Field Dossier: The Tollgate State

Originally published on Substack on 2026-06-26.

Shabbat shalom, friends.

There is a state that has held up the largest diplomatic prize in the Middle East for years and years. And, yet, it does not exist.

It has no army. It has no borders. It has no capital it properly governs. No government that can collect the trash in the cities it nominally runs. It has never held the contiguous territory a state is made from, and on every trend running it never will.

And it is, this week, the most powerful polity in the region. Powerful like a tollgate is powerful. Which is that everyone who wants to pass has to stop and pay.

Saudi Arabia calls the gate, in its view, as an irreversible pathway to a Palestinian state. And it has held the line for two years that there is no normalization with Israel without one. Not a peace treaty. Not a security arrangement. A state, irreversibly on its way, before the kingdom will shake a hand it was reportedly ready to shake the morning of October 6.

The condition may read like a step in a process. It functions like a fee. But that fee can never be paid off, because no one with the power to satisfy it intends to build what it demands.

That is the whole of the argument, so let me state it without the diplomacy. The Palestinian state is worth more to the people invoking it unbuilt than it would ever be worth built. A state that gets built can fail. It can be voted out. It can sign the wrong paper and forfeit the leverage its own existence was supposed to confer.

A state that is never built does none of that.

It sits at the head of the road, collecting, and every party — Riyadh, Paris, Ramallah — keeps it shut.

The argument over one state or two was always the wrong place to look. The operative fact is a state held permanently in the conditional tense, taxing a country that keeps paying for a building no one means to finish.

The State No One Means to Build

The Palestinian Authority cannot govern the ground it already holds. For an illustrative example, in December 2024 the PA sent its own security forces into Jenin to break the armed factions operating there. An operation it called Protect the Homeland, the fiercest inter-Palestinian fighting since the 2007 loss of Gaza. The factions held. The truce collapsed inside two days. The PA retreated, and the Israel Defense Forces went in in January 2025 with Operation Iron Wall because the Authority's own effort was not nearly enough. A government that cannot enter one of its own cities without losing the firefight is merely a municipality with a flag.

The Authority has not held an election since 2006, dissolved its parliament in 2007, and is run by a 90-year-old president who is without a mandate any voter has renewed in two decades.

When Mahmoud Abbas finally named a successor last October, the decree pointed to a succession clause that designates the speaker of the parliament Abbas himself disbanded.

And the donors keep paying while doing the one thing that should disqualify it as a partner in anything. The Authority continues to route money to imprisoned terrorists and the families of dead ones straight. It has lied and told Washington it had scrapped the program. The payments did not stop. The Authority got caught out doing it. They changed the names on the paperwork. But the pay-to-slay program remains.

Those payments rose to around 214 million dollars in 2025 from 144 million the year before. The only other difference is that it is run now through a relabeled fund and the PLO's martyrs' foundation so that the PA can say it's not doing it. [It's also important to remember that the PLO was the precursor to the PA, not some sort of different organization altogether.[

A government that finds new plumbing to keep paying its people to murder Jews and Israelis is protecting the one budget line it treats as untouchable.

Then there is the sponsor. Riyadh demands an irreversible pathway and builds none. It does not fund the Authority into competence, does not lean on Hamas to surrender the veto, does not put its own capital behind the state it demands as the condition of its signature.

Saudi Arabia's foreign minister calls the precondition a strategic principle, not a bargaining tactic, and the kingdom holds the principle and never breaks ground on the project.

A dozen Western capitals recognized "Palestine" last September, France first among the so-called major powers. What changed on the ground was… nothing. No territory transferred. No government stood up. No border moved. A hundred and fifty governments now recognize a state that has no functioning floor under it, and the recognition is, by the honest admission of the people casting the votes, mostly symbolic.

It is a flag. A communique. A mere tally in a chamber the territory in question whose vote-casting politicians have by and large never set foot in.

The body that would govern cannot.

