Palestinians as victims, but of whom and what?

(JNS) — Why is Palestine still not an independent state? The conventional answer normally begins and ends with Israel and its “occupation,” presumably denying Palestinians their lands and their right to self-determination. Columbia University professor and Palestinian American Edward Said’s famous words that Zionism should be judged from the standpoint of its victims continues to possess cultural authority even if they contradict the historical record.

Zionism always endorsed a policy built around the idea of sharing the land. For almost a decade, Israel was swept into a process where it expected to add Palestine to a map of the region. Why then does a future once imagined as opening the doors to sovereignty now seem like science fiction?

To think clearly about how and why today’s hostilities—once supposedly on the verge of extinction—descended into today’s horrors, it is necessary to discard many long-held illusions and look instead at the Palestinians’ historical “all-or-nothing” geopolitical strategy.

Take, for example, the Arab Revolt in 1936, summoning the furies of Palestinian peasants without serious consideration of the consequences. After a decade of Jewish immigration and land purchases during British rule, which came despite Palestinian opposition. Arabs, including those from other countries, began attacking Jews and British forces.

Brutal British counter-insurgency measures ended the uprising, but not before scores of peasant villagers struck and even occupied urban centers. By the end of the revolt, the Palestine problem was stitched into the broader ambitions for Arab national unity. Erasing the lines between nation and region generated aspirations that were both unrealistic and self-destructive for all who subscribed to them.

This “all-or-nothing strategy” catalyzed into a sacred formula held in reverence and passed from one generation to another. The outrage and opposition to the U.N. Partition Plan in 1947 were anchored in this principle.

These same protean forces shadowed the Oslo Accords and caused their failure by replacing years of painstaking negotiations with prolonged violence. If the first intifada helped precipitate the 1990’s peace process, the second one lionized exploding bombs on municipal buses or in pubs where teenagers gathered to dance, thwarting what had become a generous program for state-building.

Even when global leaders convinced Palestinian leaders to gesture toward the words “two states for two peoples,” they never succeeded in translating those words into deeds.

Tapping into these norms enabled the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, to be elevated to near-mythological status. By replacing the call for “two states for two peoples” with the cry “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” the cataclysm that swept over Israel jolted the Middle East conflict into an apocalyptic realm.

The Palestinians found supporters across land and sea, who turned the atrocities into a kind of sacred drama, a moment of reckless daring and self-sacrifice for a noble cause. The slaughter was hailed on university campuses and in many American and European cities for the glory of deeds done on behalf of Palestinians, who had become the enduring metaphor for the innocent victim of a historic injustice.

Some demonstrators downplayed or denied the violence, but a surprising number fully embraced the glory of Hamas’s actions, giving the movement a revolutionary legitimacy it never had before, with implications reaching far beyond the contentious region, seeding its violence.

Spreading death and destruction consistent with past sagas of massacres, Hamas’s barbarism became no more than a footnote, if that, for many global leaders whose concerns were soon directed to the innocent Palestinians caught in the crossfire. Operating within a thicket of domestic pressures and fears for their own political survival, many European leaders stepped in with proposals supposedly aimed at saving the Palestinian national struggle from total disintegration.

Among them, the most problematic comes from French President Emmanuel Macron, who hopes to organize a joint Arab and European declaration recognizing a Palestinian state. What is remarkable about his proposal is that it seems to suggest nothing has changed at all—that the world is still in the era of the Oslo Accords and that the upheavals of the last quarter-century never happened. For these countries, Oct. 7 would essentially become Palestine’s independence day.

This remains a deeply troubling idea. The Hamas-led assaults were not intended to bring peace and stability to the region or the world. A pronouncement recognizing a state of Palestine without designated, configured borders confers power on an idea that is not only disorderly but dangerous. It means the “all-or-nothing” geopolitical strategy is no anachronism. Its imperatives cannot be admitted, but, apparently, neither can they be destroyed.

Palestinians are victims of a strategic doctrine so rigidly upheld that it rules out the kinds of calculations and compromises countries normally engage in when they are building states. Thus, they are left in thrall to a violence that curates their deaths as perpetual victims only to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It thrusts Palestinian men, women and children into one after another crucible of destruction and loss, with families, if not generations, never recovering from the tailspin.

Evangelizing martyrdom, Palestinians have built a national culture on grievance and victimhood, paying homage to the 1948 nakba (Arabic for the “disaster” of the establishment of the modern-day State of Israel) and not setting realistic goals that could win them their independence. Forging the institutions and culture that advance material prosperity and stability is no easy task, and it will be particularly difficult for Palestinians. It may, in fact, be a long shot, but it is still the only one worth taking.

Donna Robinson Divine is the Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Government Emerita at Smith College’s Department of Government.