Governor Romney’s views on the Palestinians are being set down as “shameful” by a writer for the Daily Beast because — wait for it — they are in sync with the elected prime minister of the Jewish State. That is the scandal Peter Beinart perceives in the remarks the governor was taped making to those donors at Florida. The “most intriguing part of Romney’s remarks,” Mr. Beinart writes, “come at the end, when he confesses, ‘There’s just no way [to achieve peace]. And so what you do is you say, “You move things along the best way you can.” You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem … We kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.’”

Wonders Mr. Beinart: “What kind of ‘somehow, something’ could Romney have in mind?” It is, he writes, “hard to believe it’s the two-state solution, since keeping alive that option for future years would require curbing the Israeli settlement growth that is rapidly foreclosing the possibility of a viable Palestinian state. And Romney has zero interest in doing that. More likely, Romney is alluding to ideas that have long surfaced on the Israeli right: that one day Egypt will take the Gaza Strip off Israel’s hands, and that Jordan, with its Palestinian majority, will eventually take responsibility for the Palestinians of the West Bank (while leaving Israel with most of the West Bank’s land). The most recent proponent of such a vision is rising Likud star Danny Danon, whose new book proposing a ‘three-state solution’ (Israel, Jordan, Egypt) enjoys blurbs from Mike Huckabee and Glenn Beck.”

We wouldn’t want to detract from the glory of Mr. Danon or Governor Huckabee or Messrs. Beck or Beinart or, for that matter, Governor Romney. Let us just note that the notion that there might be a strategy other than the two-state or one-state concepts was aired in an editorial called “The Three State Solution” that was issued in these columns in June of 2007. At the time, the editorial noted, there was a rush to marshal international support for a longtime aide to Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, whose “government,” we reckoned then as now, “has no legitimacy.” Not, we noted, that the Hamas regime at Gaza had legitimacy either, being formed, as it was, by an Iranian backed terrorist organization.

A better strategy, we suggested, would be to “pursue — or at least explore — a three-state solution.” The idea we sketched would be that “at least parts of Gaza are turned over to Egypt” and the Palestinian Arab areas of the West Bank that are not necessary for Israel’s security or part of its religious patrimony could be turned over to Jordan. Both Jordan and Egypt, we noted, at least have peace treaties with Israel. That was more than five years ago, and the idea didn’t go anywhere. Since then, President Mubarak’s regime in Egypt has been overthrown, and a new, Islamist regime is consolidating its power. It’s one of those tricks that history so often has up her capacious sleeves. Meantime it’s nice to discover, in Governor Romney, at least one presidential candidate who, in private as well as public, is on roughly the same wavelength as the elected leadership in Jerusalem.