Those who call for decolonization sometimes compare Israel’s situation to that of South Africa and Algeria—two countries that were decolonized. But in these countries, the settlers had only the most tenuous hold over the native inhabitants. In South Africa in 1990, as apartheid was about to end, whites made up only 17 percent of the population; in Algeria, in 1960, as that country became independent, French settlers made up only 15 percent. In Israel, by contrast, about 80 percent of the population is Jewish.
Israel is more like the United States or Canada—countries in which the settlers have achieved large majorities and built effective institutions, including a powerful police and military. Israel, like the United States, is no longer a nation simply of settlers and their descendants, but through the immigration of the Mizrahi, has surmounted within its consciousness of itself (although not in the view of the Palestinians) its own origins as a settler-colony. (Compare the Mizrahi to the German and Irish emigres to the United States during the 1840s.) There is some, though dwindling, support among Israel’s Jews for an adjoining Palestinian state, but there is no support for a binational or secular democratic state that incorporates the Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and the descendants of the refugees of the 1947 and 1948 wars—a state that would threaten the very premise of Zionism. Meretz, the Jewish party most supportive of Palestinian self-determination, currently has no seats in the Knesset. An attempt to achieve decolonization would be adamantly and successfully resisted. To imagine it as a solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict is comparable to imagining colonies on Mars.
There is also reason to believe that even if by divine intervention, a secular or binational democracy were formed, Palestinians would find themselves at a disadvantage because of their lack of experience in self-government. As Rashid Khalidi argued in The Iron Cage, the Arabs in the British mandate suffered from the lack of any governing institutions, even ones that were subservient to the imperial power. By contrast, the Jews had its own governing authority, the Jewish Agency, that nurtured a leadership that was able to take command in 1948. Under Jordan’s rule and under the Israeli occupation, the Palestinians have still not developed an effective governing class and institutions. The Palestine Liberation Organization was an armed resistance group that proved ill-suited to govern. The Palestinian Authority, which was created under the PLO in 1993 by the Oslo Accords, has failed to win popular support on the West Bank. It is seen as corrupt and sclerotic and as the handmaiden of the Israeli occupation. (In 2021, at Israeli and American urging, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas postponed, and in effect, cancelled legislative elections in the West Bank and Gaza.) Hamas, like the original PLO, is primarily a resistance group. It nourishes the illusion of an Islamic greater Palestine. As the October 7 massacre showed, its strategy for ending the occupation requires sacrificing many thousands of the people it is supposed to govern to Israeli bombs and missiles. The Palestinians need the experience of self-government to develop an effective and accountable leadership.