A State Without War: Why Does the Israeli Right Fear the Palestinian Authority More Than It Fears Chaos?

In the Israeli political narrative, especially among the right, the conflict with the Palestinians is presented as a security struggle with a violent or chaotic entity that cannot be coexisted with. However, a deeper reading of Israeli policies reveals a fundamental paradox: the real danger facing the Israeli right is not the armed Palestinian as much as it is the organized, calm Palestinian capable of operating within the rules of international politics.

For the entity that does not wave weapons but legitimacy, and does not threaten with rockets but with legal files and international recognitions, represents a strategic threat of a different kind. The existence of a “peaceful” Palestinian Authority, even at its minimum level, capable of managing population affairs and building institutions, keeps the idea of a Palestinian state alive and capable of gradual development through international law and UN resolutions. This path does not require war, nor does it assume a military defeat for Israel, which fundamentally contradicts the right's vision for the future of “Greater Israel”.

From this perspective, the Israeli right does not work to completely dismantle the Palestinian Authority, nor does it allow it to succeed at the same time. The adopted policy is to keep it in a fragile intermediate state: administratively present, sovereignly absent; responsible for the population, but without real control over the land or resources. In this gray area, the Authority transforms from a transitional national project into a tool for population management, while politics is emptied of its content and any real possibility of a solution is suspended.

This managed vacuum allows Israel to accelerate its true project on the ground: expanding settlements, fragmenting the geography, and imposing demographic realities that make any future talk of a connected and viable Palestinian state almost impossible. This is not a policy of resolving the conflict, but a long-term management policy for it, based on freezing the political path in exchange for accelerating field control, and turning the idea of self-governance into an expanded municipal administration without a national horizon.

In this equation, Gaza plays a highly functional role. It is presented in the Israeli discourse to the world as a cautionary model: this is what happens when Palestinians are left to govern themselves. The siege, destruction, and repeated wars are used to cement a narrative that any Palestinian sovereignty will inevitably lead to violence and instability. In contrast, the West Bank is not allowed to present an opposite model: a calm, organized, and viable entity. Gaza is militarily besieged, and the West Bank is politically engineered, so the first is not left to live, and the second is not allowed to become a state.

But this functional use of Gaza does not work in the same direction in the long term. With the repetition of wars and the blockage of horizons, the Gaza model is no longer used only to frighten the world, but has also become material for review within Palestinian society itself. Over time, an increasing segment of Palestinians has begun to rethink the form of the possible political entity and the cost of different options.

In this context, the model of the “peaceful” Palestinian Authority, despite all its weaknesses and failures, has taken an increasing place in the thinking of people in Palestine. Not as an ideal or final model, but as the antithesis of a state of permanent destruction and open war. The daily comparison between the besieged and exhausted reality of Gaza and the relatively managed reality of the West Bank has led many to question the value of stability, even if deficient, and the possibility of developing it politically instead of the ongoing dependence on the logic of open confrontation.

It is here specifically that the real concern of the Israeli right lies. For the danger of the Palestinian Authority is not limited to international recognition or existing institutions, but in the possibility that it may, over time, transform into a popularly accepted idea as a starting point for building a state without war. A state that grows slowly, through time and legitimacy, not through the decisive battle. This type of state is what the right does not know how to deal with.

In this sense, it can be said that what the Israeli and Palestinian extremism tried to build over the past years has begun to turn against its creators. The Israeli extremism that bet on dismantling the Palestinian national project through siege and division has contributed, unwittingly, to keeping the idea of the state alive, but in a calmer and more internationally marketable form. Conversely, the Palestinian extremism that bet on imposing the equation by military force has, over time, presented a model that exhausted society more than it exhausted the adversary, and pushed broad sectors to seek less costly and more viable alternatives.

The result unfolding today does not serve extremist ideologies as much as it exposes their limits. Managing the conflict by force or coercive engineering of reality has not ended the Palestinian issue, but has reintroduced it with different tools: popular awareness, international legitimacy, and long time. In this path, the Palestinian state that the Israeli right fears most may be the one born from patience, not from war.