Who has the right to the land in Israel-Palestine?: Palestinian rights

4 a.m. in the South Hebron Hills

The bulldozer arrives before dawn. A family of eleven watches an IDF escort clear the perimeter around their home — declared illegal because the Civil Administration denied every building permit over twenty years. By sunrise the house is rubble. A settler outpost four hundred meters up the hill, also built without permits, remains untouched. This happened over 900 times in the West Bank in 2023, according to OCHA. Before October 7. Before anyone in Washington could locate Gaza on a map.

We name October 7 for what it was: a massacre no political cause justifies. The international response revealed an asymmetry so stark it functioned as evidence. Twelve hundred Israeli deaths produced emergency weapons shipments. Over 40,000 Palestinian deaths produced calls for restraint with no enforcement. The ICJ spoke the word genocide. It entered the legal record and changed nothing.

We engage directly with Israeli security because theirs is the argument with tanks behind it. The Gaza blockade did not prevent October 7 — sixteen years of collective punishment radicalized a generation that had never left a 25-mile strip of land. Every cycle confirms the same mechanism: repression buys time, then it purchases an explosion at compound interest.

The binationalist vision appeals to our democratic instincts. But we are wary of any framework that dissolves Palestinian national identity into a joint construct before Palestinians have ever exercised sovereignty. A binational state that makes us permanent junior partners is not liberation. It is absorption with better typography.

Our political institutions have failed our own people. The PA is corrupt. Hamas is authoritarian. No elections since 2006. We demand statehood while unable to demonstrate we can govern what we already have.

Where we concede ground: Palestinian armed factions committed atrocities that set our cause back decades.

What would change our mind: An Israeli settlement freeze and negotiations with a defined endpoint and a map.

Read the full synthesis: Who has the right to the land in Israel-Palestine?