New Jeanland

When advocacy treats Palestinians as though they have no meaningful political agency, it stops defending dignity and starts lowering expectations.

There is a peculiar contradiction at the center of a great deal of modern Palestinian advocacy.

Palestinians are described as a people entitled to self-determination, sovereignty, political independence, and national dignity. Then, the moment Palestinian political choices become difficult to defend, agency disappears.

Their leaders are corrupt because circumstances are difficult. Hamas exists because of Israel. Elections fail because political conditions are unstable. Institutions remain weak because sovereignty is incomplete. Political violence is explained through grievance. Authoritarianism is explained through insecurity. Repeated failures of governance are treated as things that happen to Palestinians rather than outcomes Palestinians, like every other population, can also help produce.

At some point, this stops looking like solidarity. It starts looking like the bigotry of low expectations.

Political Agency Cannot Be Conditional

If Palestinians are capable of self-determination, then they are capable of political responsibility. Those ideas come together. A people cannot be treated as sovereign moral agents when asserting claims against Israel and then as politically helpless whenever their own institutions, movements, or public preferences deserve scrutiny.

Agency cannot mean:

Palestinians chose this when the choice is admirable.

and

Palestinians had no meaningful choice when the result is ugly.

That is not agency. It is selective attribution. Political choices are always made under constraints. War, poverty, foreign intervention, propaganda, economic dependence, insecurity, religion, and social pressure all shape what societies become. They do not erase the society.

Explanation is not the same thing as absolution.

Almost Nobody Gets a Clean Start

One of the most persistent defenses of Palestinian political failure is that Palestinians have never been given a “clean sovereign environment” in which to build functioning institutions.

That is true in the narrowest possible sense. It is also a remarkably strange standard.

Very few states have been handed peaceful territory, uncontested borders, functioning institutions, economic stability, social cohesion, cooperative neighbors, and several quiet decades in which to practice government before anyone expects results.

Modern states routinely emerged from war, partition, imperial collapse, civil conflict, poverty, mass migration, ethnic tension, foreign interference, or some combination of all of them.

Israel certainly did. The state began amid war, invasion, displaced populations, enormous waves of immigration, austerity, unresolved borders, ideological divisions, hostile neighboring governments, and the immediate problem of building institutions while simultaneously fighting for survival.

The comparison does not require pretending Israeli and Palestinian circumstances are identical. They are not. It establishes something much more modest:

Difficult circumstances do not make political development impossible, and they cannot function forever as a complete explanation for political failure.

States across the world have been built under terrible conditions. Some developed durable institutions. Others did not. That difference is precisely why political culture, leadership, institutional design, civic expectations, and public choices matter. State-building is difficult because states are usually built under difficult conditions. That is not a Palestinian exception.

Governments Do Not Materialize From the Sky

There is an increasingly common way of discussing Palestinian politics as though almost every destructive feature of it came from somewhere else.

Hamas, PA corruption, factionalism, authoritarianism, patronage, political violence, and institutional weakness are repeatedly treated as external phenomena imposed upon Palestinian society rather than phenomena that also emerge from within it.

Governments and political movements do not materialize from nowhere. They emerge from political cultures, institutions, incentives, ideologies, patronage networks, religious movements, families, factions, elites, voters, armed organizations, and publics. Sometimes, governments repress people who hate them. Sometimes, they survive because alternatives are weak. Sometimes, they are sustained through fear, ideology, patronage, social legitimacy, or simple exhaustion. Usually, it is some combination. That complexity is worth discussing.

What is not intellectually serious is treating the population as though it has no meaningful relationship at all to the political order that develops around it.

Hamas Is Not Every Palestinian. That Does Not Make Public Opinion Irrelevant.

“Hamas does not represent all Palestinians” is obviously true. It is also frequently used to avoid a different question entirely: How much support does Hamas actually have?

Those are separate propositions.

No political movement represents every member of the population it governs. That does not mean public support becomes irrelevant. If a large share of Israelis supports a government policy, that matters when analyzing Israeli politics even though millions of Israelis disagree. If a large share of Americans supports a political movement, that tells us something about American political culture even though millions oppose it.

