Episode 178 Transcript: Getting to a Palestinian State, Part 2
Transcript of today's episode on what the Palestinians can do to create a Palestinian state
Today’s episode is about the Palestinians. It’s easy these days to twist words around, to take things out of context, to assume the worst interpretations of any particular statement. So let me say at the outset that when I talk about “the Palestinians,” I am not talking about every single Palestinian. I’m not talking about children, who are not responsible for the actions of adults. Just like Israelis and Jews and Americans and everyone else, any given Palestinian might represent a multitude of opinions. Nothing I’m saying here is intended to denigrate the Palestinian people. As I often say when I talk about things like terrorism and antisemitism, it’s not everyone, and it’s not everywhere, but it’s enough. In what we’re talking about today, Palestinian violence is a major driver of this conflict, historically and currently.
We talk about October 7 as the single worst attack on Israel since its founding in 1948. The flip side is that it was the single biggest victory for the Palestinians. Never has an Arab army or terrorist group either killed this many people nor penetrated this far into Israeli territory. Last year Palestinians were feeling ignored as Israel and the Arab states pursued diplomatic relations and a united front against Iran. Now look at the attention they’e getting. That’s why the latest poll has 71% of Palestinians saying that Hamas’ attack was the correct decision. When asked why, three-quarters say it was because it “revived international attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which could lead to increased recognition of Palestinian statehood.” Two-thirds of Gazans blame Israel for their suffering. Another 25% blame the United States. Only 9% of Gazans blame Hamas. Three months ago that number was 20%. And a majority of Gazans also say both that they expect Hamas to remain in control of Gaza after the war and that they want them to.
Yet. A few months ago only a third of Palestinians supported a two-state solution. That number is now up to 45%. All of that new support is coming from Palestinians in Gaza, where a majority there now say they support two states. So a slim majority of Palestinians everywhere still remain opposed to a two-state solution, but a majority in Gaza want one. And whereas 63% of Palestinians supported armed struggle to achieve their state back in December, now only 46% do, a number that fell in both the West Bank and Gaza. Still, a solid majority don’t think a two-state solution is practical anymore, and nearly three-fourths don’t think there will be a Palestinian state in the next five years.
Obviously, there is a lot going on here.
This is the second episode in a three-part series about getting to a Palestinian state. That is, what it will take from Israelis, Palestinians, and the rest of the world to make the two-state solution happen. I and many others maintain that an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel remains the best long-term resolution for a conflict that might not really have an actual solution. But plenty disagree with me on this one. The trick here is that this Palestinian state will need to be peaceful and stable, and not an outpost of Iran and a terrorist platform like Gaza. So I’m looking at this from the angle of Israel’s security. Without security, there can be no Palestinian state, no end to warfare, and no end to the occupation.
The problem is that creating a Palestinian state means that everyone will have to do things they really don’t want to do. Last week we looked at what Israel would have to give up. That includes giving up the ambition for Greater Israel — the effort to settle Jews on every inch of the biblical Land of Israel, which is the same land that the Palestinians would need to create a state. To arrest that process, Israel also needs to sideline the ultra right-wing extremists currently in power, in favor of a centrist or moderate-right government that will make the effort to gradually and safely reduce the occupation of the West Bank.
But as I said last time, Israel can’t make all these moves by itself. Israelis have learned the hard way that giving up territory means creating a platform for terrorism, and that relaxing their overwhelming military might for even a second opens the door to another October 7. Just as Israel needs to indicate to the Palestinians that there is a future end to the occupation, Palestinians need to indicate to Israel that there is an end to their own ambition: to push back the clock to 1948 by destroying Israel and getting rid of the Jews. This will require Palestinians to give up some of their most closely held values, in particular the right of return and the allegiance to armed struggle.
So that’s today’s episode. Big thanks Lynn from Portland, Oregon; Sarah from Mt. Lawley, Australia; and everyone else who donated recently. Very much appreciated. You, too, can donate at jewoughtaknow.com/donate, and while you’re there make sure to sign up for my mailing list to get a weekly newsletter from me with additional commentary on current events and Jewish history. So let’s get into today’s episode. I’m your host, Jason Harris, and this is Jew Oughta Know.
