Palestine seems to have come to a full stop. Its institutions have withered rather than evolving into a state. But Palestinians are still very much present—not merely as individuals but as a national community. Over the past half century, a sense of national identity has grown far stronger—and the tribulations suffered by Palestinians (including occupation and the failure of the Palestinian Authority, or PA) have actually made it stronger. But there is no state of Palestine now, and there is none on the horizon. Formal recognition of Palestine cheers those who hope for a state but cannot mask developments on the ground that move in the opposite direction. Perhaps things will change, but that is a task for the rising generation.
This is an extremely discouraging prognosis for Palestinians. But that is no reason to contest its accuracy. Nor is it anything to celebrate. Palestinians are not the only ones who will suffer; the slow disintegration of Palestinian national institutions has engendered severe problems for Israelis that seem certain to persist for a generation or more as the struggle over the “land of Israel” and “historic Palestine” between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea takes new (and often pernicious) forms. Future global leaders are already being forced to manage the consequences without the diplomatic tools of their predecessors.
Palestine has stopped, but the problem is not the absence of a state or a failed state. Palestinians are governed. Seen from the ground up, Palestinians see a state in most aspects of their lives: they are counted, licensed, monitored, patrolled, educated, taxed, regulated—and sometimes even cared for and fed—by official bodies. Palestinians are not stateless, but Palestine is. That is, there is no Palestine that can claim sovereignty, but Palestinians are very much subject to a host of states and state-like structures. The various ways that Palestinians are governed lack coherence. Many are citizens of Israel, a state that identifies itself as belonging to the Jewish people as a nation. Others are governed by that state but are not citizens of it. For such Palestinians, almost all aspects of movement and security operate under palpable Israeli control. For those in the West Bank and Gaza, many other aspects of life are very far from Israeli control or interest— such as disputes between landlords and tenants or those between spouses, for instance, leaving them to ad hoc or constricted Palestinian authorities that resemble little parts of a state, ones that do not add up to a whole.
In fact, none of these structures are close to forming a political entity called “Palestine,” and none are even accountable to Palestinians. Most (though not all) Palestinian governing institutions cannot or will not grant them citizenship, leaving millions of Palestinians who are unable to claim membership in any sovereign entity stateless on an individual level even while they are intensively governed.
Palestine as a Proper Noun
Palestinians first declared Palestine as a political entity in a Palestinian National Congress in Gaza in 1948. The declaration did not have much impact; it took decades for many international actors to think in terms of “Palestine.” The UN began to refer to an entity by that name only in 1988; it affirmed the need for Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza at that time. Fourteen years later, then U.S. president George W. Bush introduced a similar grammatical shift in the U.S. government’s official terminology that still has not yet been undone: he ignored decades of alternatives to use “Palestine” as a proper noun, though he was vague on where it was.
Of course, the term had existed as a geographical one for millennia and as a political one (placed under a British Mandate) since the end of the Ottoman Empire. But none of these usages had suggested that Palestinians as a national community deserved, much less possessed, a state. Its use in these newer contexts—by the UN and then by a U.S. president—seemed to recognize or at least acquiesce in the slow ascent of the Palestinian national movement.
This was the high point of a grudging international trajectory that has resulted in the use of Palestine as a proper noun and the acceptance of Palestinians as a national entity. Key milestones on the now-blocked road to statehood included Palestine’s first declaration of independence in 1948, the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) 1974 designation by the Arab League as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, Palestine’s second declaration of independence in 1988 (recognized by many more and much more actively remembered today), and Israel’s recognition of the PLO’s status in 1993. Other pivotal developments included the decision by the UN General Assembly to admit “Palestine” as a nonmember observer state in 2012, the fact that around 140 out of 193 UN members have recognized the “State of Palestine,” and endless policy statements and resolutions about a two-state solution in which Palestine is to live peacefully alongside the State of Israel.