Palestinians should not suddenly become the only population on Earth for whom polling, elections, public demonstrations, political rhetoric, ideological movements, and social attitudes tell us nothing about the society.

Not all Palestinians support Hamas, sure, but that does not mean Hamas’s Palestinian support tells us nothing about Palestinian politics. Treating every troubling Palestinian political preference as unrepresentative while treating every troubling Israeli political preference as evidence about Israeli society is not analysis. It is a double standard.

Partial Government Is Still Government

Another defense is that Palestinians have never exercised full sovereignty.

That is true. It also does not mean Palestinians have never governed.

The Palestinian Authority has exercised substantial civil authority in parts of the West Bank for decades. Palestinian institutions have administered schools, police forces, ministries, municipalities, courts, public employment, licensing, taxation, health systems, and social services.

Gaza was governed internally by Hamas for years.

These are not examples of full sovereignty. They are examples of government. And government can be evaluated.

Were institutions strengthened?
Was corruption reduced?
Were independent courts protected?
Were elections regular?
Could political opponents participate meaningfully?
Was power transferred peacefully?
Were armed factions subordinated to civilian authority?
Did institutions become stronger than individual parties, families, or factions?

Those questions do not become illegitimate because sovereignty was incomplete. If anything, they become more important.

National Identity Does Not Automatically Create a Right to Sovereignty

There is another assumption embedded in the discussion of Palestinian statehood that deserves more scrutiny. The argument often moves directly from:

Palestinians are a distinct people with political rights.

to:

Therefore Palestinians are entitled to an independent sovereign state.

The conclusion does not automatically follow from the premise. Political rights, civil rights, national identity, cultural autonomy, self-government, and sovereign statehood are related concepts. They are not synonyms. There are many peoples, nations, ethnic communities, linguistic groups, and indigenous populations that do not possess independent sovereign states of their own.

Recognizing Palestinian national identity therefore does not require accepting that Palestinian sovereignty is the inevitable or morally mandatory political outcome. Nor does questioning Palestinian statehood deny Palestinian humanity. Those are different questions.

Even if one assumes, for the sake of argument, that Palestinian sovereignty is the desired outcome, the question of institutional capacity remains. A flag does not create competence. Recognition does not create legitimacy. Independence does not guarantee liberalism. Elections do not guarantee moderation.

National liberation movements do not automatically become responsible civil governments once they acquire international recognition.

The Monopoly on Force Is Not a Minor Detail

A functioning state requires more than international recognition. It requires the ability to enforce law across its territory. That means one legitimate authority ultimately controls organized force. This is not an optional feature. A government cannot function normally if competing armed organizations retain independent military structures, conduct their own foreign policy, launch attacks, enforce separate rules, or challenge the state whenever they choose.

This problem is central to Palestinian statehood.

The division between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority is not simply an unfortunate political disagreement. It goes directly to whether a Palestinian government could perform one of the most basic functions expected of states everywhere else: governing its own territory.

Recognizing a state does not manufacture that capacity.

A UN vote cannot create a monopoly on force.

A diplomatic declaration cannot create administrative legitimacy.

A flag cannot make rival armed factions disappear.

Those are political achievements. They have to be built.

Political Culture Is Real

The phrase “political culture” makes people uncomfortable because it can be abused. It can become lazy essentialism: these people are simply like this. That is not useful. Political cultures change. They respond to institutions, incentives, leadership, education, war, prosperity, ideology, religion, and generational shifts.

Avoiding essentialism does not require pretending political culture does not exist. Societies develop norms around corruption, dissent, violence, compromise, pluralism, authority, nationalism, religion, family networks, and political legitimacy. Those norms affect what institutions can survive.

A society in which losing an election means accepting opposition status will behave differently from one in which losing means returning to armed struggle.

A society in which political opponents are treated as legitimate adversaries will develop differently from one in which they are treated as traitors.

