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.
Manufactured Palestinian Self-Defeat
How grievance, rejectionism, and violence were institutionalized as governance—and why civilians paid the cost?
Palestinian self-defeat does not originate in failed summits. It is manufactured long before leaders sit at tables they already intend to overturn.
The production line runs through classrooms, media studios, mosques, and public rituals. It is reinforced by budgets, stipends, promotions, and punishments. The objective is obedience. Intellectual rigor? Out the window. Each generation is trained to treat compromise as treason and violence as virtue—so that rejection becomes reflex, not debate.
This is political infrastructure. The Palestinian Authority’s (to say nothing about Hamas or UNRWA versions that do much the same, sometimes even more egregiously) school system functions as a centralized conditioning mechanism.
Multiple independent reviews, including EU-commissioned evaluations, converge on the same findings across years and revisions. Israel is erased or abstracted. Jews are demonized and stripped of historical presence. Jew-hate is taught. Negotiation disappears. Violence remains.
Israel is rarely named. It appears as “the Zionist occupation,” uniformly aggressive and illegitimate. Jewish historical ties to Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem, or Gaza are denied or omitted. Maps erase Israel entirely. From the river to the sea is presented as a single unresolved entitlement.
Peace agreements are excised. References to Oslo, Camp David, and Annapolis vanish from textbooks—insomuch as they were ever mentioned even obliquely. So does any sustained treatment of non-violent conflict resolution. A Palestinian child can complete primary and secondary education without encountering coexistence as a legitimate option. They cannot make it that far without being taught to hate Jews and the West, however.
Children memorize poems pledging their lives to “the revolution.” First-graders learn “martyr” as a neutral noun. Arithmetic problems count prisoners. Geography teaches total territorial claim. Haifa and Jaffa are framed not as neighbors but as future objectives.
This is intentional, authorized, and subsidized (by tax dollars from the West) radicalization.
PA officials have openly defended this content, arguing that recognition of Israel and removal of militant symbolism must wait until political demands are met. In plain language: indoctrination continues until victory arrives.
Victory never does.
The result is that a population taught that compromise is betrayal cannot sustain pragmatic politics. Rejection is preloaded before proposals exist.
What those classroom plant, media and public space harvest.
PA-controlled and affiliated outlets repeat a fixed lexicon—resistance, steadfastness, martyrdom, revolution. These words define moral boundaries in the culture.
Terrorists are honored. Attacks on Israeli civilians are framed as “operations.” Funerals become political theater. Official statements after atrocities impose solidarity—and often call for more atrocities.
The pay-for-slay payment systems completes the loop. The PA allocates substantial funds to stipends for imprisoned terrorists and families of attackers. Officials defend these payments as honor, not welfare. Palestinians—including one whom I sat on his living room floor in his village in Judea—deny it exists or, when pressed, will try to pass it off as welfare to an outsider. However, when you listen to their media or view their group chats, it is clear that violence is not merely excused—it is incentivized.
Schools, camps, tournaments, and squares bear the names of mass murderers. Dalal Mughrabi—who led the 1978 Coastal Road massacre killing 38 Israeli civilians, including children—remains institutionalized as a role model. Funding freezes may come and go. The names stay.
The message is unambiguous: killing Jews earns status and salary.
Nakba commemorations frame 1948 as reversible error, not history. Loss is ritualized without resolution. Progress is replaced by grievance maintenance. UN resolutions substitute for governance. The population is fed symbolism while leadership feeds on permanence and diverts Western funds offshore for their luxe retirements.
This system persists because institutions enforce it.
Education ministries, media authorities, clerical bodies, and NGO ecosystems are aligned to preserve the narrative. Careers depend on compliance. Budgets reward repetition. Dissent threatens livelihoods.
Foreign aid has sustained the structure. Billions flowed with limited conditionality. Paying salaries for educators who teach incitement and broadcasters who glorify terror.
When internal critics surface, enforcement follows.
In Gaza, Hamas arrests journalists and anyone engaged in dialogue with Israelis. Treason charges are routine—though due process is often just flicking off the safety switch.
In Judea and Samaria, tolerance is marginally wider and sharply bounded. Critics of corruption or incitement face detention or death. The Palestinian I met with? If he was identified, he and his family would face severe consequences.
He would, relative to his society, be considered a “peace activist.” Of course, that means he’s willing to acknowledge Jews aren’t going anywhere—at least in a private setting. Publicly? Not a chance. In our conversation, he wasn’t particularly pro-PA, but he couldn’t quite get around to condemning them either.
Western discourse leans on a comforting fiction: civilians are moderate, leaders are the problem. The visit I just described erases it and contemporary polling dismantles it.
Roughly 70 percent of Palestinians express support for Hamas. Even more support the October 7 pogrom. Those who oppose Hamas do not coalesce around liberal democracy. They largely support alternative jihadist or rejectionist currents.
Decades of indoctrination produce a public that mirrors it. The feedback loop hardens. Reform becomes politically suicidal.
