Without recounting the facts in detail, the Palestinian situation can be described as being “caught in a vortex.” Whenever a glimmer of an escape appears, developments take place that pull the situation back into the same vortex.
Through the Oslo agreements and understandings, which were sponsored by the entire international community, Palestinians had good reason to feel that they were approaching their long-awaited state. Five years, perhaps less, and the interim period of self-government would come to an end, paving the way for a Palestinian state on the territories occupied in 1967. Negotiations could then take place between two established states to resolve the permanent status issues.
The experiment failed after the Israeli architects of the process disappeared from the scene, to be replaced by a leadership that fundamentally opposed what had been reached in Oslo and imposed a different course of events. The promising peace project was transformed into a bloody war, which began when Likud came to power and has continued to the present.
In these circumstances, Palestinians have removed from their realistic calculations the prospect of establishing a Palestinian state through the Oslo process, at least in the near term. Their objectives have therefore shifted toward what appears more achievable: remaining on their homeland and following international developments that have granted them valuable recognition of their right to statehood.
There is a solid basis for this Palestinian realism and for the shift in their immediate objective from an “imminent state” to “remaining on their homeland.” Most importantly, more than six million Palestinians live in the West Bank and Gaza. These millions have a deeply rooted conviction that remaining on their homeland is essential, shaped by two highly influential factors. The first is the Palestinian experience of exile, which has deepened a collective awareness that it must not be repeated. The second is the position of countries near and far, which have not opened their doors to Palestinian migration at a time when the world is preoccupied with addressing the refugee issue by returning people to where they came from.
The four million Palestinians living in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, inhabit a territory of less than 6,000 square kilometers. They have lived through a unique dual reality: building their lives on their homeland, with all the infrastructure, facilities, and institutions that requires, as though they were not living under a military-settler occupation, while also pursuing resistance in multiple forms: military, popular, educational, and urban.
They have built tens of thousands of schools and dozens, even hundreds, of institutes covering different fields of specialization. There is hardly a governorate in the West Bank without one or two universities.
Resistance through the means available to them has proceeded alongside one of the largest processes of building the country. If you travel from Jericho, the eastern gateway to the homeland, to Al-Dhahiriya, its southern gateway, you will find urban development filling both sides of the road, with scarcely any empty spaces.
The Palestinians’ principal asset in the West Bank is the people themselves, along with the very high proportion of educated and qualified people across every field. Illiteracy exists only at a negligible rate. After the negotiating path toward a settlement with Israel has been blocked, the Palestinians’ concern is not merely to preserve this asset, but to deepen and develop it, without abandoning the idea of statehood itself. Their realism lies instead in not expecting such a state in the foreseeable future.
In Gaza, the other vital part of the Palestinian body, much of what took place in the West Bank after the 1967 occupation was mirrored there: the combination of building and resistance. This produced a territory smaller than any governorate in the West Bank and yet the most densely populated. Its people built their lives and facilities with whatever resources they could provide themselves and with support from their Arab brethren.
Although Israel has destroyed Gaza repeatedly, both piecemeal and on a massive scale, as is happening now, the people there, having experienced displacement and forced or voluntary expulsion in practice, have preferred to remain near the rubble of their homes in the hope of rebuilding them rather than migrate to anywhere else, near or far. Anyone who doubts this need only look at the Rafah crossing and the movement through it.
Palestinian realism is embodied in their collective awareness of their circumstances, with all their difficulties, and in their answer to a question imposed upon them: What is preferable, remaining on the homeland regardless of how difficult life becomes, or experiencing exile for a second or third time?
This question was not answered through opinion polls. It was answered in practice: there has been no migration at all. Where limited departures have occurred, Palestinians have not left their homeland without having guarantees of return within their reach. This has nothing to do with the migration Israel seeks to bring about.
The people of the West Bank and Gaza have not been left to their fate. They receive support from Arab brethren and friends. While that support may fall short of what they hope for, it gives them a genuine capacity to continue their unique dual reality: resistance and building.
Their realism has also given them a mature understanding of resistance, one more effective than its traditional conception as a matter of arms. They resist by remaining on their homeland and building their lives there despite the enormous difficulties they face. However severe these difficulties become, they remain possible to confront and contain so long as the foundation is a “consensus to remain on the homeland.”
