What do the Palestinians want?
Discussions about Palestine often exclude Palestinian voices. Recognizing this, the Elders, an independent group of world leaders working for peace, justice, human rights and a sustainable planet, and The Carter Center spoke to Palestinian activists from the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and inside Israel. A virtual dialogue convened in 2020, predating the atrocities perpetrated by both Israel and Hamas on and since October 2023. Though opinions expressed by participants at the time may now have changed, the lessons from the dialogue still hold: there is a “pressing need for a Palestinian national dialogue on the future of their national movement in the context of annexation and other threats to the two state solution”.
Jane Kinninmont writes that one of the most important lessons to emerge from this dialogue was that future discussions about Palestine must go beyond the usual political elites to include often excluded groups such as diaspora Palestinians, refugees in the region’s camps, and of course young people. Tellingly, Palestinian youth and civil society perspectives are underrepresented in policy discussions led by people who are deeply familiar with three decades of negotiations (and the specialist jargon that they have produced) and tend to revolve around competing accounts of what happened in previous rounds of high-level negotiations and the associated blame game.
Meanwhile, most Palestinians are under thirty. Compared with their parents and grandparents, young Palestinians are the least likely to believe in the two state solution. Many of them say that as far as they are concerned, annexation has been happening gradually for years. They are also less likely than their older counterparts to trust their own leaders, and they want more respect for rights and freedoms from their own authorities as well as from Israel. Some argue they’ve been ill-served by a political system centred, as elsewhere in the Arab world, on one male leader and call for a more distributed leadership model, and for a shift to empower women leaders and incorporate feminism into national liberation.
Indeed, before October 2023, opinions among ordinary Palestinians were beginning to show “unexpected popular flexibility on core issues of an eventual peace deal with Israel”.
A peace plan advancing Palestinian aspirations, even at the price of major concessions, would be accepted at the popular level—despite its likely rejection by both the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas.
Whatever else they might aspire to, Palestinians clearly want, and need, an end to the violence. They want, and need, an end to the colonisation and military occupation that has ravaged their lives for more than a century, with settler movement even preceding the Balfour Declaration in 1917.
To end the violence and occupation, Palestinians need the world’s full support. So how does the world imagine a Palestine free of Israeli occupation? There are countless resolutions, rulings and declarations that address this question. Yet a politically credible response remains elusive. Why? The challenge is in the details and relates the asymmetrical power of Isrealis versus Palestinians. Credible responses, generally speaking but crucially in this context, must be actionable. Responses that ignore ground realities, the human element, the nitty gritty of implementation, are mere sound bites.
In an Advisory Opinion filed on 19th July 2024, the highest court in the world, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank violate multiple UN conventions as well the human rights of millions of Palestinians:
The ICJ, as the principal judicial organ of the UN, found that Israel’s presence throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) including the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, is unlawful. It further found that Israel’s policies and practices amount to annexation of large parts of Palestinian territory, and constitute a breach of its international obligations on racial segregation and apartheid.
The ICJ further ruled that Israel is under an obligation to bring its unlawful presence to an end as rapidly as possible and immediately cease all new settlement activities and evacuate all settlers from the OPT.
According to this judgement, undoing the occupation and the damage it has done to Palestinians and their land would entail:
- An end to the illegal occupation of Palestinian land including Gaza and West Bank settlements
- Palestinians’ right to self-determination; an end to apartheid and segregation
- Reparations for Palestinians who have been living under Israel’s occupation since 1967
- Protection from land theft, illegal settlements, and the arbitrary and capricious restrictions on Palestinians’ freedom of movement in the West Bank
- An end to torture, deprivation, and starvation of the Palestinian people.
More recently, The Elders issued a call for a “new approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict towards a truly just and sustainable peace” – one informed “by the ideas of those Israelis and Palestinians who are already working together for peace“.
These ideals may seem lofty but are rooted in principles of fairness and justice. To become reality, they will have to be grounded in practical and political considerations such as:
Will freedom for Palestine mean the marginalisation of Israelis? Will the liberation of one spell the eradication of the other? What can ending the discriminatory treatment of Palestinians within Israel’s borders look like given the disparate experiences of Israelis, Arab Israelis, and Palestinians in the region since 1948?
What does acknowledging Palestinian authority over 1967 borders and the right of Palestinians to return mean when the reality could involve the mass and forcible movement of people who believe in their divine right to stay?
Can entire families with several generations born outside of Palestine or Israel still return? Will they be accorded citizenship? Some Palestinians still hold papers that prove ownership of homes that have been occupied by Israelis for decades. Will they be able to claim those homes? Who will or should win that battle? And who will decide? The same question hangs over the illegal settlements in the West Bank.
And a question that may be of particular relevance to Western bystanders, what do Israel’s major allies want and what will they allow?
These are tough questions with difficult answers that will lead to a demographic battle which for some (Israeli settlers in West Bank Settlements as much as those Palestinians who give up their right of return) will indeed be zero-sum. Indeed, the ICJ explicitly recognized the challenges implicit in its opinion:
“the United Nations, and especially the General Assembly, which requested this opinion, and the Security Council, should consider the precise modalities and further action required to bring to an end as rapidly as possible the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
One of the thorniest issues is or will be that of evacuating approximately 700,000 Israeli settlers scattered across the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Since October 2023 there has been “a drastic acceleration of long-standing trends of discrimination, oppression and violence against Palestinians that accompany Israeli occupation and settlement expansion” according to a recent report by the OCHCR. The report also notes that “the ongoing expansion of Israeli settlements involves numerous human rights violations against Palestinians, including their rights to self-determination, equality and non-discrimination, and has brought the West Bank to the brink of catastrophe.” A complicating factor is that some of these settlers are US citizens with voting rights in the USA.
So what will the ‘precise modalities’ of dismantling these settlements look like against this volatile backdrop? As an organisation and network outside Palestine and Israel, BNM can’t answer this question.
What we can say is that Palestinians (and Israelis who favour peace and justice) need to have a much bigger influence in the negotiations. External players need to use their leverage to make this happen. Waiting for the other side to compromise first has historically failed. Specifically, the West must empower Israelis who are part of the solution, not just negotiate with elites and extremists who are clearly part of the problem.
For this to happen, bystanders need to pressure their governments into exerting their influence with Israeli and Palestinian decision-makers. Most supporters of BNM are in countries with governments that are allies of Israel, but the same applies to people living in countries that support Palestine.
In practice, “Free Palestine” means: 1. an immediate and permanent ceasefire, 2. the end of Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories, and 3. the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
This is a reality Hamas too had begun to recognize as indicated in its revised manifesto:
“Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.”
BNM agrees with the many experts who explicitly point out that the existence of Israel and an independent Palestinian state are not mutually exclusive realities.