Rejection as Regime Logic
Across decades, Palestinian leadership has treated partial outcomes as illegitimate by definition. Not as insufficient. Illegitimate. The result is not a series of tragic miscalculations. It is a repeatable pattern in which leadership prefers permanent conflict over any settlement that would end the struggle—and with it, their political utility.
In 1947, the UN proposed partition: two states, Jewish and Arab. The Jewish Agency accepted. Palestinian leadership rejected outright, unwilling to tolerate any Jewish sovereignty. The rejection led directly to war, defeat, and the loss of territory they might otherwise have held. Maximal denial replaced imperfect compromise. The lesson went unlearned.
In 1967, after Israel’s victory, the Arab League issued the Khartoum Resolution—no peace, no recognition, no negotiation. The PLO embraced it fully. Its charter declared Israel null and void. They elevated armed struggle as the only path. Egypt and Jordan later exited this framework and secured (albeit tenuously) peace and stability. Palestinian leadership did not.
By the late 1980s, rhetorical cracks appeared. The PLO nominally accepted a state in Judea and Samaria and Gaza. Internally, nothing changed. The rejectionist narrative remained intact. The acceptance functioned as diplomatic access rather than an ideological revision.
Oslo exposed it plainly. While the Palestinians recognized Israel on paper. In Arabic discourse, education, and media, Israel’s legitimacy remained denied. Arafat spoke peace abroad and hudna at home. The groundwork for reversal stayed in place.
Camp David, in 2000, was an inflection point. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, backed by President Clinton, offered a Palestinian state. It would have sat on roughly 91–97 percent of Judea and Samaria, all of Gaza, and it would have had the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem for its capital. To say nothing of a framework for refugees involving compensation and return.
Arafat, privately, intimated he would sign. Instead, when it was time to make a decision, he said no. No counteroffer. No alternative map. No closing effort.
Arafat “said no to everything,” according to President Bill Clinton. Dennis Ross concluded Arafat never intended to end the conflict. Within weeks, the Second Intifada launched. Rejection moved from diplomacy to bloodshed.
The Clinton Parameters that followed met most Palestinian demands again. Israel accepted with reservations. Arafat rejected them as well. Even Arab leaders (albeit for Western consumption) warned him not to walk away. He did anyway.
The pattern repeated again. In 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Mahmoud Abbas an even more expansive deal: near-total withdrawal, land swaps, a divided Jerusalem, international administration of holy sites, symbolic refugee return. Abbas rejected it outright. No counterproposal. No referendum. Silence.
Since then, the reflex has held. Interim autonomy plans. Economic frameworks. Proximity talks. All rejected or ignored. When the Trump administration proposed an economic conference in Bahrain, the Palestinian leadership did not merely reject the political plan. It boycotted the economic discussion entirely and threatened Palestinians who attended. Normalization itself became treason.
Palestinian leadership lacks democratic legitimacy. Elections have been avoided for nearly two decades. The common consensus is that authority flows from revolutionary posture, not consent. In reality, it’s just a manifestation of the tribal nature of most peoples who didn’t go through the Enlightenment. In either case and in this environment, compromise threatens survival.
Any leader who signs a final deal must explain concessions on refugees, Jerusalem, and the end of armed struggle. That explanation collides with decades of indoctrination. It collides with the theological framework shared by the militant Islamic world. It invites accusations of betrayal. It risks assassination. Yasser Arafat reportedly told Clinton he feared ending up like Sadat.
Let’s look at Hamas. Their entire brand rests on the claim that Fatah sold out. Polling reflects the effect. Even after over two years of war that they started on October 7th, the vast majority of Palestinians support them! Even more support the October 7 pogrom and want to see it repeated. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah-linked militias retain the capacity to derail any deal with violence. Leaders know it. They act accordingly. Better to say no and blame Israel than say yes and face internal war. They’re too comfortable with their armored limousines, mansions, and really fat offshore bank accounts.
They feed those accounts out of Western coffers. Permanent conflict sustains aid flows, diplomatic attention, and, in turn, elite privilege. A resolved conflict ends the grievance economy. For those at the top, that not a reward.
During Oslo implementation, billions flowed for institution-building. Arafat chose militias over monopoly of force and patronage over governance. Corruption flourished. The soil was poisoned before final talks began.
In 2005, Israel withdrew fully from Gaza. The opportunity was there. The Palestinians need only to govern and build credibility. Instead, chaos followed. Greenhouses were looted. Power generation plants were left to moulder. Rockets flew—built out of civilian infrastructure Israelis left behind. Hamas framed withdrawal as victory of violence. Abbas declined confrontation. Two years later, Hamas seized Gaza at the polls.
In 2014, Kerry’s framework offered another opening. Abbas stalled. When momentum faded, he pivoted to symbolic UN recognition. The ground situation did not change.
Coercion as Statecraft
One of the most perverse manifestations of Palestinian self-defeat is the extent to which violence has been allowed to substitute for normal governance. In healthy political systems, leaders seek to monopolize force under rule of law and provide services. In the Palestinian system, leaders and factions use violence instead of law and services. This phenomenon of violence as governance has had devastating consequences. It entrenches warlordism. It scares off investment. But for the power players, it offers advantages. Intimidation of dissent. Media attention when attacking Israel. Maintenance of a revolutionary aura.
