Palestinian identity politics makes peace with Israel impossible.

A society that fails to establish internal peace cannot make peace with others, and no amount of international posturing will change that.

photo: Ash Hayes/Unsplash

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

Today, the United Nations Security Council approved a resolution to endorse U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed Gaza ceasefire plan, a sweeping framework that imagines Gaza placed under an International Stabilization Force and an apolitical Palestinian administration overseen by a Trump-chaired “Board of Peace.”

Its ambition is striking; its detachment from reality even more so. If the UN is voting on it, it’s already too late for common sense.

Like every international blueprint before it, the plan assumes the existence of a coherent Palestinian polity capable of reform, demilitarization, and self-governance. But the Palestinian political landscape is not a nation-in-waiting; it is a collection of factions, clans, and armed movements united only by hostility toward Israel. Peace cannot be negotiated with a political culture that has not yet demonstrated the ability to govern itself. What follows is not cynicism; it is recognition.

Israel rightfully insists that demilitarization is a precondition for any future arrangement. Hamas refuses, and not passively. Intelligence reports indicate it is stockpiling advanced weapons abroad — perhaps in Yemen and African countries — preparing for a future phase of conflict rather than an era of reconstruction. This is not a movement preparing to surrender arms; it is preparing for its next war. To imagine that Hamas, a jihadist organization defined by its doctrine of perpetual war, would voluntarily disarm is to imagine a Hamas that does not exist. And that illusion sits at the heart of nearly every “peace plan” the international community has drafted for decades.

The draft resolution goes further still, suggesting that once Gaza is demilitarized and rebuilt, and once the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority “faithfully” reforms itself, a “credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood” may finally emerge. But this relies on a fantasy that has collapsed repeatedly for nearly a century: that a unified Palestinian national leadership will materialize if only the right diplomatic incentives are provided.

But don’t just take it from me. Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of a Hamas founder, said the truth quite plainly: “There is no ‘Palestinians.’ There are tribes — the tribe of Hamas, the tribe of Islamic Jihad, the tribe of Khalil, the tribe of Nablus — and each one has different interests. And all of them are conflicted. If they did not have Israel as the common enemy, they would kill each other.”

This is not hyperbole; it is a sociological diagnosis. Palestinian nationalism is less a cohesive civic identity than a coalition of rival factions whose only shared project is resistance. Remove Israel as the unifying enemy, and what remains is not a proto-state but a power vacuum.

The backstabbing between Palestinian groups is pathological. Hamas has tried to assassinate senior Palestinian Authority figures. The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’ parent organization, steals hundreds of millions in donations meant for the Gaza Strip, in a single campaign¹. The Palestinian Authority jails dissidents. Hamas tortures and kills them. I didn’t even mention Palestinian Islamic Jihad yet. It’s all one big Islamist circus.

To sincerely believe that “Palestine” could be a functioning, productive country is like asking a volcano to simmer quietly overnight. Then you add Israel to the mix, and suddenly the world expects diplomacy and governance to emerge from a tinderbox that has been primed for eruption spanning generations.

In truth, every Palestinian “leader” who has been offered statehood — from 1938 onward — turned it down for the same reason: Accepting a deal requires accepting the end of the conflict, and no Palestinian “leader” can survive politically after ending the single narrative that binds their factions together.

For decades, Palestinian political culture has been built on the narrative that Israel is the source of all suffering, the “Great Satan,” the primary force preventing prosperity, dignity, and normal life. This narrative is not a footnote; it is the cornerstone of Palestinian identity politics. Palestinian “leaders” have spent generations telling their people that Israel is the singular cause of misery, humiliation, and displacement.

To now turn around and acknowledge that Israel is legitimate, permanent, and not going anywhere would not only be ideological heresy; it would be political suicide. Any leader who dared to reverse course, to admit that coexistence is possible or that Palestinian suffering has internal causes, would immediately be branded a traitor, a collaborator, a sellout. Even Mahmoud Abbas, longtime dictator of the Palestinian Authority, would likely have been assassinated by internal rivals long ago if Israel, ironically, were not protecting him.

In a society where legitimacy is measured by the intensity of one’s opposition to Israel, moderation is indistinguishable from betrayal. Palestinian “leaders” cannot move toward peace without delegitimizing the very narrative that keeps them in power, and they know it. No diplomatic framework can overcome this structural reality.

This is why, publicly, some Palestinians have signaled support for Trump’s proposed Gaza ceasefire plan — because rejecting it outright would expose them as obstructionists — but privately they are working to undermine it at every turn. They cannot embrace a plan that offers stability, accountability, or a path to normalization because such progress would unravel decades of messaging that blames Israel for every hardship. Accepting a workable ceasefire would mean admitting they have agency, responsibility, and the capacity to choose peace. And that, for a leadership built on grievance and perpetual victimhood, is simply not an option.

