In reality, the Zionist movement and then the state of Israel always had the big battalions on their side, whether this was the British army before 1939, US and Soviet support in 1947-48, France and Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, or the situation from the 1970s until today, where besides receiving unlimited US support, Israel's armed might dwarfs that of the Palestinians, and indeed that of all the Arabs put together.

The advantage that Israel has enjoyed in continuing its project rests on the fact that the basically colonial nature of the encounter in Palestine has not been visible to most Americans and many Europeans. Israel appears to them to be a normal, natural nation-state like any other, faced by the irrational hostility of intransigent and often anti-Semitic Muslims (which is how Palestinians, even the Christians among them, are seen by many). The propagation of this image is one of the greatest achievements of Zionism and is vital to its survival.

But they have been trying to do the impossible: impose a colonial reality on Palestine in a postcolonial age.

For his early intimations of a change in Washington's bias in favor of Israel, Obama was heartily loathed by its right-wing leaders and their American supporters (he fully reciprocated that sentiment), but in the end he changed nothing in Palestine.

The key country in this regard has been Saudi Arabia, which since 1948 has publicly advocated for the Palestinian cause, often giving the PLO financial support, while doing little or nothing to pressure the United States to change its favorable policies toward Israel. The passivity of the Saudi monarchy goes back at least to August 1948, when Secretary of State George Marshall thanked King Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud for the Kingdom's "conciliatory manner" over Palestine. This was at the height of the 1948 war, after Israeli troops had overrun most of the country and expelled much of the Palestinian population.

A retired American general described the Israeli bombardment—used to pound one Gaza neighborhood for over twenty-four hours, along with tank fire and attacks from the air—as "absolutely disproportionate "

It is possible to speculate on what they sought to achieve, even while showing how flawed their aims were. Even if one accepts their own narrative which sees suicide bombings as retaliation for Israel's indiscriminate use of live ammunition against unarmed demonstrators for the first several weeks of the Second Intifada, and its attacks on Palestinian civilians and assassinations in Gaza, that begs the question of whether these bombings were meant to achieve anything more than blind revenge.

The United States was not just an accessory: it was Israel's partner.

We knew that they coordinated closely with their Israeli peers, and some of them took the formal (but secret) US commitment to Israel to an extreme. American negotiator Aaron David Miller later regretfully used the term "Israel's lawyer" to describe his stance and that of many of his colleagues.

He argued that given the course of Jewish history, especially in the twentieth century, the use of force only strengthened a preexisting and pervasive sense of victimhood among Israelis, while it unified Israeli society, reinforced the most militant tendencies in Zionism, and bolstered the support of external actors.

A forgotten but essential element of the Palestinian political agenda is work inside Israel, specifically convincing Israelis that there is an alternative to the ongoing oppression of the Palestinians. This is a long-term process that cannot be dismissed as a form of "normalizing" relations with Israel: neither the Algerians nor the Vietnamese shortsightedly denied themselves the opportunity to convince public opinion in the home country of their oppressor of the justice of their cause efforts that contributed measurably to their victory. Nor should the Palestinians.

Perhaps the White House was up to something else: generating draft proposals that were so offensively pro-Israel as to be unacceptable to even the most compliant Palestinians. With this tactic, the Israeli government could paint the Palestinians as rejectionist and continue to avoid negotiations while maintaining the status quo of creeping annexation, expanding colonization, and legal discrimination. In either case, the outcome would be the same: the Palestinians were put on notice that the prospect of an independent future in their homeland was closed off and that the Israeli colonial endeavor had a free hand to shape Palestine as it wished.

Although Obama had indicated that the Palestinian issue was a priority for his administration, his response to the wars on Gaza was a truer measure of his engagement. The first of them that took place on his watch began after his election but before he was inaugurated. At no point then or subsequently did the president seek to disturb the false narrative whereby what was underway in the Gaza Strip during these ferocious onslaughts was a righteous response to terrorist rocket fire aimed at Israeli civilians. At no point did his administration interrupt the flow of American weapons that were used to kill some three thousand Palestinian civilians and maim many more. Indeed, deliveries were accelerated when Israel deemed that necessary. At no point did Obama decisively confront Israel over its siege of the Gaza Strip.

Israel was able to exploit the deep division among Palestinians and Gaza's isolation to launch three savage air and ground assaults on the strip that began in 2008 and continued in 2012 and 2014, leaving large swaths of its cities and refugee camps in rubble and struggling with rolling blackouts and contaminated water.26 Some neighborhoods, such as Shuja'iyya and parts of Rafah, suffered extraordinary levels of destruction. The casualty figures tell only part of the story, although they are revealing. In these three major attacks, 3,804 Palestinians were killed, of them almost one thousand minors. A total of 87 Israelis were killed, the majority of them military personnel engaged in these offensive operations. The lopsided 43:1 scale of these casualties is telling, as is the fact that the bulk of the Israelis killed were soldiers while most of the Palestinians were civilians.

Yet even with the suicide bombings, with targeting civilians in violation of international law, and with the crude anti-Semitism of its charter, Hamas's record paled next to the massive toll of Palestinian civilian casualties inflicted by Israel and its elaborate structures of legal discrimination and military rule. But it was Hamas that was stuck with the terrorist label, and the weight of the US law was applied to the Palestinian side of the conflict alone.

