Category Archives: Palestinians

Completing Jerusalem

Posted on by
Reply

In July 1980, the Knesset passed the Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel. Its opening declaration remains one of the clearest statements of Zionist purpose ever enacted by the State of Israel:

“Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.”

The law settled a question that had haunted Jewish history for centuries. Jerusalem would never again be divided by barbed wire, minefields, and sniper positions. The city reunited in 1967 would remain the political and spiritual heart of the Jewish state.

Forty-six years later, it is worth asking a simple question:

What does “united” mean?

The answer cannot be limited to municipal boundaries. It cannot be measured solely by roads, tax collection, or police jurisdiction. A united city is ultimately a civic reality. It is a city whose residents share a common framework of governance and belonging.

Image of man walking through Herod’s Gate in Old City of Jerusalem (FirstOneThrough with AI)

When Israel reunited Jerusalem in 1967, the decision to grant permanent residency rather than citizenship to the Arab residents made practical sense. The future of the broader Arab-Israeli conflict remained uncertain, and the status of Jerusalem itself was still contested internationally.

But those residents’ children are no longer children.

An Arab born in eastern Jerusalem in 1981 is now in his mid-forties. He has spent his entire life under Israeli administration. He attended schools in Jerusalem, received healthcare through Israeli institutions, worked in Jerusalem businesses, and raised a family in Jerusalem. For an entire generation born after the Jerusalem Law, the temporary arrangement has become a permanent condition.

An Arab born in Nazareth in 1981 became an Israeli citizen at birth. An Arab born in Jerusalem in 1981 generally remained a permanent resident. Both have lived under Israeli sovereignty their entire lives. One votes in national elections while the other does not.

If Jerusalem is truly united, how should that distinction be understood nearly half a century after the Basic Law was enacted?

The question is no longer theoretical. In recent years, thousands of eastern Jerusalem Arabs have applied for Israeli citizenship, reflecting a significant shift from earlier decades. The demand exists. What many applicants encounter instead is a cumbersome process that can stretch for years.

The issue has taken on added significance since October 7.

Hamas named its attack the “Al-Aqsa Flood” because it sought to seize sovereignty in Jerusalem. For decades, Hamas and other rejectionist movements have portrayed Jerusalem as a city temporarily under Jewish control and awaiting liberation.

A confident nation answers such claims by strengthening the institutions of sovereignty.

The ramifications would extend far beyond voting rights in Israel.

The Palestinian Authority presents “East Jerusalem” as the capital of a future Palestinian state. International organizations continue to describe “East Jerusalem” as occupied territory, while critics accuse Israel of apartheid and permanent disenfranchisement.

Yet what would happen if large numbers of Arabs born in Jerusalem after 1980 chose Israeli citizenship?

Hamas would struggle to explain why residents supposedly awaiting liberation had instead chosen participation in Israeli democracy. The Palestinian Authority would find it difficult to claim as its constituency citizens voting in Israeli elections. International institutions would confront a reality more complicated than diplomatic formulas unchanged since 1967. Critics would have to reconcile accusations of apartheid with a policy that expands citizenship and voting rights.

Jerusalem also offers a practical test for Israel’s broader sovereignty debate. Politicians who advocate annexing parts or all of Judea and Samaria should first explain their position regarding Arabs born after 1980 in Israel’s declared and united capital. If no consensus exists in Jerusalem, it is difficult to imagine one elsewhere.

Every party seeking to govern Israel should therefore answer a simple question: Do you support an expedited path to citizenship for Arabs born in eastern Jerusalem after the passage of the Jerusalem Law?

Such a program could include security screening, an oath of loyalty to the State of Israel and its laws, and a streamlined administrative process. Those who prefer permanent residency could retain it. Those seeking citizenship would no longer spend years navigating bureaucratic obstacles.

Jerusalem was reunited in 1967 and anchored in law in 1980. As the fiftieth anniversary of the Jerusalem Law approaches, Israelis should decide whether the next step is to complete the city’s civic integration.

The question is larger than citizenship. It is about the meaning of a united Jerusalem and the confidence of a sovereign nation in its eternal capital.

Palestinian Authority Mocks Jewish Children Murdered in Holocaust

Posted on by
Reply

How do you comprehend six million murdered Jews? One million murdered children?

The numbers are so large that the human mind struggles to grasp it. Six million becomes a statistic. A statistic becomes an abstraction. And an abstraction risks becoming forgettable.

