Why did the Palestinians lose?

21/09/2026

By Hicham Bou Nassif | Weinberg Associate Professor of International Relations and the Middle East and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College-California

The Palestinian cause has gone through three stages since the 1948 Nakba. The first lasted until 1967, during which Palestinians pinned their hopes on returning to their homeland after the Arab armies defeated Israel. The second was the armed struggle, which lasted until Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from the country in 1982. The third one is that of the intifada and peaceful struggle which began in 1987. The Oslo Accords in the early 1990s were expected to be one of the first results of this third stage.

Much changed from one stage to another: from relying on the Arabs, to armed struggle and people’s war, and finally to the intifada and throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. What did not change, however, is that none of it worked: Palestinians remain a people without a state, while suffering accumulates. This cycle of suffering continues.

Why did the Palestinian liberation movement fail to achieve its dream of an independent state? Some of the reasons are internal, meaning they are specific to the Palestinians themselves. Other reasons are related to changes in Israeli society after 1977. Regional and international circumstances also did not help.

On the purely internal level, deep divisions among Palestinians harmed their cause. Indeed, Palestinian-Palestinian conflict has accompanied the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from the start: from the rivalry between the al-Husseini and al-Nashashibi families before the establishment of Israel, to the conflict between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas today. Then there were, of course, decades of divisions between the right and left wings of the Palestinian movement.

There is no room here to detail how these divisions harmed the cause. I will limit myself to what I consider their most dangerous and lasting consequence: making it easier for parties that care less about the Palestinian cause than about exploiting its people to penetrate the Palestinian ranks. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq did so in the past through its agent Abu Nidal. Today, it is the Iranian Mullah regime and Hamas.

The shift to the right in Israeli society, demonstrated by Likud’s first rise to power under Menachem Begin in 1977, also posed a major obstacle to the establishment of a Palestinian state. Just because Lebanon’s opponents of Israel are being disingenuous in how it invokes the supposed “Greater Israel” project for their own purposes does not mean that such a project does not exist at all. It is true that accusing Israel of seeking expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates in pursuit of biblical goals is absurd: such a project simply does not exist. What is certain, however, is that the Israeli right, from Menachem Begin’s time to the present, has sought to create a different kind of Greater Israel, one that incorporates the West Bank. It views it part of the Jewish people’s historical heritage, and comes in addition, of course, to the territory of Israel as it existed before the 1967 war. This view rules out the possibility of reconciliation with the Palestinian project through a two-state solution because it disputes with the Palestinians over their fundamental geographic base, namely the West Bank, or “Judea and Samaria” in the language of the Israeli right. According to this view, the Palestinian state is Jordan, and the Palestinians’ future lies there. Ariel Sharon used to say this openly.

To be continued: The regional and international reasons behind the failure of the Palestinian national movement.

This article was originally published in Arabic by Nida al-Watan on 21 September 2026. The original can be found here.

The views expressed in this op-ed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of SyriacPress.