The sponsor that demands will not build.

The recognizers who vote deliver paper.

The maps from 1947 and 2000 and 2008 were offered and refused. The refusals a matter of record, history laying a state on the table and the Palestinian leadership pushing it back time and time again.

What sits at the gate now is different in kind, a state the very parties invoking it are working, each for its own reason, to keep from ever being born. The non-delivery?Unanimous. The next question is why unanimity like that holds.

A Shut Gate Pays Better Than an Open One

A pathway that is genuinely irreversible cannot also be conditional, because the moment you attach a condition that can slow or block it, the irreversibility is gone, and the moment you remove every such condition, you have promised a state regardless of what the recipients do. The phrase resolves to one of two useless things. Either it means nothing, or it means a state no behavior can forfeit. The drafters purposefuly chose the version that means nothing — a condition that means nothing is a condition that never has to be met and never stops being owed.

Let's consider what Riyadh says in private and what it says in public. The crown prince has told a Trump ally he could recognize Israel today, while the Saudi foreign ministry holds the public line that there is no recognition without an irreversible pathway. A sovereign who could say yes today, and instead keeps a condition he knows will not be met, has chosen the meter over the handshake.

Of course, a built state is a liability to its own sponsors. It can be governed badly and embarrass the capitals that midwifed it. It can hold an election and return Hamas, as the last one did in 2006. Or even worse (a likelier outcome). It can sign a normalization deal of its own and spend the leverage its backers were saving. The unbuilt state, however, fails at nothing. Precisely because it does nothing. It cannot govern badly. It cannot vote wrong. Cannot be caught out. It is the perfect asset. All leverage, no exposure, permanently in the conditional, available to be invoked by anyone and answerable to no one.

This is why the recognition campaign keeps moving even though nothing it touches comes closer to existing. The machine does not run on anything Palestinians do. It runs on its own European constituency. On parliaments that need the vote at home. On a foreign-policy class that has staked a generation of careers on a two-state outcome — something the facts buried on October 7.

Recognize the building, and the constituency is satisfied. Finish the building, and the constituency has nothing left to recognize. The incentive runs toward the flag and away from the foundation.

A lot of people have come to the same conclusion that the Palestinian state cannot be built. I would go a degree or two beyond that conclusion, however. The shell is empty because no one can fill it. Fair. But an empty shell that everyone agrees cannot be filled would be discarded. This one is curated. It is kept empty, restated, recognized, conditioned, and invoked, because empty is the configuration that pays. A corpse can be a deliverable. A state held deliberately at the threshold of birth, never quite delivered, is something better than a deliverable. It never depreciates, because it never has to perform.

Call it what it is, then. A veto stops an act Israel is trying to commit, and the vetoes have already had their brief. A toll is the quieter thing. It charges whether or not Israel reaches for anything, keyed to no single decision Jerusalem could make and to a state that is never built. A tollgate state: a polity whose entire power is its refusal to come into being, parked across the one road every regional transaction has to travel, charging everyone who approaches and earning the most from the ones who wait longest. Israel waits longest. Israel pays the most. And the parties collecting the toll have arranged their affairs so that the day the gate opens is the day they all stop getting paid.

Who Collects at the Gate

Three parties stand at the gate and bill through it, and the thing to see is that not one of them wants it open. Each extracts a different rent, and each rent depends on the state staying unbuilt. Trace the money and the unanimity starts looking less like a coincidence more like a business.

Riyadh banks the most elegant rent. Namely, Saudi Arabia wants the American defense treaty, civil-nuclear cooperation, and the advanced arms. And it wants all three without the domestic cost of normalizing with Israel while Gaza burns. The Palestinian-state precondition delivers exactly that. It lets the kingdom hold the prize hostage to a condition Israel cannot meet, while the kingdom collects the American goods on a separate track. When Washington moved to sell the Saudis F-35s last November, Riyadh took the jets and committed to nothing. The Saudi-American relationship no longer depends on Israel at all — the technology cooperation, the security assurances, the high-end sales were all front-loaded without a single normalization commitment in return. The precondition is the kingdom's alibi, a way to keep the door politely closed while pocketing everything that was supposed to be behind it. An open gate would force a yes-or-no on normalization. A shut gate lets Riyadh have the benefits of yes and the cover of no. Indefinitely.