Against all expectations, including its own, Hamas won the elections by a handsome margin. It took 74 seats to Fatah's 45 in a 132-member assembly (although with the peculiarities of the electoral system, it had won only 44 percent of the vote to Fatah's 41 percent). Exit polls after the vote showed that the result owed more to the voters' great desire for change in the Occupied Territories than to a call for Islamist governance or heightened armed resistance to Israel.2 Even in some predominantly Christian neighborhoods, the vote went heavily for Hamas. This is evidence that many voters simply wanted to throw out the Fatah incumbents, whose strategy had failed and who were seen as corrupt and unresponsive to popular demands.

This was not the main reason for its success, however. The rise of Hamas was part of a regional trend that represented a response to what many perceived as the bankruptcy of the secular nationalist ideologies that had dominated politics in the Middle East for most of the twentieth century.

In the wake of the PLO's shift away from armed struggle and toward a diplomatic path meant to lead to a Palestinian state that failed to achieve results, many Palestinians felt that the organization had lost its way—and Hamas grew in consequence, despite its extremely conservative social positions and the sketchy outline of the future it proposed.

Hamas was momentarily disconcerted by the wave of popular satisfaction when the Madrid peace conference was convened with Palestinian participation, albeit under Israeli-imposed conditions. During the Washington negotiations, Hamas nevertheless continued to criticize the very principle of negotiating with Israel and maintained its efforts to keep the intifada alive. The signing of the Oslo Accords had a similar effect in both raising Palestinian expectations and temporarily undermining Hamas.

But given that the PLO's standing was linked to the results of its dealings with Israel, the widespread popular disappointment that followed the implementation of the Oslo Accords left Hamas poised to reap the benefits, and it sharpened its critique of the PLO and the newly formed PA.

With the new checkpoints and walls and the need for hard-to-obtain Israeli permits to pass through them, with Israel blocking free movement among the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and with the introduction of roads forbidden to Palestinian travel, the progressive constriction of Palestinian life, especially for Gazans, was underway.

'Arafat and his colleagues in the PLO leadership, who sailed through the checkpoints with their VIP passes, did not seem to know, or care, about the increasing confinement of ordinary Palestinians.

In and of themselves, recognition by the United States and a seat at the negotiating table were unexceptionable aims. Every anticolonial movement, whether in Algeria, Vietnam, or South Africa, desired its foes to accept its legitimacy and to negotiate with it for an honorable end to the conflict. In all these cases, however, an honorable outcome meant ending occupation and colonization and ideally reaching a peaceful reconciliation based on justice. That was the primary object of the negotiations sought by other liberation movements. But instead of using the intifada's success to hold out for a forum framed in terms of such liberatory ends, the PLO allowed itself to be drawn into a process explicitly designed by Israel, with the acquiescence of the United States, to prolong its occupation and colonization, not to end them.

The intifada had delivered to them a gift of inestimable value, a store of moral and political capital. The popular revolt had revealed the limits of the military occupation, damaged Israel's international standing, and improved that of the Palestinians. For all the effectiveness of the PLO in its first decades in putting Palestine back on the global map, it can be argued that the intifada had a more positive impact on world opinion than the organization's generally ineffective efforts at armed struggle ever had.

Women played a central role, taking more and more leadership positions as many of the men were jailed and mobilizing people who were often left out of conventional male-dominated politics.

The young protestors could reappear at any moment somewhere else in the labyrinth of narrow alleys. Of course, the troops could simply kill them, and that happened all too frequently. From the beginning of the First Intifada to the end of 1996-nine years, including six when the intifada was ongoing—Israeli troops and armed settlers killed 1,422 Palestinians, almost one every other day. Of them, 294, or over 20 percent, were minors sixteen and under. One hundred and seventy-five Israelis, 86 of them security personnel, were killed by Palestinians during the same period." That eight-to-one casualty ratio was typical, something one would not have known from much of the American media coverage.

His "iron fist" policy was carried out through the explicit practice of breaking the demonstrators' arms and legs and cracking their skulls, as well as beating others who aroused the soldiers' ire. Within a short time, widely televised images of heavily armed soldiers brutalizing teenage Palestinian protestors created a major media backlash in the United States and elsewhere, showing Israel in its true light as a callous occupying power. Only five years after the media coverage of the siege and bombing of Beirut, this exposure dealt another blow to the image of a country largely dependent on complaisant American public opinion.

"There are no terrorists on the AUB campus," he said. "If you're looking for terrorists, look in your own army for those who've destroyed Beirut." […] On the same night, September 16, Raja and I were perplexed as we watched a surreal scene: Israeli flares floating down in the darkness in complete silence, one after another, over the southern reaches of Beirut, for what seemed like an eternity. As we saw the flares descend, we were baffled: armies normally use flares to illuminate a battlefield, but the cease-fire had been signed a month earlier, all the Palestinian fighters had left weeks ago, and any meager Lebanese resistance to the Israeli troops' arrival in West Beirut had ended the previous day. We could hear no explosions and no shooting. The city was quiet and fearful. The following evening, two shaken American journalists, Loren Jenkins and Jonathan Randal of the Washington Post, among the first Westerners to enter the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, came to tell us what they had seen.41 They had been with Ryan Crocker, who was the first American diplomat to file a report on what the three of them witnessed: the hideous evidence of a massacre. Throughout the previous night, we learned, the flares fired by the Israeli army had illuminated the camps for the LF militias—whom it had sent there to "mop up" —as they slaughtered defenseless civilians. Between September 16 and the morning of September 18, the militiamen murdered more than thirteen hundred Palestinian and Lebanese men, women, and children.