The gap between @HowidyHamza and Coates is at its heart the gap between the majority of real-life ordinary Palestinians and the narrow ideological elites Coates champions and trumpets. It’s hard to think of an elite that ever did worse by their people than this one, ever since the days of Haj Amin. Ever since the Ottomans. The gap is complex. But perhaps the most fundamental sense of it is in the disagreement on a simple point: Are the Israelis here to stay? Most ordinary Palestinians think they are. Really. We have polling on this. That doesn’t mean they like us. It doesn’t mean they shed a tear when Israelis die or that they’re completely unconvinceable otherwise. But the basic view is simple: The Jews aren’t going anywhere. Meanwhile, across the class divide in that stratified society, nearly all members of the Palestinian elites think we are destroyable and are willing to gamble the lives and fortunes of their people on that belief, again and again. This debate is often couched as the question of which side is at its “resting state” in all this fighting, and which must make a willful effort to continue to survive. The Jewish side is doomed to failure, most Palestinian elites argue, because our existence can only be sustained through a conscious and escalating expenditure of raw willpower and resources. If Palestinians can withstand the pain of constant war, a full and complete victory is still possible - as the anti-colonial struggles of Algeria, Kenya et al demonstrate. This was Hamas’s basic argument as it planned the destruction of Gaza. And any Palestinian who calls to end the fighting - because they don’t think the Israelis are ultimately removable - betrays that promise of ultimate redemption. It really can’t be said often enough: Haj Amin spoke this way when he violently suppressed Palestinian voices who questioned the Great Revolt in 1937. Sixty years later, Arafat talked this way when some brave Palestinians suggested the 140 suicide bombings of the Second Intifada might have been a catastrophic mistake. Folks, I submit that these Palestinian elites are mistaken, that Israelis today are in their “resting state” no less than Palestinians and can go on forever without, as Hamas and Coates promise, dismantling themselves or evaporating away. Why? Because we are refugees. Because half of us come from an Arab world that spat us out and the other half from a Europe that murdered one-third of us. That’s not a moral point. It’s a tactical one. We are sustained by the sure knowledge that our future without Israel will be far worse than our future with it. Not to belabor the point, but an Arab world in which we still today cannot live safely only bolsters that basic belief. When we go to war, we feel and believe that we do so to protect our children from those who would murder them. It’s amazing how resilient you become when you think that, and how consistent our enemies have been in continuing to serve as ongoing catalysts for this resilience. And also, of course, we are “at rest” even in tough times because, well, that ship has sailed. We’re a people, with our own unique language and history and identity, rooted in an ancient culture that was always, throughout its long and pain-filled history, built around its attachment to this land. Folks, we don’t have to fight the likes of Coates. He doesn’t threaten us in any way. He and his ilk are pushing Palestinian elites to one more round of a kind of fighting we cannot lose. One more round of wanton self-destruction from which it will take them yet another generation to recover - and after that recovery, these same elites, regurgitating the same ideological fantasies in new rhetorical veneers, and backed by the same ignorant Coates-style western fantasists, will try yet again. Hamza knows this. (I think.) Most Palestinians know this. I’ve spoken to hundreds who know this, who agree with the premise. It’s a shame Palestine’s purported allies do not.