We often hear that the ball is squarely in Israel’s court to end the conflict. Israel, after all, is the stronger power. Israel is the one imposing the occupation on the Palestinians that fuels their radicalism. Israel has Gaza surrounded and blockaded. And thus it is Israel that has to make all the concessions: give up the occupation and get rid of the settlements. Then, goes the theory, the Palestinians will of course give up their violent resistance, since it will no longer be necessary. An editorial in The Economist writes, “Israelis are right that they have no partner for peace today, but they are best placed to break the cycle.”
I’m not sure that’s the case. Arab and Palestinian violence goes back decades before the occupation. For a hundred years now this violence has been the central component of a strategy rooted in rejection: rejection of the presence of sovereign Jews in exclusively Muslim lands, and then after 1948 the rejection of Israel as a legitimate state. Israel often points out that the Palestinians have rejected nearly every single offer of peace to end the conflict, even those offers that gave them 95% of what they wanted. The problem is that last 5% wasn’t on offer: the elimination of Israel all together. Palestinians don’t want an independent state not because they don’t want a state of their own, but because it means recognizing Israel as a legitimate one. And it means giving up their status as permanent refugees, as perennial victims of Israel entitled to armed struggle in the course of liberation.
And so if the question is how to break the cycle to move towards a Palestinian state, it’s not just Israel that has to make concessions. Palestinians have to reject their violent rejectionism. Israel has learned that giving up territory turns it into a terrorist platform. That’s the best argument for the occupation, and it’s not an unreasonable one. Palestinians have the responsibility to upend that dynamic — to show Israel that reducing the occupation and pulling back settlements does not just create space for terrorists to fill in. When Israel left Gaza in 2005, that was the Palestinians’ opportunity to demonstrate they could construct the beginnings of a peaceful, stable state living in cooperation with Israel. They failed. They have to own that failure.
I’m not saying that the occupation doesn’t fuel Palestinian anger, resentment, and violence. It does. There’s no excuse for settlers attacking Palestinians, or for instances of Israeli soldiers mistreating people. As I talked about last episode, Israel needs to do its part to reduce and then end the occupation, to get the army out of the daily lives of Palestinians. But Israel can’t do that in a vacuum. As long as there is violence, Israelis see the occupation as necessary for their defense. Israel can’t break the cycle if the Palestinians insist on filling every crack with violence.
For a hundred years now first Arabs and then the Palestinians have conducted a campaign of ceaseless violence against Jews and Israel. We can look back to the beginning of collective, organized Arab violence against the Jews, in the 1920s. Palestine then was under the control of the British, who had promised both Jews and Arabs independent states. The British allowed Jewish immigration into Palestine as part of that commitment. But even though Arabs, too, were pouring into Palestine, they were passionately opposed to Jewish immigration. They feared — rightfully so — that it was in the service of establishing a Jewish homeland. And what the Arabs realized back then was that violence could be successful in advancing their cause of curtailing that immigration.
The culmination of this was the Arab Revolt of 1936, an organized effort of strikes, rioting, and violence aimed at three goals: the creation of an Arab state, an end to immigration, and a ban on Jews buying land. And of course a guarantee that there will never be a Jewish homeland. The British issued the White Paper of 1939, aimed at ending the violence and appeasing the Arabs. The White Paper all but ended Jewish immigration to Palestine, cutting off the one last major escape route for Jews fleeing the coming Holocaust.
In later decades we saw the rise of terrorism as spectacle, honed and perfected by Palestinians targeting Jews and Israel. Airplane hijackings, the Munich Olympics, the suicide bombers: all served to bring front-page attention to the Palestinians, and many actually saw Israel condemned as the aggressor rather than the terrorists themselves. October 7 was the most deadly manifestation of this trend.
But all this violence also came at enormous cost to the Arabs and Palestinians. The 1939 White Paper galvanized the Jews into their own revolt against the Arabs and the British, and ultimately didn’t stop the creation of Israel in 1948. Every Arab war initiated against Israel ended in disaster, defeat, humiliation, and the loss of territory. Palestinian terrorism led to harsh Israeli retaliation. And now, look at what October 7 has brought to the Palestinian people. More of the same.
Palestinian violence against Israel has been a catastrophe. To break the cycle, to move towards Palestinian statehood, Palestinians now have to reverse this century-long commitment. Just like Israel, they, too, are going to have to do things they really don’t want to.
