The Long Brief: Manufactured Self-Defeat
How Palestinian leadership choices—not history alone—produced paralysis, stagnation, and isolation, while civilians paid the price.
Shalom, friends.
I keep running into the same exchange.
It happens after talks. Late dinners. Long flights. Someone serious, informed, sympathetic leans in and asks something along the lines of: “But what were they supposed to do?”
Sometimes it’s phrased more gently. “There was never a real choice.”
I used to answer that carefully. Too carefully. With layers of qualification meant to sound humane.
Too much reading cured me of that habit.
Primary documents. Leadership speeches translated from the original Arabic—not what they openly say in English. School curricula. Budget line items. Donor audits. Internal PA records. Political charters. Prisoner payment schedules. Polling that doesn’t get quoted on campus.
What replaced caution wasn’t cynicism.
It was clarity.
A pattern snaps into focus. Not a tragedy. A system. One built deliberately. One that rewards grievance, penalizes reform, and makes self-defeat a rational strategy for elites.
This long brief comes out of that reckoning. It is not written to flatter activists. It is not written to absolve jihad. And it is not written to soothe Western illusions. It is written to answer a single question without euphemism:
How did a national movement with unprecedented global sympathy end up politically paralyzed, economically stagnant, and strategically isolated—largely by its own leadership’s design?
Before we proceed, we need a shared operating framework.
Self-defeat refers to repeatable policy and governance choices that reliably worsen outcomes for the population over time, independent of stated intentions. In the Palestinian case, this means leadership decisions that entrenched corruption, rejectionism, and violence even when alternative paths were available.
Inculcation describes the sustained, institutional transmission of belief through education, media, ritual, and incentives. Here, grievance is mobilized. Children are taught duty, not history. Resistance is framed as identity. Compromise as treason.
Rejectionism is the doctrine that partial outcomes are illegitimate by definition. All or nothing—which usually just means nothing. For the Palestinians, rejection hardened into a loyalty test and survival strategy for those making millions off of their masses.
Violence as governance means the use of armed action to rule, intimidate, suppress dissent, and substitute for administration. Rockets replace referendums. Militias replace institutions. “Resistance” replaces accountability. Civilians absorb the cost.
A necessary clarification.
Critiquing Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, or Hamas leadership is not an indictment of every Palestinian civilian. Many civilians live under coercive systems they did not choose.
That said, illusions help no one.
Recent polling shows roughly 70 percent of Palestinians support Hamas, and even more endorse the October 7 pogrom. The minority who oppose Hamas are not, by and large, voting blocs for Western liberal democracy. They overwhelmingly support other jihadist or rejectionist currents. Mass opinion did not restrain leadership choices. It reinforced them.
Intent matters less than outcome. Rhetoric matters less than policy. External pressure matters less than internal continuity.
Israel’s policies have varied sharply across decades. Palestinian leadership behavior has not.
Rather than neutralizing evil or blurring agency in the foolish quest to political correctness, let’s look instead at how grievance was operationalized, how refusal became rational, and how a leadership class preserved power by ensuring that failure remained permanent.