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The path to Palestinian statehood has been crushed beneath an avalanche of bombs, bullets, smoke, and fire. “After Hamas is destroyed Israel must retain security control over Gaza to ensure that Gaza will no longer pose a threat to Israel, a requirement that contradicts the demand for Palestinian sovereignty,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a prepared statement in January.
The path to Palestinian statehood has been crushed beneath an avalanche of bombs, bullets, smoke, and fire. “After Hamas is destroyed Israel must retain security control over Gaza to ensure that Gaza will no longer pose a threat to Israel, a requirement that contradicts the demand for Palestinian sovereignty,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a prepared statement in January.
What little hard-earned trust there was between Israelis and Palestinians has been shattered both by the slaughter of civilians by Hamas in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7, 2023—the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust—and the subsequent war between Hamas and Israel. More than 30,000 Palestinians have now died, the majority of whom were civilians. Violent resistance has failed Palestinians—and empowered extremists in Israel.
In the Israeli collective psyche, Oct. 7 was a tremendous violation because of the sneak nature of the attack, the dismembering and burning of corpses, the use of systemic rape as a weapon of war, and the targeting of civilians including children in kibbutzim and attendees at a music festival. There is little appetite for peace with the perpetuators.
In Gaza, meanwhile, Israel is carrying out a brutal and unremitting war that has buried countless children under rubble and seen the destruction of more than half of all houses as well as libraries, court houses, hospitals, and all of the territory’s universities. Many Palestinians view the Israeli military offensive as an attempted genocide. The greater part of the Palestinian political spectrum, including both Fatah and Hamas, broadly support the South African case in the International Court of Justice.
Yet there is little hope of real victory for either side. Even today, parts of Gaza remain under Hamas control, and the top figurehead commanders inside Gaza who oversaw the planning and execution of the Al-Aqsa Flood—Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif—have not been captured or killed. The Hamas political leadership outside Palestine is, for the most part, also still at large—top Hamas political bureau members Ismail Haniyeh, Khaled Meshal, and Mousa Abu Marzook are still alive, while Saleh Al-Arouri was assassinated by Israel in Beirut on Jan. 2.
Both sides have hardened against a two-state solution. In a Jan. 16 interview, Meshal dismissed the possibility of a two-state solution and said the Oct. 7 assault on Israel proved that liberating Palestine “from the river to the sea” is a realistic idea. In November, another Hamas political bureau member Ghazi Hammad pledged that Hamas would “repeat October 7 again and again” until they achieved their goals—the total destruction of Israel and a Palestinian state throughout the entirety of the land.
Strategically, this makes no sense. While occupied people have a right to violently resist military occupation, for relatively disempowered people, trying to assert their cause through advocacy and negotiation is a much more fruitful domain than violence because it relies on force of argument rather than military might.
The Palestinian case for self-determination—like any stateless people—is bulletproof, even if Palestinians themselves are not. The principle of self-determination is enshrined in the U.N. Charter, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Palestinians have an inalienable right to rule themselves in the land on which they live.
The trouble is that Hamas’ demands go far beyond demanding self-governance. What they and Palestinian anti-Zionists demand is the right to extinguish their neighbor’s self-governance, and conquer their neighbor’s territory. It’s the same right that Israeli extremists claim as they prepare new settlements on the West Bank—and even dream of seizing land in Gaza.
This overarching narrative of Palestinian resistance against the existence of any kind of Israel or Zionism has been deeply embedded into the cause since the start of the conflict—and has produced little but tragedy for Palestinians. Since before 1948, the use of force to resist Zionist presence in the land was normalized and glorified. Muslim leaders such as the Grand Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husseini refused to permit the establishment of any kind of Jewish state at the heart of the Arab world on what they held to be Islamic land. This absolute rejectionism fueled the anti-Zionist pogroms of the 1920s and 1930s, and spurred the Arab Palestinian factions to try to extinguish the newly created state of Israel in 1947 to 1948.
It was only in the 1990s that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) renounced the strategy of violence, recognized Israel, and switched toward a strategy of diplomacy and negotiation. But this did not last very long. After the failure to agree upon a negotiated two-state solution at Camp David, Yasser Arafat gave his blessing to armed groups including Hamas to initiate a Second Intifada, perhaps as an attempt to achieve greater negotiating leverage and further Israeli concessions. Hamas’ takeover of Gaza and their war against Israel is simply a continuation of this long history of anti-Zionism.
Of course, this approach has failed to achieve both Hamas’ objective of eradicating Israel, and also failed to grant Palestinians any kind of state. So why is this?
