Why don't Palestinians just accept peace and stop resisting?

1. Why don’t Palestinians just accept peace and stop resisting?

This question ignores the history of forced displacement, ongoing colonization, occupation, resource theft, aggression, and daily denial of basic rights to which Palestinians have been subjected since the introduction of capitalism and imperialism in the Middle East — which culminated with the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Today, whether it is the Israeli policies preventing Palestinian construction across the entirety of the lands colonized before and during 1948¹, Jerusalem, and the West Bank², aggressive colonization efforts across the West Bank³, daily raids, and killing by Israeli forces in Palestinian communities, or the unjust system of criminalizing and imprisoning Palestinians⁴, there is no semblance of peace across historic Palestine for Palestinians to “accept.”

Since the beginning of zionism and zionist colonization in Palestine, its colonial character was illustrated by its structural design to steal and extract resources and supplant the indigenous population by eliminating them and replacing them with foreign settlers.⁵ With the state never having deviated from this logic, there has never been a proposal for “peace” by Israel that meaningfully addressed some of Palestinians’ most basic concerns, including the right of return to their lands.

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