The Palestinian arena is defined by overlapping armed hierarchies masquerading as politics. The lines between “military wing” and “political leadership” are deliberately blurred. Fatah, the dominant party in the PA, historically had its Tanzim militia and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades (responsible for many attacks in the Second Intifada). Hamas, ruling Gaza, has the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades — essentially a standing army in all but name. Even smaller groups (Islamic Jihad, Popular Front, etc.) maintain armed cells. Instead of building a single national army accountable to a civilian government, the Palestinian leadership landscape is a patchwork of parallel power structures. For example, in the West Bank, the PA has multiple security services, but there are also armed clans and Fatah-aligned gangs who operate semi-autonomously.
In Gaza, Hamas resolved the question decisively. After winning elections, it executed rivals, threw opponents from rooftops, and institutionalized one-party rule under armed supervision. Since then, Hamas security organs are the government. Courts follow the gun. Dissent is criminalized as treason. Even with all that, smaller parties still get support. Unfortunately, many of them are more militant than even Hamas.
In Judea and Samaria, the arrangement is messier but no less coercive. Fatah holds the PA in the West Bank partly by suppressing Hamas activists there (with the help of Israeli security, ironically). The Palestinian Authority maintains multiple security services while tolerating armed clans and factional militias. When protests target corruption or repression, PA forces respond with batons and detention.
Armed veto power shapes every strategic decision. Any serious political compromise risks internal violence. Leaders know it. Militias know it. The system adjusts accordingly. Agreements stall. Initiatives die quietly. Blame is exported to Israel.
Violence is not external to politics. Violence also functions outward.
Palestinian leadership—especially Hamas—has learned that bloodshed buys attention. Suicide bombings. Rocket wars. Pogroms. Each triggers emergency diplomacy, UN sessions, media saturation, and aid pledges. Calm produces silence. Violence produces relevance.
These lessons hardened during the Second Intifada. Arafat’s circle believed escalation would extract better terms than Camp David. It failed strategically but succeeded tactically. The world refocused. Pressure mounted. And the lesson stuck.
Hamas refined it. Each war with Israel brings devastation to Gaza—and renewed cash flows, eased restrictions, or mediated ceasefires. Reconstruction becomes a revenue stream. Civilian suffering mere diplomatic capital.
The October 7 pogrom represented this logic stripped of restraint. The leadership calculated that escalation would reset the regional agenda. The cost to civilians was irrelevant. Polling afterward confirmed the moral collapse. The society, basically en masse, supported the attack—regardless of the devastation it wrought on either Israel or on Palestinians as Israel was forced into war.
Violence pays domestically too. Even as costs accrue. The internal damage is severe and compounding.
Economically, violence has been catastrophic. The Second Intifada slashed Palestinian GDP per capita by nearly forty percent. Gaza’s repeated wars flattened neighborhoods, wrecked infrastructure, and erased investment horizons. Capital fled. Talent followed.
Between 2007 and 2017, over 100,000 Palestinians emigrated and youth flight accelerated. Doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs exit first. The society bleeds its future.
Budgets reflect priorities. Enormous sums flow to security organs and “martyr” payments. Productive sectors starve. Palestinian schools in Judea and Samaria? Most are down to giving instruction three days per week. Don’t worry, they’re still teaching Jew-hate. History? Chemistry? Not so much. The private economy shrinks under instability and ideological suspicion. Workers lose jobs in Palestinian society and in Israel—as Israeli security organs correctly block permits to Palestinians who are engaged in espionage for terror groups or are themselves part of those groups.
Civil society withers. Journalists self-censor—to say nothing of the many confirmed cases of journalists literally working in an operational capacity for the terror cells of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and others.
Psychologically, generations grow up inside permanent emergency. Trauma accumulates. Violence normalizes itself. Clan feuds rise. Crime follows. Law recedes.
This is not collateral damage from Israel’s actions. It is damage inflicted by a leadership that chose coercion over governance.
Frozen Authority, Managed Decay
It is no surprise that the Palestinian political system today is essentially frozen in time. Elections are rarely held (and when planned, often canceled), governing institutions have atrophied, and legitimacy is nonexistent. This political paralysis is a direct result of the leadership choices and doctrines we’ve discussed.
Meanwhile, corruption has become both a symptom and a stabilizing tool of this stagnation — a way for elites to buy loyalty and placate key constituents without undertaking real reform.
The Palestinian Authority was supposed to be a temporary administrative body until statehood, with democratic underpinnings. It held a few credible elections early on (the legislative election of 2006 being the last). But since then, all democratic processes have been essentially shut down.
President Mahmoud Abbas was elected in January 2005 for a four-year term. Two decades on, no new presidential election is in sight. The PA parliament (Palestinian Legislative Council) was elected in 2006 (when Hamas won a surprise majority). That parliament never really functioned after the Hamas-Fatah split, and Abbas dissolved it. Elections scheduled for 2010, 2014, 2018, etc., were repeatedly postponed or canceled under various pretexts. In 2021, Abbas announced legislative and presidential elections — only to “postpone” them indefinitely a few months later, citing Israel’s refusal to allow voting in East Jerusalem. Critics widely noted the real reason was Fatah’s internal splits and fear of losing to Hamas.