And for decades, there was a slow institutional trajectory that ran unevenly alongside the diplomatic one. Palestinians as a nation—that is, a people desirous of political self-determination—built some of their own social and political institutions, including unions, parties, associations, civil society organizations, newspapers, and universities. And they also built state-like structures, drafted regulations and bylaws, wrote educational material, sponsored cultural events, developed national narratives, wrote aspirational documents, drafted platforms, and built bureaucracies. Elements of this (even legislative drafting) began before the Oslo Accords of the mid-1990s, but those agreements allowed the pace to pick up. The height of this institution building was reached in the 1990s when many Palestinians anticipated that the paper state of Palestine, the one of declarations and diplomacy, would be melded to all the institutions they had slowly built into a real state with all the internal and external accoutrements of sovereign governance. Institutions lined up (or were lined up) according to whether they were to be part of the proto-state, regulated by it, monitor it, ignore it, or oppose it.
But then things began to come apart; the institutional trajectory stalled and then reversed in the twenty-first century. Diplomacy worked to cover this decay, and occasionally contained it in critical areas (especially in the period of Salam Fayyad’s premiership). But the disconnect between diplospeak and lived realities came to provoke derision and alienation among many Palestinians (especially younger ones). Talk of Palestine grew cheaper by the day as its reality receded.
The decay occurred most severely at the top—at the level of building a sovereign state. The basic structures of administration and service provision remained largely intact, some of them dating back before 1917 to Ottoman times, some to the British Mandate that lasted until 1948, and some to Jordanian and Egyptian rule that lasted until 1967. Still more were built under full Israeli occupation that began in 1967 and some were established during the period of limited PA autonomy beginning in 1994. But all these structures have lost their connection with any state-building project except in a rhetorical sense.
To be sure, the institutional developments of the 1990s (when statehood seemed a realistic goal) had deep flaws of various kinds—there were autocratic, exploitative, petty, and corrupt practices that emerged in Palestinian governance. Many Palestinians complained about the emerging patterns, often without receiving much of an external hearing since most international attention was focused on the peace process, a process that actually fostered some of the problematic patterns.
But despite these problems, the various efforts produced ministries, legislation, police, curricula, bureaucratic forms, stipulated procedures, and elections. And there were plans for more, including a national currency and an international airport. In fact, one airport briefly operated in Gaza, and a second one was discussed for Qalandiya in the vicinity of Jerusalem. Some Palestinians even prepared for passports whose appearance did not require intensive negotiations with Israel and identity cards not designed in large part to be legible to Israeli authorities. One by one, those steps have come undone, have been bypassed, have been rendered toothless, and have been shuttered and even forgotten; only the desiccated shells of the state of Palestine soldier on. The scattered structures that retain vitality serve few short-term interests and no viable long-term strategy.
And there is thus a complete mismatch between the international ascent of Palestine and its domestic descent. Internationally, talk of a two-state solution began as provocative in the twentieth century and became aspirational at the turn of the twenty-first century, but it has now devolved into the delusional; most Palestinians today openly loathe the state-building structures of the Oslo period. Israelis view Oslo-era structures as tolerable only to the extent that they can be turned into security subcontractors and limited service providers. Oslo’s explicit promises of increasing territory for Palestinian governance were violated even when Oslo diplomacy was still alive; since then, they have been rolled back, leaving behind only diminishing pockets of municipal administration. And most significantly, if much less noticed internationally, most of those who live in this reality understand it as leading to a tomorrow that has less promise than yesterday. Few Palestinians know what to do; the solutions that are suggested are either very abstract or desperate. There is much discussion of the need for a state building strategy, but most of the suggested ideas focus far more on tactics—and even then few ideas seem to hold much promise.