For decades, Holocaust educators wrestled with that problem. Their answer was simple: stop counting and start remembering.

Programs such as Names, Not Numbers were created in Jewish schools to teach students that every Holocaust victim was an individual human being. Students interviewed survivors, recorded testimonies, learned family histories, and transformed statistics back into people. The goal was not merely to teach history. It was to restore identity to those whom the Nazis sought to erase.

The same idea appeared in the remarkable documentary Paper Clips.

In the film, students in a small town in Tennessee learned that six million was too large a number to understand. They discovered that Norwegians had worn paper clips as symbols of resistance to Nazi occupation and decided to collect six million paper clips – one for every murdered Jew.

As the clips accumulated, the students began to understand something profound. It was hard to gather millions of ordinary clips – it required enormous resources and participation of people and organizations far and wide. That millions of people could be exterminated deliberately was terrifying.

The educational programs also sought to do more than humanize the victims and demonstrate the scale of the atrocities.

Nazis literally transformed people into numbers. Upon arrival at Auschwitz, many prisoners were stripped of their names and tattooed with identification numbers. It was part of a larger project to erase individuality, dignity, and humanity. The Holocaust was not only a campaign to murder Jews. It was a campaign to reduce them to anonymous units in a machinery of extermination.

Jewish children display tattooed numbers that Nazis put on their arms during the Holocaust

The Holocaust was not simply a story within a war. More than one million Jewish children were murdered not because they were caught in a battlefield, not because they belonged to an opposing army, but because they were Jewish. The Nazi regime actively hunted them for liquidation. Jewish babies, toddlers, and schoolchildren were marked for death from birth.

They were not collateral damage. They were targets.

For decades, educators, museums, survivors, and Jewish communities worked to preserve those names and those stories. The idea that victims should be remembered as human beings rather than statistics became one of the defining themes of Holocaust education around the world.

Which is why the recent Palestinian campaign, “Their Names Are Not Numbers,” is so striking.

The slogan echoes language that Holocaust educators spent generations developing. It draws upon a framework created to explain why victims of genocide should be remembered as individuals rather than numbers.

Palestinian Arabs are using a cruel tool in a flimsy attempt to wipe away their own guilt for launching a genocidal war with broad support, and for deliberately banning children from entering the tunnel infrastructure that leadership spent years and billions of dollars constructing. The Palestinian Authority is not merely making the dead children martyrs at someone else’s hands rather than their own, but deliberately lifting the campaign from an actual genocide. They have turned Holocaust remembrance against the Jewish state.

This is a moral perversion.

The Holocaust was a state-directed project of extermination whose goal was the disappearance of the Jewish people. Israel’s war against Hamas is a war against an armed movement that invaded Israel, massacred civilians, took hostages, and openly declares its intention to destroy the Jewish state.

Equating those realities with the Holocaust is not simply immoral but antisemitic. Borrowing the language developed to remember murdered Jews is not simply appropriation but sadistic.

Names, Not Numbers was created to ensure that the victims of history’s greatest campaign of anti-Jewish extermination would never be reduced to statistics. To take that language and deploy it as part of a campaign that casts Israel as Nazi Germany not only vilifies Israel unjustly but negates the Holocaust of its meaning and mocks the memory of a million murdered Jewish children.

From Jesus the Jew to Gaza: The Vatican’s Dangerous Narrative

Posted on by
Reply

For years, pro-Palestinian activists have promoted the false claim that Jesus was a Palestinian.

Jesus was a Jew, born to a Jewish family, living in the Jewish homeland, speaking to Jewish audiences, teaching from the Hebrew Bible, and making pilgrimages to the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The word “Palestine” was not even the name of the province during His lifetime. The Roman renaming of Judea to Syria Palaestina occurred about a century after His death.

Yet the claim persists because it serves an ahistorical but political purpose: If Jesus can be transformed from a Jew into a Arab, then the central figure of Christianity can be detached from Jewish history and reinserted into a modern political narrative. Suddenly, Jews are no longer obvious indigenous people in the Holy Land, but Arabs – who did not arrive en masse to region for another six centuries – are the real Jews.

The recent Vatican News article about Gaza takes that process one step further.

The article does not explicitly call Jesus a Palestinian. Instead, it wraps a Gazan narrative in the language of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection. Gaza becomes the tomb. The refugee becomes the suffering servant. The journey out becomes resurrection.

