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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
If we want to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at its core, we can dissect history books, documentaries, testimonials, and narratives.
Or we can look at how each people describes their national movement.
Israelis fought a War of Independence, while Palestinians have preached resistance.
Those words sound like competing descriptions of the same conflict, but they are not. They describe two fundamentally different political instincts.
Independence is something you build. Resistance is something you do against someone else. Independence requires institutions, borders, governments, compromises, responsibilities and, eventually, acceptance of reality. Resistance requires an enemy.
And this difference does not remain confined to politics. Over time, it shapes the society itself. A culture of independence asks: What can we build? What can we improve? What can we invent? What can we become? A culture of resistance asks: What did they take from us? Who is to blame? How do we make them pay? One mindset is oriented toward the future. The other is permanently chained to the past.
Independence creates agency. It forces a people to take responsibility for their own outcomes. Once Jews achieved our modern state, Zionism had to become practical. Failure could no longer be explained only by what others had done to Jews. Sovereignty meant ownership. If something was broken, Israelis had to fix it.
Resistance, when it becomes a permanent national identity, creates the opposite incentive. The enemy becomes responsible for everything. Grievance becomes more valuable than achievement. The martyr becomes more celebrated than the builder, and compromise more shameful than continued failure. A society can begin measuring success not by whether life is getting better, but by whether the struggle is still alive.
Independence says: Our future is our responsibility. Resistance says: Our condition is their fault. The first mindset builds countries. The second sustains a conflict for generations.
Hence, so much of Palestinian nationalism has been organized not around the creation of “Palestine,” but around the negation of Israel, the Jewish state.
That difference was visible from the beginning, which everyone thinks started in November 1947, when the United Nations proposed partitioning British Mandate Palestine into two states: one Jewish and one Arab. But 10 years earlier, in 1937, the British Peel Commission reached a conclusion that would become hauntingly familiar: Jews and Arabs wanted incompatible national futures, and the country should therefore be partitioned.
The proposed Jewish state was tiny. It would contain only a fraction of the land. Jerusalem would remain outside it under British control. For Zionists who believed the Jewish People had a historical claim to the Land of Israel, the proposal required an extraordinary concession: Accept sovereignty over only part of the land they considered their national home.
The Zionist movement agonized over it — and then it did something that would become one of the defining characteristics of Zionist political strategy. It chose the possibility of a state over the fantasy of getting everything. The Palestinian Arab leadership made a different choice: It rejected partition outright. And not because the proposed Arab state was too small. The Arab side would receive most of the territory contemplated by the plan. The objection was more fundamental: There should not be a Jewish state.
In other words, resistance.
The Arab Higher Committee demanded independence for an Arab Palestine as a whole and rejected the principle that Jews should exercise sovereignty over any portion of it. That was 1937, not 1947, not 1967, not 1973, not after the settlements, not after checkpoints, not after the first and second Lebanon wars, not after the first and second intifadas.
Decades before any of those things existed, the basic argument was already visible. One side was contemplating the painful mathematics of independence: How little can we accept and still build a country? The other was resisting the existence of Jewish sovereignty full stop.
That difference would repeat itself again and again, decade after decade, to this day.
Each time, Zionist leaders could point to everything they were not receiving. Instead they chose to concentrate on what they could build. Palestinian leaders could point to everything they were receiving. Instead they concentrated on what the Jews were receiving. That may be one of the most consequential differences between the two national movements.
Zionism learned how to say: not enough, but yes. Palestinian nationalism became tragically proficient at saying: not everything, therefore no.
This is one of the foundational facts of the conflict, and it is frequently buried beneath nearly a century of political mythology. The Jews were offered an imperfect state and said: We will build it. The Arabs were offered an imperfect state and effectively said: There will be no Jewish state.
That is why there is an Israel today and no such thing as a “Palestine.”
In 1948, Zionists had crossed the most important psychological threshold any national liberation movement must eventually cross: from fighting history to making history.
The Palestinian national movement largely did not and still has not. And that is where the word resistance becomes so revealing. Eventually, a national movement must decide whether its purpose is to build its own future or reverse somebody else’s. For too much of Palestinian political history, 1948 was not treated simply as a defeat from which to recover. It became a verdict that had to be overturned. Israel’s independence itself became the forever grievance.
If the Palestinian cause were merely resistance to Israel capturing Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and Gaza in 1967, there is a rather inconvenient historical problem: The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964.
In fact, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s original charter explicitly stated that the organization exercised no territorial sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, which was then controlled by Jordan, or Gaza, which was then administered by Egypt. Yet its mission was still the “liberation” of “Palestine.”
Liberation from what? Not the settlements. They did not exist. Not Israeli checkpoints protecting Israel from rampant Palestinian terror attacks. The checkpoints did not exist. Not Israeli control of Gaza. It did not exist.
The object of liberation was Israel itself.
After the 1967 war, the Palestinian National Charter became even more explicit. Its 1968 version declared armed struggle the path to the liberation of “Palestine” — not merely a temporary tactic, but the overall strategy. The Palestinian question has always been: “How do we undo Israel?”
There is a poison hidden inside a nationalism built primarily around resistance: The enemy becomes indispensable.
If your national identity is fundamentally about building your country, every school you open is a victory. Every company you build is a victory. Every immigrant you absorb is a victory. Every road, university, hospital, scientific discovery, election and cultural achievement becomes part of the national project.