International observers increasingly acknowledge the disintegration of Palestine, but they miss the depth of the institutional decay. As a result, global leaders rush in with superficial fixes as if fundamental ones are unnecessary or can wait. The international impulse to hit the snooze alarm on the disintegration of Palestine is both understandable and very dangerous. There are constructive actions that can be taken, but they must be built on a recognition of the very deep ways in which Palestinian politics has profoundly decayed. They cannot depend on efforts to “resolve” a clear “conflict”—as if there are two authoritative actors, “Israel” and “Palestine,” that need to wrap up a “peace process” that stalled decades ago. Palestinians must be allowed to resuscitate national structures in a way that can serve Palestinians and allow others to interact with them as a national community with clear and authoritative leaders. And since what took a generation to unravel will likely take a generation to rebuild, this also means ensuring that human needs, human rights, and national communities are fully respected in difficult circumstances.
What Has Been Lost
Palestine as a proper noun has been embodied by a series of structures that were designed to speak for the Palestinian nation, begin the process of statebuilding, or lead Palestinians in a struggle for statehood. A close look at these structures shows what remains of them—and what has been lost.
In the first couple decades of the British Mandate, the Supreme Muslim Council and then the Supreme Arab Committee gave way to the All Palestine Government of 1948; then, a series of Palestinian National Councils (PNCs) met and helped create the PLO in 1964. That body gradually gained ground as the “sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” The PLO signed a series of agreements with Israel in the 1990s that did not mention “Palestine” as a proper noun but finally recognized the PLO and the Palestinians as a people.
Israeli (and American) refusals to speak of a Palestinian state did not prevent the Palestinian leadership from presenting the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) as the kernel of a state. And indeed, for the past decade, those leaders have preferred to refer to themselves as leaders of the State of Palestine, attempting to sideline the PNA moniker. Each of these bodies—the PLO and the State of Palestine to be sure, but especially the PNA—built various symbolic and bureaucratic accoutrements of statehood, including a school curriculum, a parliament, a legislative framework, and a flag, along with a set of ministries, commissions, agencies, and bureaus.
And below such aspirational parts of Palestine as a state were a host of social and political actors that were aspiring to organize or lead parts of the Palestinian nation—unions, youth clubs, women’s associations, grassroots organizations of various kinds, and, of course, the factions. (The term “factions” in the Palestinian context has referred to political parties and movements that were aimed less at elections and more at popular mobilization and various forms of “resistance,” a term that in turn generally included but was not limited to “armed struggle” in Palestinian national parlance.)
Most of the administrative and political structures still exist—but those more closely associated with Palestine as a would-be state have become soulless entities, far more alive on paper than in practice. Generally, the further removed from the state building project, the more viable an organization is. The State of Palestine has diplomats representing it throughout the world but nothing close to sovereignty over even a sliver of Palestine itself. The PNC meets on rare occasions when the leadership needs its imprimatur; the PLO is little more than a set of offices attached to the Palestinian presidency; and the PNA is a collection of official bodies that provide both social services and security in Palestinian cities in the West Bank, the latter in coordination with Israel. None are attached to anything more viable than a demand that international actors provide them with a state and the determination to hold on until that happens.
The result is not merely institutional rot but popular disengagement as well. The extent to which the Oslo process, the state building project, and the two-state solution have died was unspeakable in many international circles until quite recently. But in discussions among Palestinians, it often simply went without saying: Palestinians have not felt they were living in a state-in-waiting for almost a quarter century, during which time an entirely new generation has come of age. The period of the Fayyad premiership did inspire some earnest technocratic efforts, but they were predicated on the lack of democracy, and in retrospect those who worried that they would only institutionalize the division between the West Bank and Gaza have been vindicated. And while the older generation may be disillusioned, conversations with younger Palestinians suggest that they remember no illusions that they have lost.
The political disintegration at the top is coupled with far more limited disintegration at the social and grassroots levels—where informal mechanisms and even formal ones live on. When the PNA’s fiscal crisis led to a failure to pay salaries, for example, Palestinian teachers organized an intermittent but very effective strike in 2022 and 2023 throughout the West Bank. Furthermore, they were able to do so outside of the framework of the official union and to garner a degree of public support.