The symbolism is unmistakable.

For centuries, Christians looked to the suffering of Jesus as a uniquely sacred story. Increasingly, anti-Israel agitators are attempting to woo parts of the Christian world by recasting that story through the lens of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Palestinian Arabs occupying the role once reserved for Christ Himself.

The war in Gaza did not begin with suffering descending from heaven. It began with decisions made by thousands of Gazans. Hamas invaded Israel, murdered civilians and took hostages. Hamas launched a war that it knew would bring devastating consequences to Gaza as it hid it tunnels and refused to let women and children enter the shelters.

Does that resemble Jesus?

Genocidal psychopaths are being transformed into the innocent sufferer. The political and military context disappears from view. Agency gives way to symbolism.

What makes this especially troubling for many Jews is that the institution promoting this narrative is no longer just fringe anti-Israel groups or university protest movements.

It is the Vatican itself.

For two thousand years, the Church has wrestled with the consequences of separating Christianity from its Jewish roots. In recent decades, Catholic-Jewish relations made enormous progress by reaffirming the Jewishness of Jesus and Christianity’s historical connection to the Jewish people.

That progress is undermined when contemporary narratives replace Jesus the Jew with a new symbolic figure: the Palestinian sufferer who cheered Jews being burned alive.

The War Over Hebron: Abraham’s Tomb, Oslo’s Legacy, and Hamas’s Shadow

Posted on by
1

This week, Palestinian officials accused Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of making a “terrorist decision” after he announced that Israel would assume planning authority around Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs.

Cave of the Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs

The rhetoric was explosive. Yet the dispute reaches far beyond construction permits or municipal authority. It touches one of Judaism’s holiest sites, one of the most complicated agreements of the Oslo era, and one of Hamas’s strongest bastions in the West Bank.

If you read Palestinian official state media, the story sounds straightforward: Israel has seized Palestinian powers and is annexing another piece of the West Bank. If you read Israeli nationalist media, the story sounds equally straightforward: Israel is finally correcting a decades-old mistake and restoring authority over one of Judaism’s holiest sites.

Neither version tells readers what is actually happening. To understand the dispute, you first need to understand Hebron.

Hebron is not just another city in the West Bank. According to the Bible, it is where Abraham purchased the Cave of Machpelah as a burial place for Sarah. Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah are buried there. Long before Jerusalem became the capital of King David, Hebron was David’s first capital.

For Jews, it is one of the holiest places on earth. For Muslims, the same structure is known as the Ibrahimi Mosque and is among Islam’s revered sites in the region.

Unlike most cities in the West Bank, Hebron is also home to a small Jewish community living amid a much larger Palestinian population. That unique reality led negotiators in the Oslo era to treat Hebron differently from every other Palestinian city.

In 1997, Israel and the Palestinian Authority signed the Hebron Protocol. The agreement divided the city into two sectors: H1, roughly 80 percent of the city, was placed under Palestinian Authority control. H2, roughly 20 percent of the city, remained under Israeli security control and included the Jewish neighborhoods and the Cave of the Patriarchs.

What many people do not realize is that the Protocol never clearly settled who would ultimately govern Hebron. It created temporary arrangements and postponed the hardest questions to future negotiations that never happened.

Yet today’s argument is unfolding against a backdrop far different than the one envisioned by Oslo.

Hebron has become one of Hamas’s strongest centers in the West Bank. In 2025, Israeli security forces announced the dismantling of one of the largest Hamas networks uncovered in E49 (east of the 1949 Armistice Lines)/ “West Bank” in years, centered in the Hebron area. Authorities alleged the network included dozens of operatives, weapons caches, financing channels, recruitment efforts, and plans for future attacks.

The threat remains active. This week Hamas claimed responsibility for the shooting attack near Hebron that killed an Israeli officer.

For many Israelis, the debate over Hebron is therefore inseparable from a larger question: if authority shifts in the city, who ultimately benefits from that shift?

That brings us to the current controversy.

For years, Israeli officials sought approval for maintenance, accessibility, and infrastructure projects at the Cave of the Patriarchs, including an elevator for elderly and disabled worshippers and improvements to covered prayer areas. Palestinian municipal authorities and the Islamic Waqf opposed those projects, arguing that such decisions belonged to Palestinian institutions under the Hebron Protocol.

To Israelis, the arrangement had become unworkable. To Palestinians, it represented one of the few remaining authorities preserved under the Oslo framework.

