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Early in the Oslo peace process, the richest local Palestinian and friend of Yasser Arafat, Munib al-Masri, took a helicopter ride with Arafat over the West Bank.

“I told him how easy we could make five, six, seven towns here; we could absorb a lot of people here; and have the right of return for the refugees,” al-Masri later recalled to the writer David Samuels. “If you have good intentions and you say you want to reach a solution, we could do it. I said, if you have money and water, it could be comparable to Israel, this piece of land.”

What would it take to build a Palestine “comparable” to its Israeli neighbor? “With three hundred, four hundred million dollars we could have built Palestine in ten years,” al-Masri lamented. “Waste, waste, waste.”

Waste, indeed. Samuels notes that according to the International Monetary Fund’s conservative estimate, Arafat himself siphoned off at least $900 million from Palestinian Authority funds -- and that does not include kickbacks -- between 1995 and 2000.

In five years Arafat stole three Palestines worth of money, and today the Palestinian people are poorer, angrier, and rudderless. So we can debate whether or not the establishment of a Palestinian state in the near future in the West Bank is realistic.

Or can we?

Media pundits are in quite a tizzy because of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s recent statement in Israel that a Palestinian state in the West Bank “I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic.”

Predictably, here’s how Foreign Policy’s Annie Lowrey, later echoed by Newsweek, reacted: “At a junket hosted by a far-right Israeli religious group, [Huckabee] rejected a two-state solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict.”

The Jerusalem Post blew the story too, leading off its report by stating “Huckabee advocated for a one-state solution” and then failed to back up its interpretation within the story. (Huckabee explicitly endorsed the establishment of a Palestinian state.) Spencer Ackerman at the Washington Independent says Huckabee is “advocating the transfer of millions of Palestinians from the West Bank (and, who knows, maybe Gaza) to a different Arab state.” This, Ackerman says, is “monstrous.”

JTA’s Ron Kampeas ponders whether Huckabee “might be buying into the old ‘Jordan is Palestine’ plan.” Kampeas dismisses this because the idea is one that “no serious actor, least of all the Jordanians, takes seriously.”

Well, retired Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, one author of the “Jordanian Option” and the former head of the Israeli National Security Council, IDF soldier for 33 years, and head of the IDF’s Strategic Planning Branch, is probably slightly more serious than Kampeas, a former intrepid wire reporter for the Associated Press, paints him.

So, is Huckabee suggesting population transfer? Is he suggesting that Jordan annex the West Bank? The answers are no and no -- as we have witnessed for decades, no Palestinians need be removed from the West Bank for there not to be a Palestine, which is the current situation. Palestinians in the West Bank tend to stay put every year, and every year there is no Palestine.

Then what is behind the reaction? Why can’t a politician say that the establishment of a terror-sponsoring, corrupt kleptocracy in Israel’s backyard is possibly unrealistic? It would seem to be an exercise in tautology.

In August 2007, while running for the Republican presidential nomination, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani attracted a similar response for stating the obvious. “It is not in the interest of the United States, at a time when it is being threatened by Islamist terrorists, to assist the creation of another state that will support terrorism,” he said.

As with Huckabee, Giuliani’s critics -- I among them, by the way, because I thought it an unwise statement, but not factually wrong -- were unable to show him to be incorrect, or even illogical. It seems he and Huckabee committed Kinsley’s Gaffe: when a politician accidentally speaks the truth.

Whether realistic or not, is the creation of a Palestinian state even the solution to the conflict? No, write Hussein Agha and Robert Malley in the New York Times. Malley is no right-winger; he was an advisor to then-candidate Barack Obama before it was revealed he was meeting in a professional capacity with Hamas. On Aug. 10, Malley and Agha wrote “The Two-State Solution Doesn’t Solve Anything” -- uh-oh -- because Israel’s founding is the problem, not the lack of a Palestinian state next to it.

“In [the Palestinians’] eyes, to accept Israel as a Jewish state would legitimize the Zionist enterprise that brought about their tragedy,” Malley and Agha write. “It would render the Palestinian national struggle at best meaningless, at worst criminal. Their firmness on the principle of their right of return flows from the belief that the 1948 war led to unjust displacement and that, whether or not refugees choose or are allowed to return to their homes, they can never be deprived of that natural right.”

There was no outcry after the op-ed ran. Perhaps Israel’s legitimacy is up for debate in perpetuity, while that of a nonexistent Palestinian one is untouchable. It would be a shame to force such dishonesty on our political leaders.

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.