Who actually holds Palestinians back

By now you've heard the argument that Israel is the only thing standing between Palestinians and a state. This chapter is about the uncomfortable question that framing never asks: if Israel is the only obstacle, why have Palestinians been offered a state twice — and why did their own leaders refuse it, without a counter-offer, both times? The answer isn't in Jerusalem. It's in Gaza City, in Ramallah, and in Tehran.

Meet the first prison guard: Hamas. In 2006, Palestinians went to the polls — real, observed elections — and Hamas won. It was a protest vote, and a legitimate one: Fatah had governed corruptly for a decade. But the sequel is what matters. Rather than share power, Hamas staged a coup in 2007, gunning down Fatah officials in the streets of Gaza, and has not held a single election since. Eighteen years, one coup, zero votes. Hamas's founding charter calls not just for Israel's destruction but for the killing of Jews; its 2017 revision softened the language while still refusing to recognize Israel's right to exist. And in Gaza it built what no Palestinian state ever had: a tunnel network under hospitals, rockets stored in UN schools — UNRWA found its own schools being used to store Hamas weapons, twice — and a military machine financed by Iran. When the money ran short, Hamas cut civil servants' salaries before it ever touched its military budget. In 2023 it spent its arsenal on the massacre of 1,200 people and the kidnapping of hostages — and it did it from underneath Gaza's civilians, because the more Palestinians died, the better the footage. Your movement has never once asked Hamas for an election. Ask yourself why.

Meet the second: the Palestinian Authority. In the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas's presidential term expired in 2009. There has been no presidential election since — seventeen years. His authority pays monthly stipends to the families of Palestinians convicted of murdering Israeli civilians, a policy that consumes hundreds of millions of dollars a year that could have built schools; it jails journalists who criticize it; and when presented with the most generous peace offer in history — which Chapter III walked you through — its president took it home and never answered. The PA cooperates with Israel on security and then tells its own people the occupation is the only enemy. It is a government that has chosen to rule over a grievance rather than over a country, because a country would require elections, accountability, and an end to the war economy it runs on.

Meet the third: Iran. Tehran does not want a Palestinian state. It wants a permanent wound on Israel's border — a cause it can light on fire whenever its own interests need a distraction. Iran has armed, trained, and funded Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah for decades: not to build a Palestine, but to keep the conflict burning on its terms. A Palestinian state would mean peace, and peace would mean Iran loses its lever. The "resistance axis" is not a liberation movement. It is a state's proxy army wearing a flag.

And now the part you won't hear from the other side either: Israel's share. Settlements are real, they are an obstacle, and Israeli governments of every stripe have expanded them — I said it in Chapter II and I'll say it again. There is more: Benjamin Netanyahu, who now vows to destroy Hamas, told his own party in 2019 — on a recording his ministers made — that strengthening Hamas and weakening the Palestinian Authority was deliberate Israeli policy, because a divided, chaotic Palestine could never become a state. Israel let Qatari money flow into Hamas's Gaza by the suitcase-full to "preserve calm." Both sides' leaders, in other words, have found the conflict more useful than the peace. When the people at the top of both sides profit from the war, the people at the bottom pay for it — and they are the ones you say you care about.

So here is the question nobody in your feed will ask: if the Palestinian cause is about freedom, why does it never demand elections in Gaza? Why does it defend a leadership that has refused every state it was offered, that jails its own journalists, that pays murderers before teachers? A state cannot be occupied into existence, but it also cannot be refused into existence. The first step to freeing Palestine is replacing the leadership that has kept it unfree — and the first step to that is admitting who they are.

Next: while the resistance fought, the region signed. Four Arab states made peace with Israel and got trade, tourism, investment, and security. The next chapter is about the train that left the station — and who's still standing on the platform, holding a rocket.