The Palestinian cause has one defining feature: the refusal of its champions to accept any responsibility for the situation they’ve made for themselves.
The Palestinian cause has one defining feature: the refusal of its champions to accept any responsibility for the situation they’ve made for themselves.
T he Palestinian cause has existed since 1948, with rarely even a half decade of quiet during that time. Oddly enough, in all of the media coverage and activism around that cause, Palestinians themselves seem to have no agency. In the pro-Palestinian narrative, things simply happen to the Palestinian people, entirely caused by outside forces. In psychology, a concept called “locus of control” describes how individuals perceive their own control over events and behavior. Those with an internal locus of control feel they have a great degree of influence, while those with an external locus of control view their fate as determined by forces outside themselves. Generally, an internal locus is psychologically healthier than its opposite, as it allows the individual to own his choices and make positive changes in his life.
The Palestinian cause, its leadership, and its foreign backers fully embrace the psychologically unhealthy option — a totally external locus of control. Everyone else, but particularly Israel and the Jewish people writ large, is to blame for the woes of the Palestinian people. In reality, however, the Palestinians have a great deal of control over their situation. The self-abnegation of their agency is a tactic meant to camouflage consistently poor choices and overwhelming hatred of Jews, while garnering sympathy from useful idiots in the West.
This pretending at a lack of agency has been the narrative core for the Palestinians from 1948 onward. The Palestinian narrative of the events of that year, which they call the “nakba” (more on the evolution of this word below), is the origin story for the myth of Palestinian helplessness. In their telling, the disaster of 1948 simply befell the Palestinian people, with the Jews forcibly evicting them from their land, making them into refugees, and committing war crimes against them. Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” speaks to this lack of control. It presents the events of 1948 as fully externally driven, without Palestinian involvement. This pat story, however, could not be further from the truth.
In the historical record, it is clear that these events were driven primarily by the Palestinian Arabs themselves, along with their backers among the Arab nations. The U.N. Partition Plan, which would have created a Jewish state alongside an Arab one in British Mandatory Palestine, was accepted by the Jewish population, even though it would result in a smaller state than initially promised. The Palestinian Arabs, however, refused the partition and launched a war of extermination against the nascent State of Israel. Seven Arab armies invaded alongside local Palestinian Arab forces, seeking to deny any homeland for Jews in the Levant.
Palestinian Arab leaders were so confident in their eventual success that they pushed for Arab inhabitants of the area to leave their homes to simplify the military operation. Many did so. To give their people motivation to evacuate, the leadership exaggerated battles like Deir Yassin into so-called massacres and demonized the Jewish people. A glorious Arab triumph would soon allow them to return to their homes. Yet many of those who left would later come to regret it, as the Jewish forces emerged victorious. Originally, the term nakba was used to lament this defeat — it described the Arabs’ own ignominious military failure — but it morphed into its current meaning in the 1990s as part of the denial-of-agency strategy. Activists now claim that the dispossession of the Palestinian Arabs and the creation of Israel was not only a catastrophe, but one completely out of the Palestinians’ control.
The next step in the abdication of agency came with the interminable perpetuation of the Palestinian refugee issue. The families that left during 1948 were made into refugees by the war. This was not at all uncommon for the period, with large-scale population transfers occurring in East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Eastern Europe — as well as the mass ethnic cleansing of Jews across the Middle East. None of those peoples were turned into permanent refugees, but the Palestinians claimed special status, seeking a bogus “right of return” to the homes they fled. This unique status earns the Palestinians a large number of extraordinary benefits. The U.N. has a special agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), to provide these forever refugees with significant benefits meant to entrench the idea that the Palestinians are not the authors of their own fate. Again, this is a blatant falsehood.
Arab leaders deliberately chose this permanent displacement instead of taking the time-honored approach of integrating long-term refugees. For the past 75 years, Palestinians have lived in segregated ghettos around the Arab world. In Jordan, Lebanon, and elsewhere, they are not citizens and have no political rights, even after decades of residence. This clearly seems suboptimal, so why would Palestinian leaders choose this fate for their charges? The answer is simple: It allows them to garner undue international sympathy and blame Israel for the predicament they put themselves in.
Insisting on a permanent refugee status for Palestinians serves several purposes for Arab leaders. It grants the Arab world a cudgel by which to attempt to force Israel into unilateral concessions. The refugees are a major topic in every round of negotiations, with maximalist demands for a full “right of return” used as leverage against the Jewish state. Another reason Arab states refuse to integrate their Palestinian refugee populations is that, after decades of radicalism, the refugee population is quite politically disruptive. In the most extreme cases, Palestinians have attempted to overthrow the governments of their host nations, including Jordan and Lebanon, to push them into existential war with Israel. Making these radical refugees into citizens would disrupt the tenuous control Arab dictators have over their polities.
