For 78 years, the core of the Palestinian national movement has sought the elimination of Israel as a sovereign Jewish state.
The War of Independence (1948-49) ended with armistice lines that left Israel in control of more territory than the partition plan had assigned. Palestinian leadership and the Arab states continued to refuse recognition and maintained a state of belligerency.
An enemy is a party whose objective is the destruction of your nation rather than the adjustment of its borders or policies. A partner in a conflict is a party that disagrees on territory or rights and is willing to settle the disagreement through negotiation without the systematic use of violence against the civilian population or the institutions of the state.
The historical record places the Palestinians in the first category as an enemy of Israel. In November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted to partition the remaining territory of the British Mandate into a Jewish state and an Arab state.
The Jewish leadership accepted the plan while the Arab Higher Committee and the governments of the neighboring Arab states rejected it and launched a war to prevent the Jewish state from coming into being.
The Arab states that invaded in 1948 did so under the banner of preventing a Jewish state, and many of their leaders spoke openly of driving the Jews into the sea.
Palestinian fighters participated in the fighting and in subsequent years the idea of return was framed not as resettlement in a new Arab state but as the reversal of the Jewish victory and the restoration of Arab majority rule over the entire territory.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Palestinian organizations based in Jordan, Lebanon, and elsewhere carried out airline hijackings, the murder of diplomats, and the attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Their stated purpose was to end the Zionist state.
Attempts to reject the State of Israel
These attacks were accompanied by a political program that rejected any Jewish sovereignty. Maps produced by Palestinian organizations showed the entire area as Palestine with no Israel. Speeches by leaders described the Jews as colonial invaders whose presence would be temporary and whose removal would restore justice to the land.
The PLO under Yasser Arafat adopted a charter that called for the liberation of all of Palestine and the elimination of the Zionist entity. Even after the organization formally amended some articles under American pressure in the 1990s, the practical policy of rejecting Jewish national rights remained in place.
Generations of Palestinian children have been taught that the land is theirs alone and that martyrdom in the struggle against Israel is the highest aspiration. This educational system makes a future generation of negotiators who accept Israel unlikely.
The First Intifada that erupted in 1987 mobilized large numbers of Palestinians in the territories captured in 1967. The uprising was presented as a popular revolt against occupation, yet its leaders rejected offers of autonomy that would have begun a process toward self-government without ending the Jewish state.
The Oslo process of the 1990s transferred administrative control of major Palestinian population centers to the newly created Palestinian Authority. When Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak offered a Palestinian state on most of the West Bank and Gaza with a capital in parts of Jerusalem at the Camp David summit in 2000, the proposal was rejected.
The Second Intifada followed within weeks, and more than one thousand Israelis were killed and thousands more wounded before the construction of the security barrier and military operations reduced the number of successful attacks.
A further offer by prime minister Ehud Olmert in 2008 that included additional territorial swaps and a shared arrangement for Jerusalem was likewise turned down without a counteroffer that accepted the permanence of a Jewish state.
Hamas, which won elections in Gaza and seized full control there in 2007, has never hidden its objective. Its original charter quotes religious texts calling for the killing of Jews and states that the land of Palestine is an Islamic endowment that cannot be relinquished.
Years of rocket fire from Gaza, the construction of attack tunnels, and the diversion of construction materials into military infrastructure prepared the conditions for the assault of October 7, 2023.
On that morning, thousands of fighters crossed the border, murdered civilians in their homes, raped women, and abducted more than two hundred hostages. The attack was planned over years and celebrated by Hamas leaders as a historic achievement that would lead to further stages of the struggle.
Public opinion surveys conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in the aftermath showed that a majority of respondents in both the West Bank and Gaza viewed the attack as justified.
These findings are consistent with earlier polls that have repeatedly found majorities opposed to recognizing Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and supportive of armed struggle as the primary means of advancing Palestinian goals.
Successive Israeli governments have negotiated, withdrawn from territory, and released prisoners in exchange for commitments that were later broken.
The pattern has been that periods of relative calm are used to rebuild military capacity and that every political concession is followed by demands for further concessions rather than by acceptance of a final status that leaves Israel intact as a Jewish and democratic state.
The meetings between Israeli leaders and Palestinian representatives over decades produced temporary arrangements and limited security cooperation in certain periods. They did not produce a Palestinian leadership prepared to abandon the demand that Israel disappear or be reduced to a non-Jewish entity within borders that would leave it unable to defend itself.
This record establishes the Palestinians as an enemy of Israel in the precise sense that their dominant political movements seek the destruction of the Jewish nation-state. The distinction guides the necessary response.
Security requires the ability to prevent the concentration of forces that can carry out mass attacks, the denial of international legitimacy to groups that pursue eliminationist goals, and the maintenance of defensible lines until a Palestinian leadership emerges that is prepared to live alongside Israel rather than in its place.
The Jewish people returned to sovereignty in their land after centuries in which they lacked the means to defend themselves against those who sought their destruction. The present generation carries the responsibility of ensuring that the state created for that purpose continues to exist. Understanding the nature of the adversary is the necessary starting point for that task.
The writer is a Zionist educator at institutions around the world and recently published a new book, Zionism Today.