Why don’t Palestinians accept Israel as a Jewish state?

8. Why don’t Palestinians accept Israel as a Jewish state?

Suppose someone came to the place you are currently living, removed you by force from your home, constructed new borders that did not allow you to return, and founded a state that existed to privilege them and prevent your right to exercise self-determination. Would you accept these actions as legitimate? Would you accept the new state built on top of your home?

For Palestinians, accepting Israel as a Jewish state means acknowledging that the very intentional harm that has been done to them as a people is legitimate and will be perpetuated in perpetuity; the only way to sustain a Jewish State is the maintenance of demographic majority, or a minority rule premised on systematic violence. It means that Palestinians accept that they should be treated as a problem to be dealt with by others in their homeland at best — at worst, it means accepting their genocide and elimination, both the historical and the ongoing. While Israel does its very best to scrub Palestinian and Palestinian history from its textbooks¹ as well as from the face of the earth, refusing to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state or legitimate whatsoever is also essential for the sake of remembering, telling, and honoring Palestinian history.

There is also another element of this question, which requires deeper thought and response: is Israel really a “Jewish” state? What does it mean to acknowledge a “Jewish” state? Is it enough that the state applies Jewish religious law, or does it require some kind of collective approval by Jewish communities outside of Palestine? While many, if not most, Jewish institutions are explicitly zionist, more Jewish people around the world continue to move away from Israel as a force claiming to represent their interests, rejecting it instead.^{2 3} Even if Palestinians wanted to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state, is it our place to tell Jewish people around the world that this state is Jewish?

Finally, one might ponder the responsive question, why does Israel need Palestinians to acknowledge it as a Jewish state? If Israel truly were a legitimate state, Jewish or otherwise, why would it matter whether or not others under its control acknowledged it as such? The answer relates to a weakness at the heart of settler-colonialism, which is the settlers’ understanding that their colony will never be truly secure without its acceptance or acquiescence by the indigenous people whom they seek to supplant. Palestinians as a collective have not acquiesced, and hopefully, they never will.

Notes