And, of course, two of the factions live on, Fatah and Hamas. There are almost a dozen smaller ones—such as the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine—that still have scattered activists and intellectuals supporting them. One of these (the Popular Front) even retains a small following. But most of the small factions have an organizational existence expressed in little more than seats at the PLO table.
That leaves only Fatah and Hamas as dividing the national movement between them. Fatah still has its local chapters, strongmen, youth clubs, and student activists—and indeed, that is about all that it has. Fatah can offer little other than a sense of a historical mission linked to no future strategy beyond the egos of individual and local leaders. My own impression from speaking to younger Palestinians in recent years is that some do retain loyalty to Fatah but more as an inherited brand or a set of leaders than as an ideology, program, or viable organization.
It is true that Hamas is a far stronger organization in an institutional sense. And it has become a cliché to say that Hamas cannot be destroyed because it is an idea. But that gets things precisely wrong: Hamas’s ideas, such as they are, lack coherence. Or rather they signal in contradictory directions because the movement has always showed that it values itself as an organization more than it values doctrinal unity—many different inclinations exist within Hamas. The most intense debates seem to be over tactics and what to do, not over what to think.
And Hamas’s actions do attract attention (and for so many Palestinians who feel ignored that is no small task). But its actions (despite the movement’s claims) have certainly not brought Palestine closer to political existence. Hamas, therefore, remains less a definable idea but very much a strong and sustainable organization, one that is able to reproduce itself over time, recruit new followers and select new leaders, and, of course, make daring decisions (sometimes without care for the consequences). Its continued vitality (it remains in a sense the most resilient Palestinian organization) has likely only helped bury Palestine at least for the time being.
Losing Palestine: The Questions Are How and Why, Not Who
Who is responsible for this sad state of affairs—or lack of state? The list of those who have failed Palestine is long indeed and has many Palestinian, Israeli, American, and European names. And it can be confusing to keep track of the villains: those who speak endlessly about a two-state outcome (like PNA head Mahmoud Abbas) are sometimes treated as obstacles and those who boast about preventing a two-state solution (like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) are treated as possible interlocutors for bringing it about. And indeed, today there is no doubt that Israeli policy is to treat a Palestinian state as an existential threat, not a building block for peace.
But focusing on the who rather than the how and the why has often been precisely the problem, especially for Palestinian personalities—as if finding the right people (or undermining the wrong ones) is the same as building a state of institutions. Many bad choices have been made, but Palestinians could justly complain that from their perspective the larger problem is the bad hands they have been dealt. Palestine may not be a state, but Palestinians do have politics—and just as with Israel, it can be a mistake to reduce political analysis to tools honed for celebrity gossip.
Actually, it is more than a mistake: it is a problem. Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, and Europeans who have treated Palestinian politics as a game of personalities have ensured much of it became largely that. And all those who have worked all along to bend whatever institutions emerged to short-term needs have done more than bend these institutions; at best, they have reduced such institutions, laws, rules, and procedures into partisan or personal tools, and at worst they have shattered them.
The tendencies toward personalization, ad hoc organizational arrangements, and writing rules in the afternoon to justify that morning’s decisions were well established in Palestinian institutions during the pre-Oslo period; both international and domestic pressures and cross-purposes cemented the pattern. Palestinian leaders were not hostile to institutions, but they saw procedural niceties as a luxury and long-term decisions about fundamental structures as premature. In Palestinian parlance, this was the stage of “revolution.” In less rhetorical terms, leaders felt that the greatest challenges were geographical dispersal, occupation, suspicious Arab states, and an international environment that was difficult and sometimes hostile. Flexibility and national unity were mutually dependent. And until the 1990s, most Palestinian institutions—even those that were sinking deep roots—were thus deferential to factional leadership, or to the national leadership, which itself lined up by faction.
