Palestine: The Missed Chances and the Responsibilities Nobody Wants to Own
I find myself increasingly uneasy when I scroll through social media and see how Israel is discussed. Often enough, the argument is no longer about Netanyahu, the war in Gaza or settlements in the West Bank. It is about whether Israel has any right to exist at all. Old antisemitic tropes are back, sometimes dressed up in a new vocabulary and spreading at remarkable speed.
Let’s be clear. Criticizing an Israeli government, condemning military abuses or supporting Palestinian statehood does not make someone an antisemite. Nor does every objection to Zionism amount to hatred of Jews. But when Jews anywhere are held responsible for Israel’s actions, when familiar fantasies about Jewish control of banks or media return, or when violence against Jewish communities is excused in the name of Palestine, we have crossed into something else. The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights has documented how widespread online antisemitism is among the experiences reported by European Jews.
That is why I want to revisit a less fashionable part of this conflict’s history: the choices made by Arab governments and Palestinian leaders, and the chances those choices may have cost their own people.
I recently read a post written in the voice of an imaginary Palestinian confessing decades of mistakes: rejecting partition, choosing war, tolerating corrupt leaders and terrorism, never building a state. It makes a point, but it also cheats. A people is not one person, and no Palestinian alive today can be held personally responsible for every decision made since 1947. Leaders, however, can be held accountable. So let’s look at what they actually did.
1947: More than a dispute over a map
In November 1947, the UN proposed partitioning British Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under an international regime. Jewish leaders accepted the plan in principle. The Arab Higher Committee and Arab governments rejected it.
The Arab objections were not invented. Jews made up roughly a third of the population, while the proposed Jewish state would receive somewhat more than half the territory. Many Arabs saw this as profoundly unfair. But describing the refusal as no more than a dispute over percentages misses an uncomfortable part of the story: who led the opposition, and what did they stand for?
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, remained influential in Palestinian Arab politics. During World War II he had collaborated with Nazi Germany, met Hitler in 1941 and taken part in antisemitic propaganda and recruitment efforts for German forces. That record is documented. It does not mean that Palestinians generally shared his ideology, or that their national claims were simply a cover for antisemitism. It does mean we cannot write the leadership’s politics out of the history.
The Arab Higher Committee was not merely asking for a better division of territory. It opposed partition itself and advocated an Arab state across all of Palestine, where Muslims formed the majority and al-Husseini, a former Nazi collaborator, remained influential in the nationalist leadership. The very idea of a sovereign Jewish state on part of the land was rejected. War followed; Israel declared independence; hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled.
Would acceptance have produced a Palestinian state in 1948? Nobody can promise that. But it would have tested a political path that was instead closed off.
Nineteen years—and then the three noes
Between 1948 and 1967, Jordan controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem, while Egypt administered Gaza. Israel occupied neither. Yet no Palestinian state emerged. Jordan annexed the West Bank; Egypt never turned Gaza into a sovereign state. Regional rivalries, competing Arab priorities and the Palestinians’ own lack of independent authority all mattered. Their predicament during those nineteen years cannot be explained by an Israeli occupation of those territories that had not yet begun.
After the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel controlled the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan Heights. That September, Arab leaders meeting in Khartoum announced their famous three noes: no peace, no recognition and no negotiations with Israel.
This was more than tough rhetoric. It posed a practical problem. How could Israel negotiate borders, withdrawal schedules and security guarantees with governments that officially refused to recognize it or sit down with it? Indirect diplomacy existed, and Israeli demands also complicated the picture. But Khartoum was a genuine obstacle. Arab governments demanded land back while rejecting direct negotiations over how to get it back. Palestinians, who had not voted for those three noes, paid for decisions made in their name.
Then Anwar Sadat broke the pattern. In 1977 he went to Jerusalem. In 1979 Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty; by April 1982, Israel had completed its main withdrawal from Sinai and dismantled its settlements there. Sinai is not the West Bank, and that treaty did not settle the Palestinian question. Still, it established something tangible: recognition, negotiations and security arrangements could deliver territory that years of rejection had not.
When Palestinian leaders finally recognized Israel
The Arab League had recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people in 1974. But Israel rejected the PLO as a negotiating partner, and the PLO had yet to recognize Israel. That contradiction began to ease in 1988. In 1993, Yasser Arafat formally recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace and security and renounced terrorism; Yitzhak Rabin recognized the PLO as the Palestinians’ representative.
This matters. After Oslo, it was no longer accurate to say Israel had no Palestinian interlocutor willing to recognize it. It had one. But mutual recognition did not settle borders, refugees, Jerusalem, settlements or security. Hamas continued attacks on Israeli civilians; the Palestinian Authority developed a record of authoritarianism and corruption; settlement expansion and Israeli opponents of Oslo eroded confidence. Rabin was murdered in 1995 by an Israeli extremist. The door had opened, but neither side could keep the peace process safe from its enemies.
Camp David, the Second Intifada and the price of violence
In July 2000, Bill Clinton brought Ehud Barak and Arafat to Camp David. Talks failed. Dennis Ross argued that Arafat had passed up serious opportunities and offered too little in return. Robert Malley and others disputed the claim that a complete, final Israeli offer had simply been placed before Arafat for signature. That distinction matters. So does Arafat’s responsibility for how he negotiated.