Hamas called the cancellation a “coup against national consensus,” and indeed Palestinian analysts across factions saw it as Abbas clinging to power rather than risking humiliation at the ballot box. As it stands now, the Palestinian leadership is unelected and unaccountable, ruling by decree and factional deal-making.
The PA issues laws via presidential decrees. There is no functioning legislature to check or debate these laws. The judiciary doesn’t meaningfully exist.
Polls show a majority of Palestinians don’t trust their leaders and want Abbas to resign, but he ignores those polls. Without elections, the political class grows old and sclerotic. Abbas is 87. Many of his circle are in their 70s and 80s.
In truth, the status quo of no mandate suits the incumbents. Abbas and his cronies enjoy their perks and power. Israel who is as hands-off of Palestinian affairs as is pragmatic, understands the devil they know is better than the electorate empowering Hamas (or G-d forbid, an even more militant group) in the heart of Israel. So, everyone tolerates the corruption.
Indeed, corruption has become the grease that keeps the wheels of this stagnant machine turning. Arafat notoriously ran a patronage system where he doled out cash to loyalists and kept a secret budget. An IMF report in the early 2000s found he’d diverted $900 million of public money to a special account under his control. Abbas’s era… well, it’s no better. A European Court of Auditors report in 2013 identified “significant shortcomings” in how the PA spent $2.7 billion of EU aid — noting that Europe had little control over where the money went, and high-level corruption went unaddressed.
Foreign donors periodically complain, but then they usually keep the aid flowing (fearing PA collapse otherwise), so the cycle continues. A U.S. House Foreign Affairs hearing in 2012 even described the PA as a “chronic kleptocracy” and singled out Abbas and his family. Palestinian watchdog groups have documented scores of officials living well beyond their means—with fancy villas and VIP trips abroad—while average people struggle.
Perhaps the most damaging result of all these trends is the complete fragmentation of Palestinian governance, but without any healthy pluralism or competition.
There are effectively two regimes now: the PA/Fatah in parts of Judea and Samaria, and Hamas in Gaza. They operate as separate, authoritarian fiefdoms. This split that occurred in 2007 has never been healed.
Both Fatah/PA and Hamas claim to represent the people’s will. They routinely delegitimize each other. Hamas calls Abbas an illegitimate stooge whose term expired, Abbas calls Hamas a coup regime in Gaza. They arrest each other’s members. Hamas jails Fatah activists in Gaza. The PA jails Hamasniks in Judea and Samaria. A house divided cannot stand, said Lincoln. In this case, it cannot negotiate effectively either.
On TV, Palestinian leaders all speak of one state, one people. It’s a charade that fools no one, but they keep it up. Hamas seems content to run its Islamist faux-state in Gaza and waits for Judea and Samaria to fall into its lap someday. The PA seems content to govern its shrinking enclaves and blame Hamas for the lost Gaza. Neither prioritizes reuniting their national project, because that would require concessions (Hamas would have to share or relinquish power, Fatah the same) which neither will do.
Economic Stagnation by Design
Economic development is often thought to be a universal goal of any leadership. Who doesn’t want prosperity for their people? Astonishingly, in the Palestinian case, the leadership’s ideological choices have actively undermined economic progress, to the point one can say the stagnation is by design. The dominant ethos has been ambivalent or even hostile to traditional development. Why? Because the pursuit of prosperity has been cast by hardliners as a form of “normalization.” In other words, Palestinian politics views too much comfort as morally suspect and a betrayal of the struggle.
As a result, efforts that could improve living standards — joint economic projects with Israel, foreign investments requiring stability, private sector empowerment — are mostly shunned. The leadership benefits from an aid-dependent status quo that gives them patronage power without building indigenous capacity.
The outcome: a perpetually weak economy that keeps the populace financially miserable and dependent on largesse. This too feeds self-defeat: an impoverished society is less resilient and more prone to extremism, which then justifies further outside control, and the cycle continues. If you’re wondering if it’s because the Islamist world wants it that way, you’d be correct.
Early on, a myth took hold in Palestinian discourse: economic improvement equals acquiescence. This was amplified after Oslo, when Israel sometimes floated ideas of “economic peace” — making efforts to boost the Palestinian economy in an effort to dissuade further terror attacks.
Many Palestinian leaders recoiled at that, fearing it was a trap to make people forget about independence in exchange for jobs and shopping malls. And so the leadership took it to an extreme of framing prosperity itself as suspect, as if poverty keeps the revolutionary fire burning. Yasser Arafat said in the 90s, when asked to curb corruption, “Why would I make them rich? So they can forget Palestine?” The PA under Arafat did little to foster a productive economy. It was more interested in consolidating political control and milking the donor aid. Progress towards transparent institutions (courts, financial oversight) was slow or reversed, partly because backroom dealing was more useful to reward loyalists.