The 1990s saw a conscious effort by some to move from “revolution” to a “state,” and indeed the Oslo period saw the most serious and intensive period of institution building in Palestinian history. Revolutionary habits—and leaders who operated in a personalistic fashion—hardly disappeared, and the figure who doubled as head of the PLO and the PA, Yasser Arafat, hardly seemed ready to make a full transition. Moreover, external actors placed their thumbs very heavily on the scale against true state building while often telling themselves they were doing the opposite. Yes, there was tremendous funding for Palestinian civil society organizations—so much so that many lost touch with their constituencies. Yes, there was technical training for judges, local administrators, and parliamentary staff—but for those who funded such efforts, the justification for them was a diplomatic process that prioritized the negotiations with Israel, often viewed through the lens of Israeli politics and security concerns. The result meant little attention to giving the new structures the institutional, legal, and constitutional framework traction among Palestinians. The short-term pressures of diplomacy—for arrests of Hamas activists, for example—and the sense that there was a problematic but real set of partners in the Palestinian leadership meant that, for most international backers of the Oslo process, Palestine consisted of a small number of people they knew by name. And this often led them to encourage measures and tools that resulted in an autocratic and disconnected Palestinian Authority—one that might be tolerated but resented by a majority if it actually delivered a state.
But the idea that a Palestinian state could be built under Israeli occupation was more of a desperate hope than a strategy, with the state supposedly emerging by administering a steadily widening territory and then negotiating itself into the international aspects of sovereignty. The hope may not have been an impossible one; it seemed to realize some limited success in the 1990s. But the territorial expansion gradually slowed and then was shelved unilaterally by Israel (with American support). The physical link (“safe passage”) between the West Bank and Gaza agreed to in 1993—an essential part of the original Oslo agreements for Palestinian leaders—took six years of torturous negotiations to implement and then lasted only a year.
Referring to a peace “process” was a way of suggesting that trust might build over time and allow rigid positions to soften through negotiations and the emergence of shared interests; such references were also a way of saying that a set of signed agreements that (for all their details) were read very differently by the two parties would allow gaps to be narrowed. The slow building of trust and softening of positions would allow apparently unbridgeable gaps to be bridged. There was some sense among some Israeli and Palestinian negotiators that they were coming to understand each other better. But divisions were not bridged.
One fundamental problem with the negotiations that took place is that the most active ones were not those between Palestinian and Israeli leaders but instead those among Israelis. Leaders favoring the Oslo process fought to push through an agreement that would overcome the opposition from the Oslo critics from various nationalist and religious camps on the Israeli right. At its most generous, Israeli leaders were able to make an uncertain offer of an agreement that would have produced a Palestine that was something more like a protectorate than a state (an entity able to administer itself domestically but not be responsible for its own external security nor have full control over its borders, water resources, or even its airspace). By the fall of 2000, most Palestinians had concluded that the process was not leading to statehood; that sense helped fuel the second intifada, which began at that time. While formal negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders did continue after 2000, the sense among some international diplomats that they neared success was never mirrored on a domestic level among Palestinians, and that gap is politically much more significant than external observers generally allow. However close leaders may have come in private to an agreement, there is little evidence they could have pushed through, much less implemented, an agreement.
The second intifada deepened the international community’s pattern of pretending to deal with Palestine but understanding its institutions only through a few people. For many outsiders, Arafat was Palestine until he wasn’t. In the search for an alternative, Americans and Europeans discovered Palestinian state builders who had been steadily pressing for democratic structures such as a prime minister responsible to parliament, an interim constitution, a law for an independent judiciary, new elections, parliamentary review of the budget, and even some civilian oversight over security services. Now armed with international support, the reformers got what they wanted on paper—but it turned out that these changes were embraced by the United States and grudgingly accepted by Israel only if they empowered the right people. First to be anointed was Abbas (as prime minister, then as Arafat’s successor as president); later on came the turn of technocratic Salam Fayyad (first as minister of finance, then as prime minister). And that move toward technocracy came only after the PA’s external sponsors encouraged Abbas to suspend the parliament when the perceived wrong people had been elected to it.