Going back decades, Western diplomats have negotiated with the Palestinians they hope exist rather than the Palestinians who actually do. This is the West’s great projection: the belief that Palestinian political culture mirrors its own aspirations — pluralism, civic institutions, negotiated compromise — when in reality it is organized around factionalism, clan allegiance, and the glorification of armed struggle.

The West imagines a nascent democracy chafing under occupation; Palestinians live in a deeply politicized society where media, schools, mosques, and political movements have spent generations cultivating a culture of virulent antisemitism and martyrdom. A society saturated in incitement cannot transition overnight to self-governance simply because a UN resolution declares it so.

The international community’s insistence on chasing peace plans despite repeated failure is not just naïveté; it is a structural incentive. A vast “peace process industry” now exists, employing diplomats, NGOs, consultants, and UN agencies whose relevance depends on the endurance of the conflict. Success would put them out of business. Perpetual process, not resolution, is their product. And so every new American administration is encouraged to produce some new diplomatic architecture, some new summit, some new signing ceremony designed to signal moral ambition while ignoring political reality.

Meanwhile, the Arab world (whose solidarity with Palestinians is often invoked in Western capitals) has little interest in an actual Palestinian state. Arab governments prefer the issue unresolved. It provides political cover, diplomatic leverage, and a perennial rallying cry. The Palestinians are not treated as a nation in need of sovereignty, but as a symbolic currency that loses value the moment the conflict ends.

Think about how many countries opened their arms to Ukrainian civilians after Russia’s invasion in 2022. Now think about how many Arab countries volunteered to absorb Palestinians after October 7th. The Arab world is not interested in Palestinian “liberation”; it is waiting for someone else to manage the fallout of its absence.

To invoke historical precedent, the truth is that peace requires not just treaties, but transformation. After World War II, Germany and Japan did not magically emerge as peaceful democracies. They underwent total ideological reconstruction: demilitarization, reeducation, replacement of extremist leadership, rewriting of curricula, and sustained foreign oversight. Their political cultures were not simply restrained; they were rebuilt.

Nothing even remotely comparable has been attempted in Palestinian society, where extremist narratives are not suppressed; they’re institutionalized. Any Palestinian polity aspiring to statehood will require a similar societal transformation, one that uproots the ideologies that have defined it for generations and constructs, from the ground up, the habits of civic life. Until then, talk of sovereignty is premature.

In practice, what remains is conflict management, not conflict resolution. Israel has understood this for decades, even as the world demands otherwise. It has learned that the Palestinian Authority must not collapse, because the alternative is worse; that Gaza must not become a military fortress, but cannot become a stable democracy either; that diplomats will issue statements while Israel intercepts weapons shipments; that the UN will debate frameworks while Israeli intelligence prevents the next massacre. This is not idealism; it is governance in a world where the perfect solution does not exist.

The tragedy of the international conversation is that it treats this truth as defeatism rather than realism. Yet moral clarity begins with acknowledging the limits of diplomacy. Peace does not emerge from rewarding violence or imagining partners into existence. Peace emerges when the ideological and structural foundations of violence are dismantled. Until Palestinian society undergoes a transformation as far-reaching as those once imposed on Germany and Japan, the international community will continue to chase illusions.

So the world will watch as the UN votes on another resolution, another attempt to conjure a peaceful Palestinian state out of a political culture not yet capable of sustaining one. But no vote, no speech, no ceremony can substitute for the hard work of internal reform. Until that day comes, there is no peace plan between Israel and the Palestinians. There is only the management of a conflict that the world refuses to see clearly, and that only truth, not paperwork, can ultimately transform.

As for us Israelis, we can handle Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran with or without a diplomatic framework. The rockets, tunnels, and militias are serious, but they are not existential. The real danger to Israel has never been outside its borders; it lies within: a lack of societal unity, political coherence, and national resilience.

Maintaining cohesion, ensuring strategic clarity, and preserving public trust are far more critical to Israel’s survival than whether a resolution passes in New York or a ceasefire is temporarily observed in Gaza. History has shown that when the country’s internal fabric is strong, Israel can weather any external storm.

But Israel’s internal cohesion is only part of the equation. True resilience requires unity across the global Jewish diaspora as well. Threats to Israel are not limited to missiles or militias; they extend to the erosion of solidarity, the fragmentation of communal support, and the weakening of a shared sense of purpose worldwide. When Jewish communities abroad are divided, disengaged, or politically fractured, Israel’s strategic depth shrinks, and its ability to withstand existential pressures is weakened.

Strength, therefore, is not just a matter of borders and armies; it is a matter of culture, identity, and a global network of Jews who stand informed, unified, and committed to the survival and flourishing of the Jewish state.

---

1. “Muslim Brotherhood stole half a billion dollars in Gaza donations, Arab sources reveal.” The Jerusalem Post.