After Hamas came on the scene, the ethos hardened. Hamas openly rejects “economic normalization.” They see any cooperation with Israel — even to improve livelihoods — as collaboration unless tied to political gains. A vivid example: In 2019, the U.S. convened a workshop in Bahrain to propose a $50 billion investment plan for the Palestinian territories (as part of the ill-fated Trump peace plan). The PA and Hamas both boycotted outright. Palestinian businesspeople who considered attending were threatened and condemned.
The plan indeed had political strings attached that Palestinians found unacceptable — but note, they refused to even discuss how that economic vision might be molded or how funds might flow under different political terms. It was a reflexive rejection of “money over rights,” which plays well domestically. In more everyday terms, the PA has sometimes limited its own economic options to avoid “normalization.” They have at times banned Palestinian laborers from working in Israeli communities (while not being able to provide alternative jobs).
Meanwhile, any Palestinians who do try private initiative sometimes face hurdles from their own authorities. I’ll give a small anecdote: A few years back, a group of young Gazans found ways to freelance online (tech work) to bypass unemployment. Rather than celebrate this, Hamas imposed new taxes on them and scrutinized them for contacts abroad. In the West Bank, if a businessman gets too close to Israeli counterparts in joint ventures, he may be interrogated (or worse) by PA security for “normalizing.”
The Palestinian territories have a young population — about 30% are 15-29 years old. This should be an engine of growth. Instead, youth unemployment is astronomical: roughly 40% in Judea and Samaria and over 60% in Gaza in recent years. Thousands graduate from universities each year to find no jobs. The education system still produces capable graduates (literacy and basic education rates are high), but the economy can’t absorb them.
Some of them choose to leave. The brain drain further undercuts chances of building competent institutions or a vibrant economy, making their goal of statehood even less likely.
The rest? Well, they join the rulers. Some for hopes of scraps. Others for ideological reasons. The net result? An emboldened Hamas with bitter troops to feed their violence machines.
If nation-building were a three-legged stool of political, security, and economic development, the Palestinian leadership sawed off at least one leg (economic) themselves, and severely damaged the others through intransigence and factional conflict.
The result is a wobbly project that hasn’t stood up on its own — and it’s not hard to see why. Perhaps some in the leadership truly believed that keeping their people economically weak would prevent “normalization” and keep international pressure on Israel. If so, that strategy has backfired spectacularly: Israel’s economy boomed in the same period, while Palestinians became more isolated, not Israel.
Narrative Exhaustion, Strategic Abandonment
Palestinian strategic isolation did not arrive suddenly. Decades of grievance-first governance, rejectionism, internal repression, and violence eroded credibility with allies who once treated the Palestinian cause as sacrosanct. Sympathy remained. Confidence did not. Patience ran out.
What persists today is rhetorical support without strategic investment. It is undergirded by public support driven by Qatari-fueled indoctrination of the West.
Leadership claims, for Western consumption, commitment to a two-state solution. All the while their education systems, media, and official discourse in Arabic glorify total victory and erase Jewish legitimacy.
Foreign audiences noticed.
European parliaments began conditioning aid. The European Parliament formally condemned PA curricula for incitement. U.S. legislators tied funding to terror payments.
Then, the West forgot to check that changes were made before funding flows resumed.
International fatigue set in because engagement produced no real reforms. It was easier just to sign the checks.
Donors watched funds disappear into unreformed systems. Mediators watched negotiations implode on familiar scripts. Diplomats heard maximalist rhetoric disconnected from governing capacity.
Violence hasn’t really accelerated the erosion of support, however. Hamas’s wars with Israel and its October 7 pogrom should have hardened international perception irreversibly. For the neighbors of Palestinians, the massacre removed any remaining ambiguity. But Western capitals responded not by isolating Hamas or sidelining the PA—their anti-Israel rhetoric ratcheted up, they “recognized” the “State of Palestine,” and they kept buying Israeli arms and collecting Israel’s intelligence. The disconnect couldn’t be more clear.
For decades, Palestinian leadership relied on moral urgency to compensate for political failure. Occupation. Apartheid. Genocide. Resistance. The vocabulary did not change. The outcomes, for any relevant party, did not improve.
The problem was not that grievances were invented. Though they are. The problem is that grievance became the product. Repetition replaced strategy. Symbolism replaced progress. Each UN speech recycled the same accusations without offering a path forward.
Hyperbole accelerated the decline. Holocaust inversion. Genocide claims detached from fact. Nazi analogies. These rallied activist bases while alienating mainstream audiences who understood the difference between war and extermination.
The Palestinian narrative froze in time. A ritual. A museum exhibit.
The contrast with other post-conflict movements sharpens the isolation.
Egypt recovered Sinai through negotiation. Jordan secured peace and stability. Gulf states pursued normalization and growth. Kosovo, Rwanda, Northern Ireland—all moved from struggle to governance.
Palestinian leadership is not willing to. The Arab world—regardless of public English-facing rhetoric—supports them. They fund it. They lend legitimacy. They provide diplomatic cover.
