Palestinian rejectionism, not poverty, remains the main obstacle for peace with Israel - opinion

There is a persistent idea in certain circles that if Israel improved living conditions for Palestinians – more jobs, better infrastructure, freer movement, greater economic opportunity – the violence would fade.

Treat them kindly, the argument goes, and they will eventually come around to peace. A heavy hand, by contrast, only breeds resentment and fuels more attacks. This sounds compassionate on the surface, but it is also deeply flawed, and the evidence against it has piled up for generations.

The United Nations Partition Plan of 1947 offered a two-state solution with clear borders, and the Arab states and Palestinian leadership rejected it and launched a war instead. After Israel’s victory in 1967, the Khartoum summit produced the famous “three no’s” – no peace, no recognition, no negotiations.

Camp David in 2000, the Clinton Parameters, and later offers under Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert met the same fate. Each time the answer was no – not because the details were insufficient, but because the very existence of a Jewish state was treated as illegitimate.

Improving daily life does not erase an ideology that sees Israel itself as the core problem rather than a neighbor to live beside.

It also ignores the consistent record of Palestinian violence in both good times and bad. After the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, when Israel transferred significant territory and governing authority to the newly created Palestinian Authority and economic cooperation increased, suicide bombings and other attacks surged rather than declined.

The Second Intifada that began in 2000 killed more than a thousand Israelis and wounded thousands more. Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005 removed every settlement and every soldier. What followed was the rapid rise of Hamas, the systematic diversion of resources into tunnels and rockets, and repeated rounds of war.

Periods of relative calm, increased work permits, and international aid flowing into the territories have not produced lasting quiet. Attacks have continued whether checkpoints were eased or tightened and whether economic indicators rose or fell.

The violence is not a simple reaction to hardship or restrictions. It has its own momentum and its own justification in the eyes of those who carry it out.

Their grievances center on establishing caliphates, imposing their interpretation of religious rule, toppling local governments they deem insufficiently pure, or fighting perceived Western influence in general. They do not issue demands about checkpoints in the West Bank or living standards in Gaza.

Their existence demonstrates that radical Islamist violence has deeper ideological roots than any single conflict with Israel. Palestinian groups that share similar language, methods, and martyrdom culture are part of this broader phenomenon, not an isolated response to occupation policies or economic frustration.

She volunteered with The Road to Recovery, personally driving sick Gazans, children with cancer, and adults needing surgery to Israeli hospitals for treatment. She built projects aimed at shared economic opportunity and mutual understanding. On October 4, 2023, she helped organize a large joint Israeli-Palestinian rally for peace.

Three days later, Hamas terrorists and others who crossed the border overran her kibbutz. They murdered her in her home and set the house on fire. For weeks, her family believed she had been taken hostage. Only later did DNA confirm she had been killed that morning.

Silver embodied the very approach the argument champions by improving lives, extending hands across the border, rejecting force in favor of dialogue. Her murder did not come from resentment over harsh Israeli treatment. It came from an ideology that viewed her as an enemy simply because she was Israeli and lived on the wrong side of a border that the attackers refused to accept.

The notion that better material conditions will magically produce peaceful neighbors has been tested for generations, and it has failed. Palestinians have received substantial international aid over decades, periods of limited autonomy, work opportunities inside Israel, and repeated diplomatic openings.

What has not changed is the refusal, among significant portions of leadership and public opinion, to accept Israel’s permanent existence as a Jewish state. Polls continue to show high levels of support for “resistance.”

Official media and educational materials still glorify those who attack civilians. Terror groups still recruit on the promise of destroying the Jewish presence rather than building a functioning, prosperous society next to it.

This is not a call for cruelty or collective punishment. Israel has both a moral and practical responsibility to defend its citizens and to treat non-combatants humanely within the harsh constraints of war. It also has every right and every obligation to insist that security comes first.

But treating improved conditions as a substitute for confronting rejectionism and violence is wishful thinking dressed up as wisdom. History shows that the desire to erase Israel has survived both relative prosperity and genuine hardship.

Real progress requires Palestinians, and especially their leaders, to abandon the dream of Israel’s disappearance.

Until that fundamental shift occurs, focusing primarily on making life more comfortable will not deliver peace. It will simply repeat the same cycle we have already lived through too many times: offers extended, rejected, and followed by more bloodshed and more funerals on both sides.

The evidence of a hundred years is clear enough for anyone willing to look at it without sentimentality. Ignoring that record makes one blind to reality, and the cost of that blindness continues to be paid in lives.