In the spring of 1948, hundreds of thousands of Arabs locked their doors, pocketed their keys, and walked away from their houses in the newborn State of Israel. The departure was meant to be brief. Five Arab armies were converging on the Jewish state, the whole business was expected to be over within a month, and the residents would return victorious to find the furniture undisturbed. The armies lost. The keys stayed in pockets, then moved into frames on walls, then passed down to grandchildren as heirlooms of a miscalculation.

Everything that has gone wrong with the Palestinian cause since is contained in that opening move. It was the founding act of a politics that never matured: the conviction that an unwelcome fact, refused loudly enough and long enough, will eventually get up and leave on its own.

The pattern held with remarkable discipline. The Peel partition of 1937: rejected. The UN plan of 1947: rejected, and answered with war. Khartoum, 1967: no peace, no recognition, no negotiation. Camp David in 2000 and the Olmert offer of 2008, each conceding more than the last: walked away from. Beneath every refusal sat the same wager — why settle for a slice when patience will deliver the whole loaf? That was an understandable bet in 1948, when the state was hours old and surrounded. One could even defend it in 1967, on the eve of a war the Arab world expected to win. In 2026 it is a clinical delusion.

Call it political infantilism. A child believes a sufficiently loud tantrum can repeal bedtime; an activist believes a sufficiently loud encampment can repeal the Jewish state. The generation raised on TikTok and inspirational Instagram captions has supercharged the instinct, because in its native habitat the method works — institutions fold, principals apologize, brands grovel. They have mistaken the cowardice of university administrators for a law of nature.

So let me state, for their benefit, the three facts from which any realistic conversation has to begin. Israel will never permit a Palestinian state west of the Jordan. Israel will never extend citizenship to millions of people schooled from kindergarten to regard its destruction as a sacred duty. And Israel is not going anywhere. The first disposes of the two-state solution. The second disposes of the one-state version beloved by academics. The third disposes of the scenario the marchers are chanting about, in which the river meets the sea with nothing Jewish in between.

Consider what the question of the day has been at each stage of this conflict. In 1948, it was whether Israel would survive. In 1967, whether Israel would liberate Jerusalem. In 2026 — and I am writing this in the second week of June — the question is whether Israel will resume striking Beirut and Tehran.

There was a moment when the Arab world could plausibly have destroyed Israel — in 1948, perhaps for a few October days in 1973. That window is bricked over. Egypt drew the conclusion and signed in 1979; Jordan followed in 1994. Of the two remaining neighbors, Syria slipped out of Iran’s orbit when the Assad dynasty collapsed at the end of 2024 and has been negotiating security arrangements with Jerusalem since, while Lebanon — dragged by Hezbollah into yet another losing round this spring — has opened direct peace talks with Israel for the first time since 1983. The two countries that once hosted the PLO’s wars are now discussing demarcation lines.

Farther down the Gulf, the picture is more vivid still. When Iran answered the February strikes by raining hundreds of ballistic missiles and over two thousand drones on the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)