Over time, courts, administrators, and politicians became entangled in disputes that were ostensibly about construction but were really about governance. Now they have exploded.

The argument unfolding in Hebron sits atop three unresolved realities: the ancient claim of Abraham’s burial place, the unfinished compromises of Oslo, and the persistent presence of Hamas in and around the city.

Nearly thirty years after negotiators divided Hebron into H1 and H2, the questions they postponed have returned. Not as diplomatic clauses on paper, but as arguments over sovereignty, security, and history.

This Day in Palestinians Resorting to Violence History: June 16 — When ISIS, Hamas, and the PFLP All Wanted Credit for Murdering Hadas Malka

Posted on by
Reply

On the evening of June 16, 2017, 23-year-old Border Police officer Hadas Malka was standing guard near Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate, one of the busiest entrances to the Old City.

Before the night was over, she would be dead.

Border Police officer Hadas Malka, who was killed on June 16, 2017, in a stabbing attack near Damascus Gate in Jerusalem

Three Palestinian terrorists from villages near Ramallah launched coordinated attacks using knives and firearms. As officers responded, one of the attackers rushed Malka and stabbed her repeatedly. Four others were wounded before security forces killed the terrorists.

Malka, from Ashdod, died of her injuries shortly afterward.

What followed made the attack unusual even by the standards of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

ISIS claimed responsibility.

“lions of the caliphate carried out a blessed operation in the city of Jerusalem.” –ISIS

Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine pushed back, insisting that the attackers belonged to Palestinian organizations.

“The three hero martyrs who executed the Jerusalem operation have no connection to Daesh [ISIS], they are affiliated with the [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] and Hamas,” Hamas official Izzat El-Reshiq tweeted.

The argument was never about the murder itself. It was about who deserved recognition for carrying it out.

For many outside the Middle East, ISIS represents a uniquely dangerous form of extremism. Yet in Jerusalem that night, the distinction mattered little to the victim. Whether carried out in the name of ISIS, Hamas, or the PFLP, the result was the same: a young policewoman was murdered while protecting the public.

The attack came years before October 7, but it reflected a pattern that long predates both events. Terrorist groups may differ in ideology, tactics, and leadership. Their rivalry often centers on who can claim the mantle of “resistance” and the vile prestige that follows a successful attack.

On June 16, 2017, that competition played out in plain sight.

A young Israeli officer lay dead. Three terrorist organizations wanted the world to know the attack belonged to them.

Solomon’s Pools and the Battle to Replace the Builders

Posted on by
Reply

The Palestinian Authority has announced plans to transform Solomon’s Pools, between Bethlehem and Efrat, into a major Palestinian tourist, cultural, and religious destination. The project includes a mosque, tourism infrastructure, educational programs, international advocacy campaigns, and efforts to preserve what officials describe as the site’s historical and demographic character.

The irony is hard to miss.

Solomon’s Pools are among the most important surviving engineering works of ancient Judea. Built during the Second Temple period, the reservoirs and aqueducts supplied water to Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple. Their existence is evidence of the Jewish civilization that built and governed Jerusalem over two thousand years ago, that grew the city towards the end of the Second Temple period to approximately 50,0000 people.

Mazar, A.A. 2002. Survey of the aqueducts to Israel. In The Aqueducts of Israel, ed. Amit D., Patrich J., and Hirschfeld Y., 212–244.

Without Jewish Jerusalem, there would be no Solomon’s Pools.

Yet Palestinian officials speak of preserving the site’s historical character while proposing changes that have no connection to the history that made the site significant.

  • If the goal is to preserve the site’s historical character, why alter it?
  • If the goal is to protect its demographic character, what demographic character existed when the reservoirs were built?

The people who built Solomon’s Pools were Jews. The reservoirs were built to serve a Jewish capital. The aqueducts carried water to the Jewish Temple. The site’s significance is inseparable from ancient Jewish Jerusalem.

Solomon’s Pools c. 1890

So why place a mosque at a reservoir built by Jews to serve Jewish Jerusalem while claiming to preserve its historical character?

The answer appears in the language of the project itself. Officials speak of strengthening Palestinian presence, reinforcing Palestinian identity, and mobilizing international support for Palestinian claims.

This is not preservation. This is a battle of historical replacement.

A generation from now, visitors may encounter a mosque, Palestinian tourism facilities, and Palestinian historical narratives. What may become increasingly distant is the reason the site exists at all: it was built by Jews to serve Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish people.