But if your national identity is fundamentally about resisting another people, their normal life becomes your defeat. Their city is your grievance. Their language is your grievance. Their holidays are your grievance. Their flag is your grievance. Their existence becomes an injury.
And eventually even peace can begin to feel like surrender, because peace requires acknowledging that the thing you spent generations trying to reverse is permanent.
That is why the distinction between independence and resistance matters so much. Israel did not become successful because Israelis stopped remembering Jewish suffering. They remember it constantly — the destruction of our Temples, exile, pogroms, expulsions, massacres, the Holocaust. Israel is one of the few countries on earth that have two memorial days: one for Jews who died because they had no country, and one for Jews who died defending the country they finally built.
Jews could have constructed an entire national identity around grievance. Instead, Zionism eventually made a different decision: Suffering would explain why a Jewish state was necessary, but suffering would not become the purpose of the Jewish state.
That changed Jewish history. The Zionist answer to exile was not an eternal movement called “Resistance Against the Romans.” It was Jerusalem. The Zionist answer to antisemitism was not a global campaign demanding that every historical injustice against Jews first be reversed. It was sovereignty. The answer to powerlessness was power. The answer to refugeehood was citizenship. The answer to destruction was construction.
And perhaps nothing illustrates the difference better than what happened after 1948.
Israel absorbed enormous numbers of Jewish refugees and immigrants, including Holocaust survivors and Jews fleeing or leaving countries across the Middle East and North Africa. They arrived traumatized, impoverished, and often stripped of everything they owned.
Israel could have built a political identity around their dispossession. Instead, it built kibbutzim and moshavim. It built homes. It built universities. It built an army. It revived Hebrew. It developed agriculture. It built companies. It held elections. It became a country. That is what independence looks like.
Independence does not mean forgetting what happened to you. It means refusing to allow what happened to you to determine everything that happens next.
Every step of the way, Palestinian nationalism has done the opposite. The refugee camp became not merely a temporary humanitarian condition but a political symbol passed from generation to generation. The key to a house lost in 1948 became more politically sacred than the blueprint for a house that might be built tomorrow. The map of what existed before Israel became more emotionally powerful than a serious plan for what “Palestine” could become.
“Resistance” became romanticized precisely because resistance postpones the hardest obligation of independence: responsibility. A resistance movement can blame the enemy for everything; a state cannot. A state eventually has to collect garbage, balance budgets, police neighborhoods, build sewer systems, create jobs, educate children, suppress armed factions, fight corruption, compromise with neighbors, and explain why promises were not kept.
Independence is brutally unromantic. That is why successful national liberation movements eventually stop being liberation movements. They become governments. Zionism understood this. At some point the Jewish People had to stop asking the world for permission to exist and begin accepting responsibility for what Jewish sovereignty actually required.
That is why the Israeli story, for all its flaws and failures, became a story of independence. And it is why the endless glorification of “resistance” has been so destructive for Palestinians. Resistance without a realistic political destination is not liberation. It is repetition. Fight, lose, shame and blame, radicalize, fight again, lose again, rise and repeat. Create another generation whose inheritance is the unfinished war of the previous generation, then call the cycle “steadfastness.”
There comes a point when refusing to accept defeat stops being courageous and starts becoming stupidity. Germany lost territory. Japan lost an empire. India was partitioned. Pakistan was partitioned again when Bangladesh became independent. Greece and Turkey experienced mass population transfers. Millions of people across the twentieth century lost homes, villages and ancestral lands. History is filled with catastrophic borders.
Most successful countries were eventually built by people who understood an unpleasant truth: History cannot always be reversed.
Imagine a Palestinian national movement whose central slogan was not about return, revenge, resistance, or liberation “from the river to the sea,” but something painfully ordinary: We are going to build the most successful Arab society in the Middle East.
Imagine Palestinian leaders competing over who can build better schools rather than who has resisted Israel more dramatically. Imagine martyrdom losing its prestige to entrepreneurship. Imagine the political hero being the person who creates 10,000 Palestinian jobs. Imagine refugee camps disappearing because Palestinian leaders insist that their people deserve permanent homes rather than permanent symbols of grievance. Imagine Palestinian children being taught that Haifa can be the city their grandparents came from without needing to become the city they someday conquer.
Jews know this distinction intimately. A Jew can say, “My family came from Baghdad,” without demanding Baghdad. A Jew can say, “My grandparents were expelled from Poland,” without raising children to recapture Kraków. Memory does not require political reversal. Loss does not require eternal war. And history does not have to be erased before the future can begin.
That may ultimately be the greatest difference between the Israeli War of Independence and the Palestinian mythology of resistance. The Zionist movement eventually answered the question: What are we fighting for? The answer was: our own state. Palestinian politics has spent far too much of its history answering a different question: Who are we fighting against? Their answer was and still is: the Jews.
Until that changes, no diplomatic formula will solve the conflict. There is no territorial compromise between a people that wants its state to survive and a movement that considers that state’s existence the original sin. That conflict can end only when independence defeats resistance.
Israel’s War of Independence ended in 1949. The Palestinians’ war of resistance has continued, in different forms, for generations. Perhaps the real Palestinian revolution will begin when they finally decide to have a “War of Independence” of their own — not a war to destroy Israel, but a desire to build something of their own.
The day that happens, if it ever does, Palestinians will not have abandoned their national cause. They will finally have chosen one.
Brilliant
"The other is permanently chained to the past." Islam is living in the 7th-century and unless the so-called "Palestinians" enter the modern world their endless resistance will continue while NOT building a better world for their people who live in squalor by choice.