Reliance on violence fuels a cycle of violence. This cycle of violence has led to severe Israeli retaliation, exacerbating the suffering of civilians and leading to deep humanitarian crises, cruelly visible in Gaza today. The use of violence has sabotaged the Palestinian cause on the international stage. Violent tactics have frequently been used to justify the delegitimization of Palestinians, and serve as an excuse to prolong the occupation of the Palestinian Territories by Israel. Horrific acts such as those of Oct. 7 alienate potential allies and supporters, particularly in the Western world.
This is not to mention the internal Palestinian political landscape. The split between Hamas and the PLO over tactics, strategy, and goals has fragmented Palestinians. This has made it more challenging—if not nigh on impossible—to present any kind of united front in negotiations with Israel and the international community.
The Israeli right has used Palestinian fragmentation as a way to prevent the development of a two-state solution. According to the Jerusalem Post, in 2019 Netanyahu admitted as much when he told a private meeting of his Likud party that bolstering Hamas was part of his strategy to help maintain a separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Yet the use of peaceful protests and strategies has also faced significant challenges. Despite the moral and ethical superiority of nonviolent resistance, its effectiveness in the Palestinian context has been limited due to several factors. Peaceful protests often receive less media attention compared to violent conflicts simply because they are of lower impact and lack the visceral shock of terrorism.
This lack of visibility can limit the impact on the global stage, making it harder to garner any kind of recognition or negotiation leverage. While violence might isolate Palestinians on the world stage, the dramatic and attention-grabbing nature of violent attacks helps to bolster Hamas’ standing on the Palestinian street, where they are seen to be the ones doing something—anything—to fight for the Palestinian cause.
Beyond this, peaceful protests have often been met with heavy-handed responses from Israeli security forces—such as with the Great March of Return in 2018. This suppression not only risks the lives and well-being of protestors and also discourages participation from the broader population. Violent elements including Hamas have also infiltrated these movements, and turned efforts at peaceful protest into acts of aggression.
The ongoing occupation, the blockade of Gaza, and settlement expansions in the West Bank underpin a sense of desperation and frustration among Palestinians. As Frantz Fanon suggested in his anti-colonialist opus The Wretched of the Earth, violence sometimes can be viewed as a cathartic force and as a response to the systemic violence inflicted upon an occupied people by a process of colonization or military occupation, and thus as a means for an occupied or colonized people to reclaim their humanity and agency.
Additionally, Palestinian nonviolent campaigns have been blighted by the same tendency for maximalist demands as Hamas’ violent campaigns. The Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for example opposes Palestinians having dialogue with Israelis, in what they call “anti-normalization,” and makes maximalist demands about the right of return for all Palestinian refugees to Israel. By making maximalist demands that are never going to be met in a negotiation, nonviolent campaigns can doom themselves to failure through the perception that these demands are not serious or in good faith.
After this war, we must call for a new approach rooted in realism, a renewed commitment to coexistence, and the willingness for both sides to compromise. Both Israelis and Palestinians need to abandon maximalist demands and delegitimization to focus on pragmatic solutions, accepting the fact that neither side is going to disappear, or push one or the other into the sea.
Israelis and Palestinians must both accept that maximalist positions—whether it’s the complete destruction of Israel as a state or the denial of Palestinian statehood —are unattainable, implausible, and only perpetuate the cycle of violence, hatred, and trauma. Moving beyond this demands a culture of coexistence, where both Israelis and Palestinians acknowledge each other’s right to live in peace and security. Education and public discourse—on both sides—must emphasize mutual respect, understanding, and the historical and emotional ties that both groups have to the land.
The focus must shift back to negotiating a pragmatic compromise that can satisfy the core needs of both sides. Palestinians and Israelis need to prepare to head back to the negotiating table and work out our differences. This involves working towards establishing a Palestinian state with agreed borders, preventing the takeover of this state by terrorist groups like Hamas. We need to establish a consensus on Jerusalem’s status, refugee rights, and an end to settlement expansion. On the Palestinian side, trust was lost in previous peace efforts due to settlement expansion. On the Israeli side, trust was lost due to continued violence, leading to a lack of faith in Palestinian leadership’s ability to control extremism and provide security.
The international community, including regional powers and global organizations, must play a constructive role in mediating and supporting this process. This includes ensuring that any agreements reached are respected and providing economic and political support for peace initiatives. This pathway to peace is undoubtedly challenging and requires courage, vision, and perseverance. But it’s the only way toward a future in which two peoples can live side by side in peace, dignity, and safety.
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