“We know that the prime Zionist goal is emptying this land of its Christians and Muslims. They [the Jews] don’t want anyone here other than themselves. The Christians before the Muslims, because the Christians were here on this land before the Muslims… the Christian is the brother of the Muslim. They celebrate together, suffer together, live together, work together, and fight together against their enemy, because we have been the owners of this land since this land’s existence… We will remain in this land forever, while the attackers [the Jews] have no place in Jerusalem and no place here.” – Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas March 2023

That is how historical replacement works. The monument is not destroyed. The identity of its builders is replaced.

Solomon’s Pools stand as evidence of Jewish statehood, Jewish engineering, and Jewish life in the land of Israel long before the rise of Christianity, Islam, or modern Palestinian nationalism.

Solomon’s Pools is located off Road 60, between Efrat and Bethlehem

Palestinians nationalism is being built on erasing Jewish history and heritage. Today, it is clearly evident at Solomon’s Pools.

Who First Gave Palestinian Arabs Self-Government?

Posted on by
Reply

One of the most common claims in the Arab-Israeli conflict is that Jews took the land from Palestinian Arabs and denied them self-government.

History tells a different story.

  • For four hundred years, the Holy Land was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. There was no Palestinian Arab state.
  • After World War I, Britain took control under the Mandate for Palestine. Again, there was no Palestinian Arab state.
  • In 1947, the United Nations proposed creating both a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish leadership accepted the plan. Arab leaders rejected it and chose war.
  • When the fighting ended, Jordan occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem while Egypt controlled Gaza. For the next nineteen years, neither country established a Palestinian state. Neither granted sovereignty to the local Arab population. Neither created independent Palestinian governing institutions.

The first meaningful Palestinian self-government did not emerge under Ottoman rule, British rule, Jordanian rule, or Egyptian rule.

It emerged through agreements with Israel.

The Oslo Accords created the Palestinian Authority and transferred governing responsibilities in Palestinian cities to Palestinian leaders. For the first time in modern history, Palestinian Arabs exercised substantial self-rule in the territory where they lived.

Signing of Oslo II Accords

Then in 2005, Israel withdrew every soldier and civilian from Gaza, leaving the territory entirely under Palestinian administration.

Israel is often accused by Israel haters of having stolen a Palestinian state. Yet no Palestinian state existed under Ottoman rule, British rule, Jordanian rule, or Egyptian rule. The first meaningful Palestinian self-government emerged only through agreements negotiated with Israel.

From a Hamas Double Standard to the Hamas Dangerous Standard

Posted on by
Reply

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently declared that he supports “a monopoly on weapons by the Lebanese Government.”

He is right.

No sovereign state can exist when an organization maintains its own army outside central government control. Hezbollah may hold seats in parliament and participate in Lebanese politics, but that does not give it the right to possess an independent military force and wage war outside the direction of the government.

The obvious question is why the Secretary-General does not apply the same principle to Gaza.

If Lebanon requires a state monopoly on force, then so does any future Palestinian state. Hamas must be disarmed. There is no path to peace while an independent army remains outside governmental authority.

Yet the United Nations does not say so. Instead, it issues endless calls for ceasefires, negotiations, and diplomacy while avoiding the central reality that an armed movement dedicated to Israel’s destruction cannot simultaneously be the foundation for coexistence.

That double standard helps sustain the current conflict. Israelis and Gazans continue to suffer while international institutions refuse to confront the most basic requirement for ending the war.

But today’s war is not the real danger.

The real danger is what comes next.

Every major Palestinian poll points in the same direction. Palestinians are increasingly likely to hand control of the Palestinian Authority itself to Hamas or leaders who share Hamas’s objectives.

The result will not be a Palestinian Authority that replaces Hamas but Hamas becoming the Palestinian Authority.

At that point, Hamas will no longer be an armed movement operating from Gaza. It will be the internationally recognized government of Palestinian Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank. Its army will no longer be described as a militia but the armed forces of Palestine, internationally recognized, and still committed to the destruction of the Jewish state.

If so, the suffering of Israelis and Gazans today will pale in comparison to the conflict that follows.

Difficult situations are sometimes referred to as being between a rock and a hard place. The popular Palestinian terrorist group places the Middle East between a double standard and a destructive standard.