It was in this period that a Palestinian state moved from the unspeakable to a platitude, especially for American leaders who, for the first time, showed an interest in a program led by Fayyad to repair some of damage of the second intifada on an apolitical basis predicated on the absence of elections and the near-total rupture between Palestinian institutions in the West Bank and Gaza. Puzzlingly, they termed this personalized, undemocratic program as “institution building.”
The predictable results were deep division, disengagement between administrators and those administered, and feckless negotiations about a two-state outcome that the Israeli and Palestinian publics both had lost faith in (with those disliking the idea increasingly joined by those who simply saw it as a mirage, endlessly receding on the horizon). The institutionalization that actually took place took the form of transportation infrastructure, border controls, laws, housing developments, public buildings, restrictions, and blockades (with their painfully negotiated workarounds). Palestine may have become a proper noun for policymakers, but another word was increasingly used more frequently: “apartheid.” In international policy circles, the word “apartheid” was either decried as a marker of hatred of Israel or a warning of what could happen in the future. For Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, it was the best one-word description of their lives.
There was something mutually reinforcing in the decay of Palestine: domestic leaders, dependent on international support, strove to meet their shifting conditions and demands in ways that would not be excessively embarrassing and wound up persuading neither those inside nor outside. Deprived of diplomatic support and tax revenues, they had nothing to offer their constituencies, and in a weakened state they proved less useful internationally, exposing them to new indignities and further domestic derision. It has been many years since I met a Palestinian—even a senior official—who did not acknowledge the failure of the national project. The only strategy they can offer is hope that someone else will change something.
It was this cycle of decay and despair that Hamas was able to exploit on October 7. That event has made the utter irrelevance of the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah undeniable even to those who had sponsored it for so long; a U.S. government that had treated Abbas as indispensable as he grew more aged and autocratic suddenly discovered that he was old and autocratic. They openly called for a “revitalized” body with suggestions that there were problems of high-level corruption. It was not clear precisely what the latter term means internationally, but when Palestinians decry PA corruption, they tend to mean something a bit broader than officials lining their own pockets. While there are some complaints about venality, there are more profound concerns that Palestinian leaders (and even some NGO leaders) enjoy privileges denied the rest of the population and in return deliver not Palestine but only deteriorating services, security cooperation with Israel, and empty rhetoric. And Palestinians see many international actors—most particularly the United States—as having brought about that precise outcome. Seen this way, international denunciation of PA corruption makes no sense or becomes profoundly cynical: for Palestinians, corruption is more than pilfering; it is the co-optation of their leaders into a process that entrenches occupation rather than peace.
That diagnosis might be disturbing to senior U.S. and European policymakers, but diplomats who operate on the ground—and certainly Palestinians themselves—deal with it as an undeniable and visible daily reality. So when international diplomacy continues based on the fiction that Palestine is just around the corner, it sounds either disingenuous or utterly clueless. If policy discussions become franker, what is to be gained?
Institutionalizing the Palestinian Nation as the Dream of Statehood Recedes
Over two decades, my writings on Palestinian politics have generally used titles that reflected gloom more than optimism: examples include “sunset for the two state solution”; “the peace process has no clothes”; “a permanent state of ambiguity”; “the green elephant in the room” (on Hamas’s entrenchment in Gaza); and “reinventing a square wheel.” A few attempts to be constructive include “time for plan B” and “from the search for state to the search for tactics.” But there is one title in particular that captures the core of the argument that needs to be heard more in policy circles: the “receding dream of statehood.”