Europe banks a recurring trigger, an evergreen reason to act on Israel that refreshes itself every time Jerusalem builds. The recognition cascade is the visible end of it, and recognition is cheap and renewable. But recognition is also the ignition for the expensive end. A year ago this month, five governments — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom — imposed travel bans and asset freezes on two sitting Israeli cabinet ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, on the stated ground that their conduct rejected the two-state outcome. That September, the recognition wave crested, with France pairing its own recognition to an entry ban and an airspace closure.

Smotrich answered the recognitions by accelerating the E1 corridor, the building plan between Maale Adumim and Jerusalem that severs the north-south line of any contiguous Palestinian territory, on the explicit logic that there is nothing to recognize. And E1 became, in turn, the next thing to sanction.

The European Council in just this month called on Israel to reverse the corridor and warned European businesses not to bid for its construction contracts, while 440 former officials pressed Brussels to move from words to visa bans and commercial restrictions.

Recognition delivers no state. The non-state provokes Israeli construction. The construction triggers the next sanction. And the cycle resets, each turn raising what Israel owes, none of it requiring a Palestinian state to actually exist.

The Authority banks the humblest rent and the most revealing one. Relevance.

A Palestinian state that arrived would be governed by someone, and on present evidence that someone would not be Abbas or his designated speaker-of-a-disbanded-parliament. The PA's institutional interest is the permanent candidacy for statehood, the standing as the recognized address of a nation-in-waiting, which keeps the donor money flowing and the chair occupied. Democracy-theater performed for foreign audiences. The elections never come. The "reforms" are never implemented.

The Authority is an applicant that has discovered the application pays better than the job. Its relevance is a function of the gate staying shut, because the day a real state is built someone will ask the Authority to actually run it. It won't go well. For over two decades now it has proven ad nauseam that it will fail the test.

Every one of those holdings evaporates the instant the gate swings open and a real state stands on the other side. The toll is the product the process exists to manufacture. Which leaves the only party at the gate with an interest in something other than the toll, and a bill it has been paying in a coin the other three do not have to spend.

Israel Pays in Gravel

Israel cannot clear the gate by consent, so it pays the toll on the ground. In administrative facts, one approval at a time. We have a name for this already: sovereignty by accumulation, the doctrine of building the reality first and arguing about the label later. What that doctrine looks like from inside this argument is a payment plan. Each administrative act is a coin dropped into a meter Israel cannot stop feeding.

The tools are the planning approvals and jurisdiction transfers that never need a foreign signature. In February 2023 the government handed Smotrich, as a minister inside the Defense Ministry, control of the Civil Administration's civilian functions in Area C, the land allocation and planning and construction and enforcement that decide what gets built and who builds it. He has used it.

The cabinet approved 34 new communities in a single session last year, the largest such approval in the country's history, raising the count of state-recognized communities from 69 to 103 and expanding the residential footprint by roughly half in one vote.

He unveiled a map applying Israeli sovereignty to 82 percent of Judea and Samaria in September 2025, leaving the Palestinian population centers as enclaves. The Knesset passed a motion endorsing sovereignty by 71 to 13 that July.

Both of those are statements of direction, the map a plan and the motion non-binding, and that is exactly the register the payment runs in: not the law, which would be taxed, but the gravel, which is free.

The Hebron episode this month is the whole mechanism compressed into forty-eight hours. Smotrich announced on June 16 that he had cancelled the Hebron Protocol, the 1997 agreement that split the city, and returned full authority to Israel. Within hours Israel's own Foreign Ministry contradicted the minister stating flatly that the Hebron Agreement had not been cancelled and that what had actually changed was a narrow transfer of planning and zoning authority over the Jewish community in the H2 sector and the heritage sites.