The second thing is that Palestinians have to end their rejectionism of Israel. They have to stop trying to roll back the clock to 1948. One of the reasons why this is so hard is that it means giving up a core element of Palestinian identity: the right of return.
The right of return is central to Palestinian rejection of Israel, and the chief ideological means by which they plan to eliminate it. Right of return holds that the Palestinian refugees of 1948 have the right to go back to their original villages inside Israel — along with all of their descendants. There are probably around 30,000 original refugees still alive today. But their descendants — all those recognized as Palestinian refugees - number around 5.9 million. Add those millions to the 20% of Israel that is already Arab, and the Arabs will outnumber the Jews. Israel will no longer be a Jewish state but a Palestinian one. That’s the point. The right of return means rolling back the clock to 1948, to erase Israel though this kind of demographic conquest.
Look, the Jews are the last people who can complain about someone longing for their ancestral homeland. Just as Israelis don’t have to give up the dream of Greater Israel, just the ambition, Palestinians don’t have to erase the memory of 1948 or give up the dream of someday returning. Those villages can retain their lofty, idealized place in the Palestinian imagination. But they have to give up the ambition. They have to give up the notion that the right of return justifies violent opposition to Israel’s existence. But most of all, the right of return fuels a Palestinian identity of perennial victimhood. The right of return tells Palestinians that they are permanently refugees unless they can return to an eliminated Israel.
There is much debate about the international legality of the right of return, but that’s almost besides the point. There is no recognition that the million Jews tossed out of Arab countries have a right to return. I don’t have a right to return to Poland, where my family lived for 500 years before the Nazis came. The right of return isn’t predicated on the scrupulous adherence to international law or fair play. Nor is it a bargaining ploy for compensation. The Palestinians have made it clear over the years that they don’t want financial compensation for lost property. Instead, the right of return has become the sole means by which Palestinians can stop being refugees, not the establishment of their own independent state.
Gaza is the example of this. Gaza today is a Palestinian territory ruled by a Palestinian government and populated solely by Palestinians. A Palestinian born and raised there is not a refugee from Palestine — they’re in Palestine! That should end the notion that Palestinians there are refugees. Yet they are still classified as such by UNRWA — the UN Relief and Works Agency. They are still treated as victims. Each new child is added to the roster of refugees without any effort towards resolving that status except through the right of return to Israel. This helps create the condition by which armed resistance — rather than, say, competent government — becomes the expression of Palestinian hopes.
I’m not saying the right of return isn’t sincerely held. It is. But it’s also cynically exploited by Palestinian leaders, Hamas, UNRWA, and others as a tool to fight Israel. And we can’t expect Israel to make concessions when the Palestinian dream remains to destroy Israel. Palestinian liberation cannot come at the expense of Israel’s elimination.
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Palestinians don’t see the occupation beginning in 1967. They see it beginning in 1948. It’s a simple logic: Israel should never have been created in the first place. Therefore it is illegitimate. Since it is illegitimate, it must be destroyed. Since it must be destroyed and won’t go willingly, violence is the answer. And that violence is itself legitimate because it is in service of destroying that which is illegitimate. The jihadism of Hamas adds another layer to the logic. Jews have no right to live freely in Muslim lands won through military conquest. Jews must therefore be violently resisted. It’s a perspective that denies any Jewish historical connection to the land: the Jews have no ancient history here, the Zionists simply showed up in the 1800s to steal everything from the Arabs.
Palestinians have to reject all of this false logic. To get their own state, they have to give up their commitment to destroying the Israeli one. Last week archaeologists discovered that Palestinians destroyed a site in the West Bank dating back to the Second Temple Era. It was covered with concrete and made into a parking lot. So Palestinians are going to have to accept that Jews have a legitimate history here, and that Israel is a legitimate state with an absolute requirement for security. They don’t have to like Israel. Plenty of unfriendly countries live next to each other without constant warfare. But Palestinians have to give up the idea that they can, in time, destroy Israel, eject the Jews, and replace it with a Palestinian state. Palestinians must accept that 1948 happened and there is no going back.