By that, I meant not simply what I am arguing here—that the state of Palestine seems to steadily recede beyond any horizon—but that statehood as the center of the Palestinian national movement is receding as an end or strategic goal. It is not that Palestine as a proper noun has disappeared from discussions among Palestinians—it is used to refer to the geographical location and sometimes to the national community. Nor does it mean that Palestinians would not greet a state. But few expect to win that lottery, at least any time soon. So Palestinian national identity no longer coheres around the idea of statehood. Maintaining a sense of nationhood without having a state to define, defend, and inculcate it should be seen as an impressive achievement of sorts since nations without states can have great difficulty organizing and operating in today’s world. But it is a recipe for resilience and mobilization (perhaps even revolt); it is not one for a peaceful or prosperous future for Palestinians or their neighbors.
It is time to start placing ideal futures—of one state, two states, a confederal state, a binational state—on the shelf next to socialist paradises or religious utopias as noble ideas for a better tomorrow that can lead to problems if they drive all of today’s politics. The focus on general principles rather than ideal blueprints is far more realistic. The insistence that a two-state solution must be realistic since other solutions are unrealistic makes no sense at all. The claim that one state from the river to the sea is the only way to provide justice for all inhabitants can make a bit more sense in the abstract but remains unconnected to any strategy or any means of overcoming intense opposition from those who fear a one-state outcome (especially marketed under the “river to sea” slogan) as a codeword for an ethnic cleansing of Jews. All such solutions for one, two, or various forms of state are imperfect even in principle; holding one impossible dream up as the only outcome makes the imperfect and the impossible the enemy of the good.
There are two far better questions to ask than whether a given step brings any utopian outcome closer or pushes it further away. First, does a proposed policy improve conditions for people alive today? Second, does it open possibilities for the next generation to find a more peaceful and prosperous future? These questions are general, but they are not banal. Indeed, their biggest problem is the way they can point in opposite directions: a short-term improvement can often be seen (and be motivated) by a desire to keep the lid on any form of Palestinian resistance very tight, potentially leading to a future explosion.
And the best way forward is neither to declare a state of Palestine nor pretend that it is there. Instead, the path forward should focus on developing Palestinian institutions and ensuring that the panoply of bodies that administer them are molded to become more accommodating of Palestinian national identity. What general form Palestine will take and the relationship between Israel and Palestine are matters for future generations to decide; for the current generation, the task is to create options for the future. And that means the task now is to work to undo the half century of entrenchment of the profound injustices of the one-state reality.
The Palestinian Task: Reviving Palestine From the Ground Up
By concentrating on procedures rather than personalities today and principles rather than panaceas tomorrow, Palestinians and others can find more promising answers to the questions in front of them. This suggests not abandoning any hope that they will belong to any state but only seeking to avoid tying all their efforts to the idea that they already have a State of Palestine whose ingredients just need to be filled in.
There is every reason to write laws, develop curricula, and regulate civil service grades; the alternative sometimes discussed of dissolving the PA and handing Palestinians back to Israel for full administration reflects pique more than concern with practical outcomes. And there are good reasons to revive the Basic Law (the PA’s interim constitution) and even the idea of a constitution for statehood—the first can regulate how Palestinians relate to each other and the second can provide authoritative statements of Palestinian political values.
But for Palestinians who have seen Palestine recede, the most important element in any set of tactics is public engagement. Elections, protected space for civil society, and grassroots organizing will not create Palestine, but they will help enable Palestinians as a national community to articulate principles and advance efforts to ensure those principles are placed on the agenda.
Deep problems arise when diplomacy, constitution writing, and recognition become ends in themselves, sucking the energy out of more grassroots efforts—or even leading to attempts to contain such efforts by an authoritative older generation of leaders more focused on the trappings of statehood than on daily ways of fostering national self-determination. So the legitimacy for any such efforts must be seen as coming from domestic politics and accountability, not as a substitute for popular engagement.
Moreover, expanding the focus to include grassroots efforts and building connections across the 1967 lines can enhance the prospects for a holistic and inclusive approach. Such links have emerged, far more so from the ground up rather than as a project of Palestine. Large numbers of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship enroll in West Bank universities; the insistence of such Israeli citizens on citizenship rights (muted in the post–October 7 atmosphere but likely to return) has also increased markedly over the last generation. Socially, divisions among Palestinians (Gazans, West Bankers, and Israelis) tend to be very deep, but politically the interactions among them have been resilient, and the insistence of Palestinians that they must be dealt with as a national community has generally increased.