A minister claims annexation. The ministry walks it back to a zoning adjustment before the cable traffic cools. That distance between the claim and the act is the gravel doing its job. The administrative fact lands, the legal characterization stays deliberately contested, and the Jewish deed on the ground compounds while the diplomats argue about what to call it.

The formal act would convert a tolerated accumulation into the exact text the world has promised to punish. The administrative act draws a complaint and changes the map. Israel keeps choosing the map.

There are two facets that we need to hold simultaneously. Israel is itself refusing the state. It forecloses the state deliberately and builds the ground situation precisely to prevent any possibility of a Palestinian state taking shape.

So how is Israel both the party blocking the state and the party billed for its absence?

Because Israel and the collectors at the gate want the same outcome for opposite reasons. Yet only one of them pays for it.

Israel forecloses the state because it rejects the state on the merits and as a security catastrophe. Riyadh and Brussels and Ramallah keep the state pending because pending is profitable. The result they share is no state. The difference is who is charged for it. The sponsors collect a rent on the non-event. Israel pays a rent on the non-event. The cruelty of the arrangement is that Israel's own deepest preference is the very thing it is being made to pay for.

The settlement freeze and the deferral of formal annexation were once defensible as timing, the wise patience of a state that holds the right and is choosing its moment.

That read has expired. Timing as strategy and paralysis as strategy have become operationally indistinguishable, because the toll never clears, and a moment forever deferred for an act the structure guarantees will cost more tomorrow than today is a toll paid on the installment plan, forever, by a country that has confused the meter for a clock.

There is a version of postponement that works for Israel, where deferring its own sovereignty lets the facts accumulate untaxed. The Palestinian state runs the other version, postponed by everyone, and that deferral bills Israel where Israel's own postponement would have entrenched it.

A Chokepoint That Never Opens

The mechanism is not unique to this gate, and the closest cousin is running right now on the water, which is the cleanest way to see what makes the phantom version worse.

Tehran is administering the Strait of Hormuz as a tollbooth. The surrender was sold as reopening the strait. Iran reopened it on paper and tolls it in fact. With its stated public position that the waterway will not return to its pre-war status. A chokepoint everyone needs, declared open, quietly metered. The toll is real money on real cargo, and it is collected because the hull has to pass.

Hormuz is rent on a thing that exists. The strait is there, the water flows, the ships transit, and the toll is the surcharge Iran extracts for a passage that genuinely reopens, however grudgingly. There is a ceiling on that kind of toll, because it can be sailed around, escorted through, or eventually forced open. The phantom-state toll on the other hand has no such ceiling. Because it was never built and never will be.

The irreversible pathway is a paper promise. A Western-drafted framework that audit-fails the instant it touches a fact. The same as the ceasefire clauses and the verification annexes and the stabilization roadmaps.

The Conditional Tense Is the Asset

The argument the whole capital-city commentariat keeps having is whether the answer is one state or two. That argument assumes a state that resolves into one form or the other, but the useful condition is the one that resolves into neither. Two states, and Riyadh has to actually normalize or actually refuse. One state, and the recognition machine has nothing left to recognize.

Nations do not live by permission slips. We have said it about Jewish legitimacy. About the lie that Israel's existence is a license others grant and can revoke.

The Saudi precondition borrows the same logic for a narrower target, Israel's every regional transaction. The "irreversible pathway" is a permission slip the surrounding system has arranged never to sign, held just out of reach, a yes forever pending so that the asking never ends. It's rather absurd — a state that conducts its foreign policy by waiting for that slip has accepted that its normalizations, its trade, its standing in the region are things it must be granted rather than things it can build. The whole point of sovereignty is that you stop asking.