Then the Second Intifada began in September 2000. Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif was a flashpoint, not a complete explanation. The Mitchell Committee found no persuasive evidence that the Palestinian Authority had planned the uprising in advance. But failing to prove a prearranged plan is not the same as clearing Palestinian leaders of responsibility for what came next.
The uprising turned increasingly violent. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad carried out suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. The al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, linked to parts of Fatah, also attacked civilians. Marwan Barghouti and the Fatah-affiliated Tanzim played significant roles in the confrontation. Arafat led Fatah; the armed groups emerging from its orbit were hardly strangers to his political world.
Documents seized by Israel in 2002 pointed to financial links involving Palestinian Authority structures and armed activists. Human Rights Watch examined some of the allegations and reported evidence of payments authorized by Arafat to people implicated in, or suspected of involvement in, attacks. It did not establish that he personally ordered suicide bombings or directed every group. We should not claim more than the evidence supports. Yet the political responsibility for failures to curb attacks—and for support that helped sustain violent actors—cannot simply be waved away.
The Mitchell report also criticized Israeli use of lethal force against unarmed Palestinian demonstrators. The violence and counterviolence mattered on both sides. But there remains a hard question for Palestinian leaders: did they genuinely try to protect the negotiations, or did some come to see armed confrontation as useful leverage? A centrally planned strategy has not been proved. The participation of Fatah-linked factions in attacks, and the Authority’s inadequate efforts to stop violence against civilians, are far less speculative.
And the diplomats were still talking. In December 2000, Clinton proposed parameters for a Palestinian state in Gaza and roughly 94–96 percent of the West Bank, with land swaps and arrangements for Jerusalem and refugees. Both sides accepted them as a basis for further talks, with reservations. At Taba in January 2001, negotiators said they had never been closer. Then violence, unresolved disagreements and political changes overtook the process. Clinton left office; Barak lost to Ariel Sharon. An opportunity faded while the public’s faith in compromise was collapsing.
Other doors that opened—and closed
In 2002, the Arab League offered normalization with Israel as part of a comprehensive settlement involving withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967, a Palestinian state and an agreed refugee solution. It was a striking reversal of Khartoum, even if no treaty followed. In 2008, Ehud Olmert made Mahmoud Abbas an extensive territorial proposal, including land swaps and arrangements for Jerusalem. Abbas did not accept it then. He later said he had not been allowed to keep the map for review and still had objections, especially over refugees. It is inaccurate to describe this as a finished treaty casually turned down. It was nonetheless another major negotiation left unfinished.
Hamas took a different path from the PLO. Its 1988 charter rejected Israel and contained antisemitic language. A 2017 political document accepted a Palestinian state on pre-1967 lines as a formula for national consensus, but did not recognize Israel’s legitimacy. Those are not the same thing. Israel removed its settlements and permanent ground forces from inside Gaza in 2005, without giving the territory full sovereignty or ending major external controls. Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections and seized Gaza after fighting Fatah in 2007. Palestinians have had no new general legislative election since. Israeli and Egyptian restrictions, Israeli military operations and Hamas’s authoritarian rule all helped shape the misery that followed.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other armed groups deliberately killed Israeli civilians, took hostages and committed other grave crimes. No national cause excuses that. Nor do those crimes erase Israel’s obligations to Gaza’s civilians under international humanitarian law. The same insistence on accountability has to work both ways.
Whose cause was it, anyway?
Arab governments have long spoken passionately about Palestine. Their treatment of Palestinians was much less consistent. Jordan granted citizenship to many Palestinian refugees; Lebanon imposed serious social and employment restrictions; other governments alternated between welcome, pressure and expulsion. The Palestinian cause was too often useful to regional leaders for reasons that had little to do with Palestinians’ daily lives.
Israel’s own decisions cannot be edited out either. Settlement expansion, prolonged occupation and policies obstructing Palestinian self-determination have shaped the conflict. In its 2024 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice found Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful. Anyone asking Palestinian leaders to answer for their decisions must be willing to scrutinize Israeli governments as well.
But recognizing responsibility on both sides is not the same as dissolving it into a vague claim that everybody is equally to blame. They are not interchangeable decisions, and they had different consequences.
The people who inherited the bill
So when I see social media posts that move from attacking a particular Israeli policy to denying Israel’s very legitimacy—and sometimes to reviving antisemitic prejudice—I think of this record: the rejected partition, nineteen years without a Palestinian state under Jordanian and Egyptian rule, Khartoum, the long wait for recognition, the promise of Oslo, negotiations amid the Second Intifada, and the division between Fatah and Hamas. These were not six ready-made Palestinian states offered and refused. They were different moments, with different actors and different opportunities. They deserve to be judged on their actual terms.
A Palestinian born in Gaza in 2010 did not reject partition in 1947, issue the Khartoum declaration, negotiate at Camp David or vote for Hamas in 2006. An Israeli born that year did not make every decision of past Israeli governments either. Collective guilt is a poor substitute for history. Accountability means asking which leaders made which decisions—and who paid for them.
Palestinians have a right to self-determination. Israelis have a right to live in peace and security. One right does not require denying the other. After nearly eight decades, perhaps we should spend less time explaining every failure solely by pointing at the other side—and more time examining why so many leaders found it easier to manage this conflict than to take the risks of ending it.
The tragedy is not only the chances that were lost. It is the generations still paying for decisions they never got to make.