Such a perspective might be unkind to some nationalist shibboleths. On the Palestinian side, the Israeli political party, led by Mansour Abbas, Ra’am (United Arab List, appealing generally to socially conservative Muslim Israelis), appeared to many Palestinians as betraying the national consensus when he led it into supporting a center-right Israeli cabinet. But in an Israeli political system where fringe groups and antisystem parties can become part of the calculus of forming a governing coalition, the party still could have unexpected effects. Were Ra’am part of the ruling coalition today rather than the Jewish supremacist right, a different political calculus would have been operating at a time when much public discourse in Israel took on frighteningly bloodthirsty tones.
Such efforts should aim to increase self-determination and public engagement, supporting long-term national ambitions. Such a broader if diffuse set of approaches, integrating immediate institutional improvements with a wider scope for public participation and principle-based governance, promises a more sustainable and representative path toward Palestinian nationhood than current methods that either overemphasize procedural correctness or focus too narrowly on individual leadership changes.
International Efforts to Foster Palestine
Internationally, articulation of clear principles—that the human rights of all must be respected; that nobody should remain stateless; that as long as they do remain stateless, Palestinians need protection; that national self-determination should be respected in forms that do not deny citizenship to entire classes of permanent residents—can be coupled with a clear decision not to support those who violate such principles. Again, the point is not to abandon diplomacy at the top level. Recognizing Palestine as a state would likely do a bit of good and little harm; the main practical effect would be to offer a voting seat in some international bodies and clearer diplomatic status for Palestinian officials. But in the one-state reality that currently exists, anything that suggests that it is not permanent, that treats Palestinians as a national category, and that addresses the gross power imbalance (one that has vitiated all diplomacy) is good.
But more generally, a diplomacy based on such principles means more than an individual-level “rights-based” approach: it also requires thinking in terms of national rights that engage with Palestinian institutions and actors that actually exist and have ties to their constituencies. Currently, international actors show more than a bit of unevenness in what can move a movement or party beyond the pale. Disqualifying those who use peaceful means—solidarity movements, boycott campaigns, and calls for Israel to become “a state for its citizens”—to achieve a Palestinian state very effectively subverts that approach, however. Palestinians who question the Jewish nature of the single state can no longer be treated as tantamount to treasonous by Israel, as has sometimes been the case (and is clearly implied by the 2018 Basic Law proclaiming: “The Land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish People, in which the State of Israel was established. The State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.”
Disqualifying political actors because they deploy violence, glorify it, or call for ethnic cleansing may be a principle that is unevenly applied by all actors, but it has an underlying logic. The problem lies less in the principle than in the practice: precisely who is to determine who is disqualified and according to what standard? Domestic actors are partisan; even when it was emerging, Palestine had very few bodies that were not in the hands of individuals or factions with their own agendas. International actors that refuse to deal with Palestinian movements based on their positions but that accept Israeli actors who call for ethnic cleansing and apartheid do not have much credibility; those who do so based on a violent record in the past will have to explain why Etzel and Lehi leaders have assumed office without renouncing their history of terrorism. It might be possible to devise a diplomatic approach in which various actors (domestic and international) would come to an understanding on future behavior. That would be a difficult task, indeed, but it would be more worth the effort than selectively, unilaterally disqualifying actors based on their past.
These sorts of efforts would not breathe sudden life into Palestine in any form (two state, binational, confederal, consociational, or even aspirational). But they would breathe more life into those Palestinians—perhaps children or even unborn today—who may eventually find a path for a world that has made a place for them as a national community. And that place needs to exist not only in the hearts and minds of its people but in political structures that express their wills and defend their interests and that allow them to live peacefully and prosperously alongside other nations.
