Most Israeli Jews, meanwhile, are convinced Palestinian violence is not ultimately a protest at their misbehavior or at unjust policies, but is rooted in the ideology described so clearly by Abu Marzouk: Incessant and remorseless violence until the Jews all flee from the country or are killed.
Israelis believe that partly because the major Palestinian factions routinely say it. But they also believe it because they experienced it. The world may have forgotten the Second Intifada that began in 2000, in which relentless waves of well over 100 suicide bombings detonated in Israel’s cities and left the Oslo-supporting left shattered and marginalized for a generation and counting. Israelis have not.
That wave of shocking, sustained violence began not three decades into a failed peace process, but in 2000, scarcely eight years into what most observers believed was a successful effort to that point. Israeli troops had left Palestinian cities starting in the mid-1990s, the Palestinian Authority was established, and Israeli, Palestinian and American leaders were in Camp David negotiating — so Israelis were told at the time — the final boundaries of the two-state solution. It was then that a paroxysm of violence and brutality suddenly swept over Palestinian society and dashed the hopes of a generation.
The point here is not that the Second Intifada is unexplainable. There are many explanations, such as the argument heard from some Palestinians over the years that the violence began as a grassroots rebellion against Yasser Arafat’s tyranny and was diverted by his frightened, teetering regime into an assault on Israel. The point here is only to say that the Israeli experience of those terror waves did not see them as an attack on the occupation, but as an attack on an Israel trying to dismantle the occupation.
Israeli Jews do not feel as vulnerable as Palestinians; they do not believe the other side is likely to succeed. But the belief that Palestinians are trying to remove them drives the corollary belief that Palestinian violence is ultimately not an argument against Israeli policies, but against Israelis’ existence. Palestinian terrorism, this mainstream Israeli view holds, is not unthinking and reactive. It is planned and purposeful, rooted in the strategy described by Abu Marzouk, a strategy that interprets any Israeli compromise or accommodation as evidence of weakness.