Paradoxically, this is a highly beneficial arrangement for the Palestinians as well. The Palestinian people, en masse, have embraced a near-religious devotion to the idea that they will be able to recapture the status quo ante bellum of 1948, returning to their homes and undoing the State of Israel. One would think that living in long-term refugee camps would be a miserable plight, but these are not the tent cities that the term conjures up in the mind’s eye. They are large-scale, concrete apartment blocks that look no different from any other residential neighborhoods of the region. And they’re paid for by international relief dollars. That enormous flow of funds through the United Nations and its NGO partners enriches the Palestinian leadership through corruption, provides jobs for large swaths of Palestinian society, and funds the terrorism meant to destroy Israel. It pays the families of terrorists, provides construction dollars for the building of tunnel networks, and funds salaries for Hamas cadres. No wonder the refugee issue hasn’t been resolved; it’s entirely within Palestinian interests to keep the scam going indefinitely.
The flip side of that coin is the failure of Palestinians to achieve statehood, something that is depicted as being stymied by Israel. In the Palestinian telling, Israel refused to countenance a two-state solution, allow Palestinian self-determination, and grant Palestinians the territory they deserved. This nefarious Israeli role in “suppressing Arab democracy” is a repeat theme in pro-Palestinian activism, with no acknowledgment of any Palestinian role in the process. Once again, this flies in the face of reality. Historically, the statehood problem was driven almost entirely by Palestinian rejectionism and embrace of terroristic violence. Every time statehood has been offered to Palestinian leadership, it has been rejected. Israel has consistently made unilateral concessions — withdrawing from Gaza in 2005, allowing the Palestinian Authority to run a government in the West Bank, and offering to divide Jerusalem for a future Palestinian capital — with no commensurate response.
Instead of choosing the arduous task of state-building and governance, Palestinian leadership has chosen terrorism, eliminationism, and statelessness. And that choice has been repeatedly ratified by the people they lead. The first and second intifadas were widely popular among Palestinians, being viewed as righteous resistance against Israeli oppression. The latter terror campaign, one joined by thousands of ordinary Palestinians, was a direct response to the generous offer of statehood that Yasser Arafat turned down at Camp David in 2000. Arafat himself was recognized as the leader of the Palestinian nationalist cause largely owing to his support for violent attacks on Israeli civilians. Hamas was elected by the people of Gaza precisely because it is a terror organization. It was not expected to govern but to carry out terror attacks against Israel. Indeed, the barbaric October 7 attacks are supported by the vast majority of the Palestinian public. In this, it seems as though the Palestinians care less about gaining their own state than they do about destroying someone else’s.
The final, and most relevant, false denial of Palestinian responsibility is the blaming of the military conflict with Israel and the blockade of Gaza purely on external forces. This is exceedingly clear in the rhetoric and activism around the current Israel–Hamas war. The pre-war blockade of Gaza is presented as a cause of the conflict and is ascribed entirely to uncontrollable outside powers: imposed by Israel for no reason having to do with Palestinians’ own actions, an arbitrary and capricious exercise of oppressive power against a helpless people. In reality, the limitation of supplies into the Hamas enclave was imposed because of chronic terrorist rocket barrages and the importation of weapons and military components from Iran and other malign actors. And it must be remembered that Egypt, which also shares a border with Gaza, imposed its own blockade in 2013 — a cordon sanitaire intended to reduce weapons smuggling and prevent Hamas-linked terror attacks in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
The war in Gaza is a case in point when it comes to the Palestinian external locus of control. The Palestinian line on the war, which is echoed by international media and NGOs, is to portray the airstrikes causing destruction in the Strip, the consequent deaths of civilians, and the ongoing dislocation of civilians as being carried out by Israel with the malicious intent of maximizing harm to Palestinian innocents. Unsurprisingly, there is no mention of the deliberate co-location of Hamas military assets within, underneath, and around civilian infrastructure. Hamas, backed by most Palestinians, sparked this war with its despicable terror massacre and kidnapping of innocent civilians, from babies to grandmothers. Hamas has continued to hold hostages, make ridiculous demands in negotiations, and steal humanitarian aid for its own use. The extension of the war is entirely Hamas’s responsibility. But it’s We blame Israel all the way down.
The full-scale abdication of agency is exceedingly maladaptive for a people or a nation-state. A victimhood mentality is at odds with a society that controls its own destiny: Sovereignty entails responsibility. Palestinians need to learn that their choices are their own and have consequences that they must live with. Blaming everything on external forces outside of their control has created a version of learned helplessness among the Palestinian population, one that speaks poorly of their ability to run a successful nation-state. Combining that victimhood mentality and repudiation of control with the widespread approval of terrorist violence is hardly a recipe for peaceful self-determination. Though international voices are calling for a Palestinian state, the Palestinians themselves must adopt a new mindset and accept their own agency. Unless and until they do, the creation of a Palestinian state would be a grave mistake.