels the Palestinians to renounce their war against the Jewish state and accept its legitimacy at last. Until that happens, no map, no summit, and no diplomatic mantra will bring peace. What is needed is not another repetition of the two-state catechism, but the honesty to acknowledge why it has failed.