Palestinian Ju-Jitsu

In ju-jitsu, the weaker party survives by absorbing and then redirecting their opponent’s blows.

Could West Bank Palestinians learn something from this?

For almost a century, Palestinians have tried to blunt or reverse the Jewish community’s encroachment on their land by fighting fire with fire, using guns, regional military and political alliances, international diplomacy, and UN maneuvering.

Those efforts have all failed, and spectacularly so. Palestinians in Gaza have been horrifically pounded into submission, and Palestinians in the West Bank have been herded into tiny bantustans, otherwise known as “Areas A and B.”

Area C, which includes the bulk of West Bank land but only a small minority of the Palestinian population, is being swallowed by settlers and the Israeli state. Palestinians in Syria and Lebanon are stuck in misery, with no end in sight. Palestinians in Jordan are the only ones who have a modicum of hope and rights.

The problem is that Israeli Jews have proven too strong, too committed, too well-organized, and too capital-intensive to be defeated, blunted, or even slightly reversed. They have developed one of the strongest air forces in the world, and their ground forces — although not nearly as fearsome as their air force — can defeat all conceivable challengers.

Israel’s international alliances, moreover, while deeply frayed due to the Gaza horror, are still strong enough to head off a serious diplomatic offensive.

The Stronger Party Cannot be Overcome with the Existing Tools

As a result, Israel cannot be overcome with the weapons that Palestinians and their dwindling circle of regional and international allies have at their disposal. Unless there is an international sea change, moreover, they will not be defeated by attempted economic boycotts, diplomatic efforts, the International Criminal Court, or UN resolutions.

The international human rights industry, for example, reported heavily on the Gaza atrocities, but did nothing to prevent the Strip’s awful destruction. Hamas’ horrendous (if briefly successful, from a tactical point of view) October 7 attack, similarly, yielded nothing good for Palestinians. The Oslo Peace Accords from the early 1990s have proved spectacularly useless.

The UN’s many resolutions have also proved about as useful as everything else, and the non-violent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, BDS, has not, and probably will not, make a real dent in the Israeli economy.

Now, perhaps, the time has come to absorb and metabolize the “blow” of West Bank annexation, and then turn that strike back towards its origin.

Annexation Efforts Are Accelerating as We Speak

Over the last two weeks, several important Israeli cabinet decisions have advanced the occupation of the West Bank towards permanent rule.

Many think this will spell political disaster by ending all hope for a negotiated two-state solution. I suggest a different, and perhaps overly optimistic perspective.

Maybe — just maybe — these new moves could spark a long-term process ending in a more democratic, egalitarian, and peaceful Israeli-Palestinian space.

Background

The current government of Benjamin Netanyahu has been heavily influenced by its ultra-nationalist cabinet members, including Finance Minister Bezalal Smotrich, who leads the political party “Religious Zionism,” and whose responsibilities include administering the Palestinian West Bank (known to his supporters as “Judea and Samaria”).

Another key right-wing government figure is National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, head of the Israeli party, “Jewish Power,” who was handed control over the powerful national police.

Under the influence of these and other right-wing coalition partners, the Netanyahu government — which won Israel’s national elections in late 2022 — wrote policy guidelines that committed itself to efforts aimed at ensuring the Jewish people’s full and exclusive rights over what they called the entire “Land of Israel.”

These guidelines were interpreted by many as commitments to strengthening Israel’s legal and administrative hold over the West Bank in preparation for eventual annexation.

The New Rules

In the last week or so, the government has passed new rules enhancing Israel’s ability to take over more West Bank land and tighten its administrative and legal grip over the area. These include:

· Declassifying West Bank land ownership records, which would allow settler groups to place pressure on individual Palestinian owners to sell or abandon their property.

· Striking down a Jordanian law, long applied to the West Bank, barring private land sales to foreigners, including Israelis.

· Mandating a new land registration process, which might allow the government to register more West Bank property as “state land,” which could then be turned over to settlers, and opening the door to fraud during the registration process itself.

· Eliminating the need for a special permit to register land sales, again expanding opportunities for skulduggery.

· Expanding the Israeli military’s law enforcement role in the West Bank’s “A” and “B” zones, which are supposed to be under the control of the Palestinian Authority, to varying degrees.

· Transferring control over some West Bank areas from Israeli military commanders to civilian agencies, normalizing their incorporation into the Israeli state. Until now, the West Bank has been legally defined as an object of “military rule,” although Israel’s civilian ministries have long crept into specific areas of jurisdiction.