A society in which compromise is understood as ordinary politics has different institutional possibilities from one in which compromise is routinely framed as humiliation or betrayal.

These are not genetic characteristics. They are political habits, and political habits can be criticized. In fact, if political culture could not change, there would be very little point in discussing self-government at all.

There Is Nothing Respectful About Pretending Adults Have No Agency

A strange thing happens when Palestinian political responsibility is discussed.

Accountability itself begins to sound cruel. To examine Palestinian public opinion is supposedly to blame civilians for everything their leaders do. To criticize Palestinian governance is supposedly to excuse Israeli conduct. To discuss ideological extremism is supposedly to deny the complexity of Palestinian life.

But adults can be both constrained and responsible. People can make choices from a limited set of options and still be accountable for which options they support. We understand this almost everywhere else. American political choices are analyzed even though Americans live in an environment shaped by propaganda, economic incentives, partisan media, and social pressure. Israeli political choices are analyzed despite Israelis operating under significant security pressures. European political movements are still treated as meaningful expressions of political culture even when economic conditions strongly influence elections. We routinely understand that structural pressures and political agency can coexist. Except, increasingly, when discussing Palestinians. Then constraint becomes incapacity.

Context becomes absolution. Agency becomes almost offensive to suggest. That is not respect.

Sympathy Can Become Infantilization

There is a charitable impulse behind some of this. People are understandably reluctant to assign collective responsibility to civilians for every failure of their leaders. That instinct is reasonable. But compassion becomes distortion when it requires imagining Palestinians as permanently acted upon and never acting.

There is something deeply patronizing about a political analysis in which Palestinians are sophisticated enough to make territorial claims, demand recognition, assert national rights, and participate in international diplomacy, but somehow not sophisticated enough to bear responsibility for what they do with political power.

They can demand borders but not be expected to control armed groups.

They can demand elections but cannot be criticized for political choices.

They can demand recognition but cannot be expected to maintain accountable institutions.

They can claim national agency, but whenever the consequences of that agency become inconvenient, suddenly history, Israel, Britain, America, colonialism, poverty, or somebody else assumes control of the steering wheel.

Eventually, the defense becomes insulting. If political responsibility disappears whenever historical circumstances become sufficiently difficult, almost nobody in history has ever been responsible for anything.

Sovereignty Is Not Owed Merely Because a National Identity Exists

There is a tendency to discuss Palestinian sovereignty as though the existence of Palestinian national identity settles the question. It does not.

Sovereignty is not simply an acknowledgment that a people exists. It is an enormous grant of political authority. A sovereign government controls territory, administers law, manages security, enters international agreements, controls institutions, and exercises coercive power over the people within its jurisdiction.

Those powers have consequences beyond symbolism. That means arguments for sovereignty cannot stop at identity or grievance. They also have to confront security, institutional capacity, political legitimacy, public norms, factionalism, and the actual likely behavior of the government that would exercise that sovereignty. A functioning state needs courts, public finances, administrative competence, legitimate security forces, mechanisms for transferring power, institutions stronger than individual factions, and enough political consensus that losing an election does not mean abandoning the political system. Those things do not emerge because the international community decides that statehood would be emotionally satisfying. They have to exist in political reality.

Eventually a people claiming self-government has to demonstrate government. That means taking ownership not only of aspirations, but also of failures.

Agency Has to Mean Something

Political dignity is not the right to have every failure explained away. It is the right (and burden) of being treated as a participant in history rather than merely its victim.

If Palestinians are political actors, then Palestinian politics should be open to the same scrutiny applied to every other society: institutions, public opinion, ideological movements, civic norms, incentives, leadership, political violence, corruption, and failure. If Palestinians are capable of national self-determination, then they are capable of political responsibility. If their political choices matter when those choices are used to support claims for sovereignty, then those choices must also matter when they complicate those claims. Agency carries consequences. To grant Palestinians agency only when it produces conclusions advocates find sympathetic, and withdraw that agency whenever it produces outcomes they would rather explain away, is not equality.

It is the bigotry of low expectations.