>>64207616
There’s a lot of socioeconomic, cultural, and historical factors behind this, I’ll go through what I think are the most important ones
>lack of a warrior tradition
Being an ethnic group that only really began to emerge as a distinct identity in the 19th Century, the Palestinians simply don’t really have that much in the way of a military tradition, especially when compared to the Jews who’ve been fighting wars since Antiquity. Granted the Jews have had their share of (spectacular) failures, but their successes have left a model of leadership to follow.
>lack of an industrial base/nation state
This one’s pretty self-explanatory, the Palestinians will always be at disadvantage to Israel because the latter is an established state with a standing army
>geography
Another no-brainer, the Palestinian Territories are smaller than the Bay Area and they’re surrounded by hostile states on three sides and the ocean on the other
>lack of ideological consensus
For all their talk of being united against Zionism, Palestinians can’t seem to actually agree on what they want their prospective nation to actually look like. Hamas, Fatah, the PLO, these groups fight amongst themselves constantly and when they do cooperate, they’re prone to fracturing.
>victimization mentality
In flip of the above point, the one thing that unites Palestinians is their absolute nuclear-level seething at Israel and Jews as a whole. While this grievance is understandable, it’s also terrible for things like negotiation. Virtually every US president since LBJ and multiple Arab states have tried to mediate an amicable settlement with the Israelis and the Palestinians have rejected virtually all of them. The worst example of this self-sabotage was the 2000 Oslo Accords which could have laid the groundwork for Palestinian statehood, but Arafat’s response was to not only reject it, but restart the Intifada, torpedoing years of work to get the two sides to come to the table