Taken together, according Ziv Stahl, director of the Israeli human rights organization, Yesh Din, these actions are accelerating processes of de facto West Bank annexation by Israel.

“Legally speaking,” Stahl told +972, “I don’t know if we can still call it occupation. I think we have been shifting to a reality of annexation. It’s hard to determine where exactly the pivotal moment was, but the physical situation on the ground in the West Bank has completely changed in these three years of this government.”

Annexation: Good or Bad?

Many regard annexation as an absolutely disastrous development that will permanently end all hope of a two-state solution. It is this solution, in turn, that is the desired outcome of most European states, the Palestinian Authority, most Arab countries, most UN members, and the US government.

Under President Trump, US support for the two-state option has grown muddier, however. Although he hasn’t endorsed annexation, he hasn’t made any effort to promote the two-state idea either.

Among some of Israel’s more moderate political parties — as well as left-of-center Jewish advocacy groups such as J Street or Peace Now — the idea of two separate, sovereign states living side by side is sacrosanct. One would be for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, whilethe other would be for Israeli Jews living in roughly 70% of Mandatory Palestine.

For most international diplomats and many advocacy groups, the two-state option has long been regarded as the best possibility for long-term political stability, justice, and human rights.

A Different Perspective

I’d like to offer a different perspective.

If Israel were to annex the entire West Bank, the demographics of Israel’s official polity (as opposed to its hybrid ‘internationally recognized state plus militarily occupied Palestinian zones’) would include an additional three million Palestinians.

This number includes some 2.8 million Palestinians living in the West Bank’s A and B zones (Palestinian Authority-controlled, in theory), and another 250,000 living in the West Bank’s C zones (controlled by the Israeli military).

To these, add another roughly 1.6 million current Palestinian citizens of Israel, living chiefly in the country’s north, along with some 350,000 Palestinians who are permanent residents of Israel, living in East Jerusalem.

This combined total of roughly 5 million Palestinians would represent just over 40% of the entire population under direct Israeli sovereignty, using today’s figures. It would not include the roughly 2.2 million Gaza Palestinians now living in dire conditions. (I do not include them here because the Israeli cabinet’s new regulations do not refer to Gaza).

Although only 1.6 million of these five million Palestinians currently have Israeli citizenship and the right to vote today in Israeli elections, there might be pressure, over time, to add more Palestinians in sovereign Israeli territory to the Israeli voter rolls.

Over the next few decades, these newly enfranchised Palestinians could exert increasing influence on Israel’s legislature and governments. With a bit of luck, this pressure might eventually lead to a softening of Israel’s commitment to Jewish political, legal, and cultural supremacy, gradually leading to a more pluralistic and democratic space.

Importantly, this could give desperate Palestinians a viable, non-violent alternative for shaping their political fate, relegating the Palestinian Authority’s moribund diplomatic efforts and the violence of Hamas and others to the back of the line.

A Fifth Option?

Several authors have discussed the possibility of a “one-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including a 2010 volume by American academic Virginia Tilley, and the more recent book by Sarah Leah Whitson and Michael Omer-Man. These analysts have identified a fifth option that is distinct from the four possibilities currently on the table for Israelis and Palestinians. These five options include:

· Permanent subordination: The Israeli radical right’s current plan for Jewish annexation and eternal Palestinian subordination.

· Two states: The two-state solution promoted by the international community and other mainstream actors ever since the Oslo Peace Accords.

· Consociation: A new set of proposals for a political consociation of “two sovereign peoples living in a single land,” promoted, among others, by the Palestinian-Israeli NGO, A Land for All.

· Business as usual: The violent status quo, in which the Palestinian Authority continues to crumble, Palestinian militant groups occasionally strike Israelis, and Jewish settlers, backed by the Israeli army, wield violence against Palestinians.

· A single, democratic state: And finally, the “one-state solution,” which involves the creation of a single, unified state from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, in which all residents are lawful citizens, have the right to vote, are equal before the law, and share in the country’s internal and external defense.

If Gaza were to be included in this single state, the new entity’s population would include roughly coequal ethnic populations, although divergent birth rates might, over time, lead to an Arab majority.

If Gaza were excluded, as noted above, Palestinians would make up just over 40% of the unified territory’s population, using contemporary numbers.

Could Annexation Lead to a Democratic State?

If the Israeli cabinet’s recent annexation-enhancing efforts lead to the eventual annexation of the West Bank’s A, B, and C, this may prepare the ground for an eventual move towards political, cultural, and legal democratization.

