The Profiteers of Perpetual Conflict

Who Really Has The Power?

Israel is a state with a powerful army. And they are backed by the world’s biggest superpower: the United States of America. Therefore in the war between Israel and Hamas, they must be the oppressors because Palestinians are stateless with much less power, right?

This narrative is popular, simple, digestible and fits neatly into the binary thinking of “oppressed versus oppressor” that so often dominates public discourse today in the West. But it is wrong. Not only is it a gross oversimplification that obscures reality but it is a dangerous manipulation that is used to benefit those who are the real oppressors.

Israel exists today because its people, after nearly 2,000 years of persecution and exile from their homeland, worked relentlessly to build a state where they could be free. They accepted the United Nations’ partition plan in 1947, which would have created both a Jewish state and an Arab state in a land that had not had sovereignty since the Judean Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans (132-135 CE), when Jewish rebels managed to re-establish an independent Jewish state in their indigenous land. But what did the Nazi-supporting Arab leadership do? They rejected the partition plan, which was the only diplomatic solution to the civil war and decided to wage a genocidal campaign against the Jews, merely 2 years after the Holocaust in an attempt to finish the job that Hitler started. And they lost (something they have refused to accept for 75 years).

The very notion of Jewish sovereignty, in any part of the land was, and continues to be, an affront to Arab Muslim supremacists who have long dominated the region since their violent Muslim conquests in the 7th century. The war that the Arabs (now identifying as “Palestinians”) waged was never about borders, scarcity of land or resources—it was about antisemitism and a refusal to coexist with Jews who have any form of relative power in the Middle East. This is why they have rejected their own independence in 1947 and multiple times since, including as recently as 2000 and 2008.

A question many people are not asking is, “Why would Palestinian leaders continuously refuse statehood for their people?” Why reject the opportunity to build a nation? Isn’t that what “Free Palestine” is all about? It turns out, it’s not. The answer lies in their long-term strategy—a strategy not of peace and coexistence, but of destruction. They have no interest in a two-state solution because their ultimate goal is not independence for their people but the elimination of Israel. The ideology that is the backbone of Palestinian national identity is anti-Zionism, or Jewish rejectionism, not Palestinian self-determination. The bond that keeps them united is their mutual hatred for the Jew with power, or the “Zionist,” and not the love they have for themselves. They forgo power in the short term because it is strategically beneficial for what they see as "ultimate power" in the long term, when Israel is eventually destroyed.