A leadership that refuses to prepare its society for compromise cannot deliver peace. Ever. A movement that glorifies violence cannot claim surprise when it isn’t greeted by their neighbors with open arms.
The world did not abandon Palestinians. Indeed, much of public discourse stands by them. The world has forgotten its history lessons. Thinkers in the West, however, abandoned the pretense that Palestinian leadership would change without both internal and external pressure.
What remains is symbolic support without leverage. Statements without stakes. Sympathy without strategy.
Enablers Without Accountability
Palestinian self-sabotage did not occur in a vacuum. It unfolded inside an international ecosystem that rewarded grievance, subsidized failure, and punished Israel for defending itself. Palestinian leaders bear primary responsibility for their choices. The scandal is how many external actors worked overtime to remove consequences.
The United Nations and its satellite NGO universe did not merely misread the conflict. They deliberately entrenched it. They enabled it. They support it.
For decades, UN bodies and aligned NGOs laundered rejectionism into humanitarian language. Agencies like UNRWA became permanent political instruments masquerading as relief organizations. A refugee crisis from 1948 was deliberately frozen in time. “Refugee” status was inherited, expanded, and weaponized. Great-grandchildren were classified as refugees not to solve a problem, but to preserve a claim. Resettlement was treated as heresy. Integration was forbidden. The “right of return” remained untouchable because it functioned as a veto against peace and a cudgel against Jewish sovereignty.
UNRWA employed tens of thousands inside a political culture saturated with incitement—scores of whom were literal Hamas terrorists, being supported by the West’s tax dollars. It tolerated Hamas infrastructure embedded in its schools, its hospitals, and its other facilities. When exposed, the institutional response was denial, deflection, and accusations against Israel. Accountability never arrived.
The broader UN system followed the same script. Israel was subjected to more resolutions than any other country on earth. More so than all serial human-rights abusing countries and genocidal regimes combined. Palestinian violations were treated as background noise, if ever even acknowledged. Incitement, terror stipends, child soldiers, and systematic repression triggered no sanctions. The message was unmistakable. Jews defending themselves would be prosecuted. Jihadist violence would be contextualized and excused.
NGOs amplified the distortion. Many adopted openly antisemitic frameworks while hiding behind the language of human rights. “Lawfare” replaced law. Reports were written first, facts selected later. Hamas atrocities were minimized. Israeli counterterror operations were labeled crimes. NGOs rebranded jihadist terror as “resistance” when Jews were the target.
This asymmetry was not accidental. It reflected ideological capture. It also reflected a softer pathology: the bigotry of low expectations. Palestinian leadership was treated as a permanent ward of the international system—incapable of agency, immune to standards, entitled to indulgence. Israel, a functioning democracy fighting for survival, was treated as uniquely illegitimate.
Arab states played a different game. For decades, they used the Palestinian issue as a shield for their own failures. Palestinians were kept stateless in Arab countries to preserve the grievance. Rejectionism was encouraged so long as it served regional politics. Then priorities changed.
Iran, Islamist insurgency, economic modernization—these became more urgent than preserving a stagnant cause. The Palestinian leadership failed to adapt. The Abraham Accords exposed the reality. Arab capitals were done waiting. Normalization with Israel (they’d get back to the jihad later) advanced regional stability and prosperity. Endless Palestinian refusal offered neither.
The response from Ramallah was predictable: accusations of betrayal. The response from the region was unambiguous: we’ll do what we want for our people and prosperity, but you must remain locked in this perpetual struggle against Israel’s existence.
Israel’s role in this ecosystem was constant but not causal. Israeli governments changed. Offers were made. Withdrawals occurred. Risks were taken. Terror followed. From Rabin to Sharon to Olmert to Netanyahu, the pattern held. When Israel extended concessions, Palestinian leadership banked them and escalated. When Israel defended itself, it was condemned.
Benjamin Netanyahu internalized this reality and his insistence on security first is not ideological obstinacy. It was empirical judgment. For those who haven’t kept up, Gaza after the 2005 withdrawal became the proof of its necessity. Rockets, tunnels, pogroms. October 7 was the end of the argument.
Netanyahu’s approach—contain threats, reject illusions, expand regional alliances—reflected the world as it is, not as diplomats wished it to be. The Abraham Accords validated that strategy. Palestinian leadership was sidelined not because Israel demanded it, but because it earned it.
External actors normalized and enabled Palestinian dysfunction. They insulated leaders from consequences. They turned antisemitism into policy language. They punished Israel for surviving.
Regime Preservation as Strategy
The persistence of Palestinian dysfunction is not a mystery. It is a system that works exactly as designed—for those who run it.
From Ramallah to Gaza City, the governing logic is survival, not statehood. The leaders of it do not misunderstand the damage they inflict. They calculate it. Reform threatens them more than stagnation. Peace endangers them more than war.
At the top of the Palestinian system sits a political class that has learned one lesson well: permanent struggle guarantees permanent relevance.
Mahmoud Abbas governs without a mandate because elections are dangerous. Hamas rules through terror because ballots are optional when force decides outcomes.