This is going to require wholesale change in Palestinian culture, society, politics, and much else. For one thing, Palestinians cannot have a state whose education system is predicated on antisemitism. Palestinians have to stop teaching kindergartners to hate Jews and teens to kill them. All those textbooks glorifying martyrdom and hatred and indoctrinating generations of kids with radicalism has to be completely replaced. Israel will have to start appearing on maps in classrooms, reflecting the reality of the world and not the wishful thinking that the right of return offers. Schools will need to be named after Palestinian poets, philosophers, actors, singers, peacemakers — not terrorists killed while murdering Israelis.
The Palestinian government has to end what Israel calls the “pay for slay” program. The PA pays salaries to the families of terrorists who are killed, wounded, or imprisoned while carrying out an attack on Israelis. It’s a direct financial incentive to commit murder, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars. Of course, the Palestinians consider this a demonstration of their “participation in the struggle against the occupation.” This mentality is what the Palestinians have to give up.
At every level, then, the Palestinians have to forswear violence. Of course there will still be individual attacks — that’s true of every society, including Israel, and Palestinians aren’t collectively responsible for that. But many commentators have noted that the Palestinian commitment to violence is an addiction — and this addiction must be broken. Violence must be relegated to the unacceptable fringes of society: by teachers, parents, friends, politicians, and everyone else.
Israel can defeat Hamas militarily, but only the Palestinians can resist its hateful, destructive ideology and ensure it doesn’t rise again in Palestinian society. Hamas has made clear that theirs is not resistance to the 1967 occupation but genocide for the existence of Jews and Israel at all. In its 18 years in power, Hamas has systematically looted and destroyed Gaza. Look at the devastation it has brought upon the Palestinian people. Right now Hamas is too powerful for Gazans to resist on their own. That’s why Hamas has to be defeated so thoroughly that they are no longer in power and cannot rise again from the ashes. Only then will Palestinians have the space to keep jihadism far below ground. Then they’ll have help: from the rest of the world supporting a burgeoning Palestinian state, to Israel having to do its part to lessen the blockade and reduce the West Bank occupation.
The occupation seems to present a chicken-and-egg problem. Which came first, a Palestinian attack or an Israeli reprisal? The occupation is a vicious feedback loop. It requires violence from Israel to maintain control. That brings about violence from the Palestinians, which in turn requires more control, further justifying the occupation. But October 7 revealed once and for all what happens when Israel relinquishes control, and relaxes their defensive posture for even a moment. It’s a catastrophe. Israel must do its part to reduce the occupation that is so disruptive to Palestinian life. But I maintain that security is paramount, and here is where Palestinians hold the upper hand, where they are the ones best placed to break the cycle of violence. If Israel, say, dismantles a checkpoint which then becomes an unfettered route for terrorists, well then that simply justifies Israel putting that checkpoint back up. Palestinians have to demonstrate to Israelis that loosening control won’t lead to more violence.
So let’s imagine that the Palestinians can go through a cultural change in which they no longer see themselves as victimized refugees but as agents of their own independence. They no longer reject their own statehood because they think Israel will be eliminated just a little further down the road. They no longer tolerate the destructive ideologies that keep them powerless and impoverished, whether it’s the corruption of the Palestinian Authority or the warmongering of Hamas. The right of return is relegated to cultural symbol, not absolutist ambition demanding armed struggle. They accept, however grudgingly, Israel’s existence — just as Israelis will have to accept a Palestinian state. This all might be the work of generations. But if it can happen simultaneously with Israeli efforts to reduce the occupation, then over time Israelis will come to trust that ceding ground to the Palestinians won’t lead to terrorism. That will build trust, and with trust comes a feasible road towards security, peace, and statehood. That will offer the Palestinians a future to believe in.
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None of this can happen without Hamas gone and Iran kept out of the way. This requires, then, more than just what the Palestinians and Israelis can muster. If Israelis and Palestinians have to do things they really don’t want to do, so will the rest of the world. Just as democracy is fighting for its future between Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Hamas represent the fault line in a similar global battle between radical Islam and, well, everyone else. It’s a fight the rest of the world has to win.
As always I’m at jewoughtaknow.com and make sure to sign up for my mailing list to get my weekly newsletter with additional commentary on what is going on. You can find Jew Oughta Know on Substack as well, and sign up there directly. My email is jewoughtaknowpodcast@gmail.com, and thanks again to all the generous donors out there. Thanks for listening, Am Yisrael Chai, the Jewish People Live.
© Jason Harris 2024