Somebody on Quora asked:
Can you express your opinion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here?
I answered:
Happily.
Most Israelis (actually add non-Israeli Jews to that bucket) have absolutely no idea of the level of hatred and animosity that West Bank Palestinians have for Israel and Israelis.
BTW, my politics are left leaning. I broadly support the two state solution. However, most Israelis don’t quite get that the Palestinians are not happily enduring the situation in the West Bank and planning to one day come to the negotiating table. It just doesn’t work that way.
There’s a big difference between the viewpoints of West Bank Palestinians — which, in my view, are largely radical — and those of Arab Israelis and residents of East Jerusalem, which tend to be more pacifist and pragmatic.
The party line is that most (WB) Palestinians are moderate Fatah supporters and that there is a hardline fringe which supports Hamas’s military aspirations. My experience leaves me heavily to belief that the situation which those imagine to be true is in fact a fiction and that hardline beliefs are the mainstream and that, among West Bank Palestinians, the fringe that exists within Palestinian society is the pacifist one. Or in simpler words, the situation is the other way around.
In my opinion this hatred is as big an obstacle to the two state process as any other factor. It is also, in my opinion, the elephant in the room that both the world and most on the Israeli left choose to willfully ignore.
Firsthand source: Interactions with real world WB Palestinians helped by a rudimentary command of Arabic
Secondhand source: Corey Gil Shuster’s excellent The Ask Project