Conflict justifies emergency rule. It suspends elections. It excuses corruption. It explains repression. It attracts donor money. It deflects blame onto Israel.
In this environment, failure is rewarded.
Yasser Arafat grasped this instinctively. Signing an end-of-conflict agreement would have stripped him of revolutionary legitimacy and reduced him to a mediocre president forced to answer for schools, jobs, and sewage. Keeping the struggle alive preserved his myth and his power. Abbas inherited the same calculus, minus the charisma. As long as the conflict persists, he remains indispensable as gatekeeper of aid and interlocutor to a credulous world. Peace would render him obsolete.
Hamas takes the logic further. Its entire identity depends on perpetual jihad. Its “legitimacy” is built on bloodshed. Disarmament would mean ideological collapse. That’s why “Phase 2” is a laughable folly.
The narrative trap is absolute. Palestinian leadership spent decades teaching that every inch of the land is Arab, every Jew is a colonizer, and every compromise is betrayal. That messaging cannot be unwound without detonating their own authority.
Any leader who tells the truth—that Israel is permanent, that Jews are indigenous, that return is symbolic, not literal—signs his own death warrant.
They know it. Their followers know it. The indoctrination worked too well.
Their fear is not abstract. Moderates were murdered in the past. Sadat was assassinated. Hamas executes dissenters routinely. Abbas governs behind armed guards and still cannot risk elections. The majority of Palestinians reject the PA (to be clear the PA is still a terror organization) as too moderate.
The Palestinian public is not a peace constituency waiting to be unlocked. It is a radicalized public that punishes moderation.
Leaders respond rationally to that environment. Better to say nothing. Better to stall. Better to issue speeches at the UN and collect donor funds than confront the mythology they built.
Then there is the money. A lot of it.
Permanent conflict sustains a grievance economy. Aid flows. NGOs proliferate. Security budgets swell. Patronage networks thrive. Elites travel on VIP permits, own foreign properties, and move money offshore. Peace would bring audits. Peace would bring elections. Peace would bring competitors—including educated Palestinians from the diaspora who might actually govern competently.
War, by contrast, is profitable. Reconstruction contracts. Terror stipends. NGO salaries. Media relevance. Conflict keeps the cash moving and the questions away.
Hamas would rather rule a destroyed Gaza than share power. Abbas would rather preside over a decaying authority than risk defeat. Each faction fears the other more than it fears condemning its own people to endless misery.
So they wait. They stall. They blame Israel. They invoke international law while violating every principle of governance.
And until that incentive structure breaks, nothing else will.
Implications for Reality, Not Illusions
This record explains, with uncomfortable clarity, why three decades of conferences, roadmaps, summits, envoys, and donor pledges failed. Not stalled. Failed.
The core error was structural: external actors tried to solve a pathological religious war with modern assumptions. They mistook diplomacy for transformation and money for reform. They assumed Palestinian leadership wanted a deal and merely lacked the right incentives. The evidence shows otherwise.
Peace initiatives collapsed because they were built on false premises.
Every major framework—from Oslo through Camp David, Annapolis, the Quartet, and the Trump plan—assumed that if borders were drawn, security guarantees offered, and aid pledged, Palestinian leadership would do the rest. They would prepare their public. They would dismantle terror networks. They would accept finality. They would govern. Of course, they did none of that.
In Oslo, the Palestinian Authority was entrusted with territory, funds, and legitimacy on the assumption it would suppress violence and build coexistence. Instead, it preserved militias, escalated incitement, and used ambiguity to keep maximalist claims alive. Terror followed. Trust collapsed. The accords failed not because Israel sabotaged them, but because the Palestinian leadership never wanted them to succeed.
As long as Palestinian politics rewards rejection and punishes compromise, any signed paper is decorative.
Economic aid failed for the same reason.
Western capitals believed prosperity would soften ideology. They believed jobs would replace jihad. They believed infrastructure would crowd out incitement. So they funded industrial zones, budget support, salary pipelines, and reconstruction cycles. Even Netanyahu convinced himself that this was the way to quiet Hamas’s terror tendencies.
The result? Predictable.
Aid flowed into systems that taught children that peace is treason and Jews are devils. Militias retained veto power. Terror payments continued. Corruption metastasized.
Gaza became the most heavily subsidized failed territory on earth—and one of the most radicalized.
Money cannot repair a political culture that teaches death as virtue and compromise as betrayal.
Western diplomats compounded their error by projecting their own rationality onto Palestinian leadership. They assumed leaders wanted peace but feared domestic backlash. They assumed incitement was tactical noise. They assumed terror was a bargaining chip, not a worldview.
They were wrong.
Mediators repeatedly ignored what Palestinian leaders said in Arabic and focused on what they said in English. They accepted condemnations of terror abroad while tolerating martyr glorification at home. They treated jihad as “internal politics” and Israeli security as obstruction.
Each new envoy arrived convinced they would succeed where others failed. Each rediscovered the same reality. The leadership did not want a deal.
This miscalculation cost countless lives. Israelis. Arabs. Jews. Muslims. Christians. Druze. Atheists. Buddhists.