Related:

When Founding Fathers Are Psychopaths And Cowards (January 2024)

The Palestinian Movement with Arab Neighbors to Destroy Israel, 1964–1967

Posted on by
Reply

On May 28, 1964, the Palestinian National Charter was adopted in Jordanian-controlled Jerusalem. At that time, the West Bank was under Jordanian rule and Gaza was under Egyptian rule.

The Charter explicitly excluded both territories from its claims. It focused on Israel.

Article 24 stated:

“This Organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or in the Himmah Area.”

The Charter did not challenge Arab sovereignty. It only challenged Jewish sovereignty.

Palestinian leaders supplied the national cause; Arab governments supplied the armies.

The Charter left little doubt about its objective. It declared:

“The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the State of Israel are entirely illegal.” – Article 17

And that “liberation” of the land is the common cause of all Arabs:

“Arab unity leads to the liberation of Palestine, and the liberation of Palestine leads to Arab unity.” – Article 12

The Palestinian movement was therefore born not as a campaign against an Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but as a movement that denied the legitimacy of Israel itself, and one in which the entire Arab world must unite.

The Charter’s author, Ahmad Shukeiri, was born in Lebanon and was Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1957 to 1962. His pan-Arab worldview called for Arab armies to destroy Israel:

“Those who survive will remain in Palestine, but I estimate that none of them will survive.” – Ahmad Shukeiri June 1, 1967

Another widely reported statement attributed to him declared:

“The Jews of Palestine will have to leave…We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors – if there are any – the boats are ready to deport them.“

Ahmad Shukeiri, circa 1965

Shukeiri’s brothers-in-arms said much the same.

In October 1964, Syrian leader Salah Jadid declared:

“Our army will be satisfied with nothing less than the disappearance of Israel.”

In May 1965, Egypt and Iraq jointly announced:

“The Arab national aim is the elimination of Israel.”

That same year, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser proclaimed:

“We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand; we shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood.”

Iraqi President Abdul Rahman Arif described Israel as:

“an error which must be rectified.”

In June 1967, the Palestinian movement and the surrounding Arab states were speaking a common language. The PLO and Arab leaders denied Israel’s legitimacy and spoke openly of its disappearance, elimination, and destruction.

The rhetoric was matched by action. Egypt expelled the United Nations Emergency Force from Sinai, followed by Egyptian troops pouring into the peninsula. The Straits of Tiran were closed to Israeli shipping. Military alliances linked Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Arab armies massed on Israel’s borders.

Against that backdrop, Nasser announced on May 26, 1967:

“The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.“

Nine days later, war began.

Today, one of the most recognizable slogans associated with the Palestinian movement is “From the River to the Sea.” People often pretend that it is a call to free the West Bank and Gaza from “occupation” but the Arabic phrase speaks to the deeper truth as outlined by history.

“Min al-nahr ila al-bahr, Filastin ‘arabiyyah” meaning “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab.”

Whether controlled by Jordan or Egypt or a hoped for Palestine, the Palestinian movement at its core has always been an anti-Israel movement to destroy the presence of Jews in “any part of Palestine.”

The June 1967 Six-Day War did not create the current dynamic in the Israel-Arab conflict. It was the conclusion of the first chapter of the Palestinian-led pan-Arab rejection of Jews living in and having sovereignty in land they view as purely Arab.

Before Palestinians Can Hold an Election, They Must Decide Who Is Palestinian

Posted on by
Reply

On November 1, 2026, Palestinians are scheduled to elect a new Palestinian National Council (PNC), the legislative body of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Before they can choose their leaders, however, they must answer a more fundamental question: Who gets to vote?

The PNC claims to represent Palestinians everywhere, not merely those living in the West Bank and Gaza. Its members help determine the leadership and direction of the Palestinian national movement itself. The question of voter eligibility is therefore inseparable from the question of who is represented.

The new electoral framework approved by President Mahmoud Abbas reserves 200 seats for Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, and 150 seats for the diaspora.

The allocation itself reveals a dilemma.

The Palestinian national movement claims to represent over fourteen million people worldwide. Yet more than nine million live outside the territories. A fully proportional system could allow voters in Jordan, Europe, North America, and elsewhere to dominate institutions that claim to represent Palestinians living in Ramallah, Hebron, Nablus, and Gaza. The 200-150 split appears to give preference to those who live with the consequences of Palestinian political decisions over the larger voices from around the world.