For West Bank Palestinians to become full-fledged voters would likely take years. It would require repeated cycles of social protest and would likely include violence from all sides. Still, the death toll could hardly rival today’s horrific body count.

The radical right is well aware of the one-state possibility and hopes to thread that needle by annexing only Area C. Although C includes the vast majority of the West Bank’s landmass, it has only a fraction of its Palestinian population. C is also the zone where most of the Jewish settler-colonies are currently situated.

To avoid including Palestinians from A and B, the right would devise a hybrid, “neither fully in, nor fully out” arrangement that granted them very limited self-governance — essentially, a stepped-up version of the current arrangement.

Still, the momentum for including all three West Bank areas into Israel’s sovereign territory would persist, both among settlers and Palestinians. The A and B zones are small, isolated enclaves, and they will struggle, over time, to remain truly distinct from their larger Area C hinterland.

The radical right and its associated settler movement, moreover, will continue to cast their eyes over A and B for religious, security, economic, and other reasons. Stripped of the “sea” of Area C, the “islands” of A and B may eventually be incorporated. This would not happen overnight, and it would require Palestinian interest to do so, but it is not impossible to imagine.

In my optimistic reading, the Israeli radical right’s new turbo-charged efforts to annex more Palestinian land may include a silver lining, offering a more hopeful path forward.

How Can This Be Done?

The path towards incorporating West Bank Palestinians into the Israeli state as equal citizens will be long and difficult. The first step in that prolonged, painful process is for politically active Palestinians to genuinely embrace the option, and to not just use it as a threat to bludgeon Israeli annexationists.

For now, many Palestinians and their international activist allies see the one-state option as silly, defeatist, or treasonous. As a result, even some low-hanging fuit has been left on the trees.

Consider East Jerusalem Palestinians, who have permanent Israeli residency but who refuse to consider Israeli citizenship, fearing that they will be cut off from their brethren and used to legitimize Israeli annexation of their land.

The annexation has already happened, however, and Israel has built tens of thousands of housing units on East Jerusalem land. For all intents and purposes, East Jerusalem, as a distinct Palestinian entity, has been lost.

If those 350,000 Palestinians were to pursue Israeli citizenship and then vote with the 1.6 million Palestinians who already have political rights in Israel, they could make a real difference at the polls.

A combined electoral force of 1.95 million Palestinians in a population of 9 million Israeli citizens could be game-changing. At least some centrist and center-left Jewish parties would have to modulate their policies, change their outreach, update their platforms, and generally behave differently than they do today.

The first step in this act of Palestinian ju-jitsu, however, would be for Palestinian political elites to openly and transparently accept that they have lost the fight for their own state. They would have to say, loudly and clearly, that this ship has sailed, and that it’s never coming back, at least not in our lifetimes, or those of our children and children’s children.

The next step should be to start thinking of ways to demand and achieve inclusion within Israel and, from there, to fight for democratization from within. This will require learning Hebrew, getting to know Israeli laws, culture, and politics, and adopting an entirely different political mindset.

Right now, anyone in the West Bank who cooperates with Israeli political or other groups — even human rights groups — is branded as a boycott breaker, “normalizer,” and traitor. As a result, West Bank political and other groups eschew collaboration with like-minded Israeli entities, arguing that to do so would be to accept the fact of Israeli domination and the reality of encroaching annexation.

That mindset needs to change. Palestinians have lost the war for an independent Palestine. Annexation is here. Now, the struggle should be to create a binational state and to democratize from within, not to pretend that by closing one’s eyes, putting one’s fingers in one’s ears, and talking, the annexationist reality can be wished away.

Palestinian political leaders in the West Bank need to meet with Palestinian political party leaders inside Israel and devise a common path forward. They need to reach out to their international allies, including those in BDS and those demanding the right of return, and tell them that the two-state solution is dead. Instead, the international allies need to accept the Jewish presence and demand a “one person, one vote” system from the River to the Sea. Palestinian political activists in the West Bank would need to drop their anti-normalization rhetoric and finally embrace the reality they actually live in.

Palestine is not going to shake itself free from Israel. It’s over. But in fifty years, a new, democratic, and egalitarian Israel/Palestine, or Palestine/Israel, can be created. It’s not for now, and not for us. I’ll be dead if and when that happens, and so will most of the current Palestinian and Israeli political elite.

But it's for our children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren.

A version of this article appeared online on February 26, 2026, in the journal E-International Relations. It was entitled “Opinion: As Israel Pushes for Annexation, Is There Hope for Palestinians?”

About James Ron

James Ron is an author and retired social scientist. To learn more, visit the following websites:

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