No summit can substitute for cultural transformation. No aid package can override indoctrination. No mediator can manufacture a peace constituency where one does not exist. This is not a latent Western polity waiting to emerge.
For Israel, the conclusion is operational, not emotional. Every Israeli understands—whether they want to believe it or not—that there is no peace partner where jihad retains legitimacy and elections are existential threats. Israel learned the lesson the hardest possible way. After Gaza. After the First Intifada. After the Second Intifada. After October 7. There is no credible partner for comprehensive peace under current conditions. Policy must reflect that reality. Containment, deterrence, regional integration, and defensive strength are not ideological preferences. They are necessities.
For the West, the implication is equally stark. Repeating the same formulas while expecting different results is self-deception. Supporting Palestinian civilians does not require indulging Palestinian leadership. In fact, it requires the opposite.
Indicators of Breakage, Not Hope
Real change in the Palestinian system will not arrive through speeches, summits, or donor conferences. It would announce itself through behaviors that directly threaten the existing power structure. That is the standard. Anything less is theater.
There is no roadmap. So we can just identify the signals—observable, costly, and internally destabilizing—that would indicate the self-defeating system is finally cracking rather than cosmetically rebranding.
A serious rupture would begin with Arabic-language messaging that tells the truth Palestinians have been systematically shielded from. Israel is permanent. Jews are indigenous. Partition is final. Violence failed. There is no return to Safed or Haifa. There is only coexistence or continued ruin.
That message would not appear once, in English, for Western consumption. It would be repeated domestically. In schools. In mosques. On television. In textbooks. It would dismantle martyr glorification, not rename it. Terror stipends would end, not be relabeled. Clerics preaching jihad would be removed, not defended. Incitement would be punished even when politically costly.
Such a shift would provoke backlash and be easily visible.
Political behavior would follow. Elections would be held even at risk of defeat. Opposition would be tolerated even when embarrassing. Corruption prosecutions would target the top, not the expendable middle. Courts would constrain the executive branch. Security forces would answer to law, not tribal faction.
In Gaza, that would mean something even more radical: disarmament. Not rhetoric. Not “long-term truce.” Actual monopoly of force. Hamas would have to choose between governance and jihad. Historically, it has chosen jihad every time. Their charter is pretty clear on it. Any deviation from that pattern would be unmistakable—and internally explosive.
Economic signals would be equally revealing. Prosperity would cease to be treated as treason. Cooperation with Israel would be framed as necessity, not betrayal. Joint infrastructure projects would proceed without apologies. Entrepreneurs would be protected, not extorted. Aid dependency would shrink instead of metastasizing.
When leaders prioritize infrastructure over slogans, something has changed.
Civil society would breathe. Journalists would criticize leadership without disappearing. Teachers would teach history without erasure. Peace activists would operate openly instead of in whispers. Children would learn chemistry without being taught Jew-hatred as a prerequisite.
Violence would be confronted honestly. Not managed. Not excused. Renounced.
That means no more “popular resistance” euphemisms. No more rocket rationalizations. No more intifada nostalgia. A reformed leadership would say, clearly and repeatedly, that terrorism harmed Palestinians more than Israel—and that it is over. Full stop.
The most telling signal would be accountability for past failure.
Palestinian leaders have never admitted error. Not 1947. Not the Intifadas. Not Gaza. Not October 7. Blame is always external. Israel. America. Arabs. Fate.
Until then, announcements mean nothing. Unity deals mean nothing. New committees mean nothing. Ceasefire agreements mean nothing. Reforms that do not threaten incumbents are camouflage.
There is no evidence whatsoever such changes are imminent. Current leadership structures are incapable of initiating them. The incentive system forbids it. Change, if it comes, will come from fracture—generational, institutional, or catastrophic.
History allows for pivots. But they are never painless. Japan and Germany needed total defeat. The IRA needed exhaustion and internal revolt. None reformed because outsiders asked nicely.
So, I cannot predict any change is coming. I can tell you, though, it will come with a heavy price.
Anything short of these indicators is not transition. It is continuation by another name.
These are the facts, bleak as they may be. One hopes that shining light on them might, eventually, help to break the vicious cycle — for the sake of Palestinians most of all.
When people ask me, “What were they supposed to do?” I understand the impulse behind the question.
It assumes good faith. It assumes tragedy without agency. It assumes the story is too cruel to interrogate.
But history doesn’t work that way. And neither does responsibility.
The Palestinian leadership made choices. Bad ones. Repeatedly. Predictably. And those choices narrowed the future available to their own people far more than any speech at the U.N. ever expanded it.
That doesn’t make all Palestinian civilians guilty. Though, for sure, it doesn’t excuse any who have acted to promote this system. They are the primary victims of a system that sold struggle as destiny and paralysis as virtue. That system has produced other victims, too. Mostly Israelis and Jews. Also the West to a lesser extent.
Until that system is named honestly, nothing changes. Not diplomacy. Not aid. Not peace plans. Not slogans.
— Uri Zehavi · Intelligence Editor, Israel Brief