That raises a more difficult question.

Who qualifies as Palestinian?

Should Jordanian citizens of Palestinian origin – like Queen Rania – vote? What about Americans, Canadians, or Europeans whose grandparents left the region decades ago? How many generations removed from Palestine remain eligible?

Queen Rania of Jordan, also a Palestinian

The question may be most consequential in Jordan, where millions of people of Palestinian origin – estimated at 70% of the population – already participate in the political life of another state. Would Jordanian citizens vote in elections for a body that claims to represent Palestinians globally? If so, how many generations removed from Palestine remain eligible?

The question becomes even more complicated inside Israel.

Roughly two million Israeli Arabs vote in Israeli elections and participate in Israeli political life. Many also identify as Palestinian. Will they vote in elections for the Palestinian National Council?

Jerusalem creates an additional complication. Palestinian leaders seek participation from Arab residents of eastern Jerusalem, which they view as part of a future Palestinian state. Israel considers Jerusalem part of Israel, and many Arab residents of eastern Jerusalem hold Israeli citizenship.

If eastern Jerusalem residents vote while Arab citizens of Israel elsewhere do not, Palestinian leaders will be drawing distinctions that many people may find difficult to explain. Why should an Israeli citizen in eastern Jerusalem participate while an Israeli citizen in Haifa, Nazareth, Acre, or Jaffa cannot?

Arabs in the Old City of Jerusalem. Some are Israeli citizens while others only residents. Who will be invited to participate in Palestinian elections? (photo: First One Through)

The Jerusalem question raises another issue Palestinian leaders will eventually have to address.

If current residency in eastern Jerusalem or the West Bank is enough to qualify someone to participate in Palestinian national elections, what about the hundreds of thousands of Jews who live in those same areas?

Palestinian leaders consider eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank part of the territory of a future Palestinian state. More than 700,000 Israeli Jews live there today. Will any of them be eligible to vote for the Palestinian National Council?

The issue extends beyond contemporary residents. Before 1948, the term Palestinian was often used in a geographic sense. Jews living in Mandatory Palestine carried Palestinian passports and considered themselves Palestinian.

A descendant of an Arab family that left Jaffa, Haifa, or Jerusalem generations ago may be eligible to vote despite never having lived there. A descendant of a Jewish family that lived continuously in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, or Tiberias for centuries almost certainly will not be allowed to participate in PNC elections.

The distinction reveals that eligibility is not based solely on current residence, geography, or even historical presence in the land. The electorate is being defined through a more specific combination of ancestry, identity, and connection to a particular historical community.

For decades, Palestinian leaders have often left the boundaries of Palestinian identity deliberately broad. Political movements can operate with ambiguity. Elections cannot.

The voter rolls will reveal whether Palestinian nationhood is principally based on residence, citizenship, ancestry, ethnicity, geography, national affiliation, or some combination of all six. Ethnicity alone cannot fully explain the answer. Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese, and many others share substantial linguistic, cultural, familial, and ethnic ties. The decisive factor appears to be a connection to a particular place and to people who lived there at a particular moment in history.

That is what makes the exercise so unusual. A Palestinian born in Chile, Canada, or the United States may qualify because a grandparent once lived in Jaffa or Jerusalem. A Jordanian or Syrian whose family never lived in Mandatory Palestine may not qualify despite sharing many of the same cultural and ethnic characteristics. A Jew – regardless of where he currently or historically lived – may be excluded.

Every eligibility rule will draw a line. Some people will be included while others will be excluded. Every decision will reveal how Palestinian leaders understand nationality, citizenship, ancestry, and belonging.

In many ways, Palestinians are attempting something few modern national movements have ever attempted: defining a political nation across multiple countries, generations, and citizenships while simultaneously deciding who belongs to it.

Imagine a movement claiming to represent all Black people whose families lived in North Carolina before 1948. Descendants living in California, London, or Johannesburg could vote even if they had never visited the state. Non-Black current residents of North Carolina could not. The electorate would be defined by ancestry tied to a place and a moment in history.

Whether one finds that model compelling or problematic, the Palestinian election will force its architects to explain where they draw those lines.

Whatever rules emerge, millions of people will discover whether they are considered part of the Palestinian political nation, observers of it, or something in between.

Most elections choose leaders. This election may do something far rarer: define the nation itself.

Before Palestinians can elect their leaders, they must first answer a more difficult question:

Who is a Palestinian?