Scenarios: Whether the Gate Ever Opens

The honest forecast is that the gate stays shut. Every actor with a hand on it profits more from the toll than from any resolution, and the Israeli system's own deepest preference aligns with keeping the Palestinian state in the conditional. That is a remarkably stable equilibrium. The scenarios below are sorted by how much they disturb it, and most of them barely do.

The toll compounds. This is the base case and it is not close. The precondition holds, Riyadh restates it as principle, the recognition wave adds capitals, E1 draws fresh sanction threats, and Israel keeps paying in gravel and exposure while the gate never moves. Nothing about this requires anyone to act. It requires everyone to keep doing what already pays them, which is the easiest forecast in the business. The toll does not need a decision to continue. It needs only the absence of a decision.

A sponsor breaks ranks. This is the live exit and the reason the thesis is not a counsel of despair. A government can normalize with Israel below the waterline, the way Somaliland did, the way the conviction-based investment funds now forming do, deals that ask nothing of any Arab public and route entirely around the gate. Those are real and they are growing, and they prove the toll only binds where Israel agrees to queue. But they cap at the niche. The Berbera-style move buys a coastline, a fund, a discreet partner. It does not buy the Saudi grand bargain, which is the one prize Israel still chooses to seek at this particular counter, and so the big toll stays paid even as the small bypasses multiply. The exit is real. It is just narrow, and it leaves the main gate exactly where it stands.

Annexation forces the gate. Discount this hard. Israel formalizes what the gravel has already built, applies sovereignty in law rather than in planning memos, and the UAE makes good on its warning that annexation is the red line that ends the Accords, while Europe escalates from recognition to real sanction. The reason to discount it is that Israel has a standing revealed preference for the untaxed administrative fact over the taxed formal act, and the preference runs deep enough to outlast any one government. The system that chose the zoning transfer over the annexation declaration in Hebron this month will choose it again. The politics are noisy, the formal act is expensive. Low probability, and lower the closer it gets to a vote.

The cascade delivers a flag and no floor. More recognitions arrive, more capitals sign, and not one of them puts a government on the ground or moves a border. Each recognition raises what Israel owes without delivering anything the Palestinians could govern. This one is likely, because the recognition machine runs on its own domestic fuel and needs no Palestinian state to keep running. It is the toll compounding through Europe specifically, and it is the most probable single development of the next year because it is the cheapest for the people doing it.

The shell collapses. Live, and underrated. The Authority finally fails, the Abbas succession fractures, the Jenin loss of writ spreads to Nablus and Tulkarm, and there is no counterparty left even in theory. The instructive part is what happens to the toll, which is nothing. The gate does not open when the tenant dies. It loses its last pretense of a tenant and keeps charging, because the toll never depended on a real Palestinian state and was always a charge on the idea of one. A collapsed PA does not clear the precondition. It just removes the fig leaf and proves the gate was never really about the building.

The toll survives the election, survives the cascade, survives even the collapse of the only party that was ever supposed to walk through it.

There is a state that has held up the largest prize in the region for two years, and it does not exist, and its not existing is the most valuable thing about it to everyone except the country being charged for it. Israel did not lose the argument over one state or two. It is losing a different contest entirely, a contest it keeps entering by treating a tollgate as a negotiation, paying down a fee on a building that the people collecting the fee have arranged to keep forever under construction.

The state has decided not to decide, and the cost it declined to pay it has paid anyway — except the decision that matters was never Israel's. The cost is the rent the sponsors collect on a Palestinian state they will never allow to be built, billed to the one party that would actually have to live next to it.

The two ways off the meter are the only two that have ever existed. Build the relationships that ask no one's permission and pass no one's gate, the way Israel already does wherever possible. Or stop queuing at a counter engineered so the answer is always not yet. What Israel cannot keep doing is the thing it is doing now, which is paying, year after year, for the privilege of waiting at a gate that was built to never open.

— Uriel Zehavi · Editor, Israel Brief

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