There is a persistent argument, repeated in glossy op-eds and political speeches, that peace will remain out of reach until Palestinians abandon what is described as a “dangerous illusion” that Israel’s existence is temporary, that one day the balance of power might shift, and that their right of return could be realised. In this telling, the central obstacle is not Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories or the months-long blockade of the Gaza Strip, but an entrenched refusal to “accept reality.”

The appeal of this argument lies in its clarity. It transforms a century of colonial dispossession, war and structural inequality into a moral grievance. Palestinians, we are told, must choose between clinging to the past or embracing a pragmatic future.

But to cast the Palestinians as delusional is to erase the material facts that have defined their lives for generations. A family displaced in 1948 does not inhabit a myth. If they have even survived, they inhabit a refugee camp in Lebanon, Jordan and Gaza, where overcrowding, statelessness and restrictions on movement are daily realities.

The rising toll since October 7, 2023, even after the “peace deal” was signed earlier this month, reinforces this stark inequality: an estimated 67,074 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s assault on the Palestinian territory, at least 20,000 of the dead are children, 168,716 Palestinians have been injured, most of them permanently handicapped, about 92% of homes, 90% of schools and 654 hospitals have been bombed. Over 1,700 health workers and, as Al Jazeera reported, 269 journalists have been killed.

A child in Khan Younis who has seen her home reduced to rubble more than once is not clutching at an imagined grievance but enduring the consequences of a political order that treats her presence as negotiable.

Analogies are often drawn with post-World War II Europe, where millions of ethnic Germans, expelled from Poland and Czechoslovakia, abandoned their claims to ancestral towns. The lesson, we are told, is that peace required acceptance. But the comparison falters.

Europe’s stability rested not only on displaced Germans moving on, but on the cessation of violence, mutual recognition of sovereignty and Germany’s renunciation of conquest.

Palestinians have been denied all three.

Their displacement is not a singular rupture to be mourned and absorbed, but a continuing process of land seizure, violent settlement expansion and illegal subjugation despite the International Court of Justice terming Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories unlawful and asking Israel to withdraw and pay reparations.

It is striking that such rhetoric never calls up Israel to “accept reality”: not the reality of international law that designates violent settlements in Palestinian territories as illegal, not the repeated UN resolutions demanding withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territories and not the reality that a state cannot bomb, blockade and police a population indefinitely while expecting acquiescence and submission in return.

Instead, the burden of accommodation is placed entirely on the occupied, while the occupier demands for recognition of its permanence. That is colonialism 101.

What is framed as Palestinian obstinacy is the insistence on equal dignity. To tell Palestinians they must abandon the right of return to their homes while Israel continues to militarily settle occupied land is to approve of the humiliating hierarchy of the apartheid structures of ghettoes and checkpoints.

Israel has built about 160 settlements housing approximately 700,000 Jews in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967, as the BBC and The Guardian report. Israeli ministers have openly and explicitly announced plans to annexe Gaza even as they support the violent settlers in Palestinian territories.

The problem with the “Palestinian illusion” thesis is its moral asymmetry. It asks one people to forget, while permitting the other to remember endlessly. Israel’s founding narrative is built on the insistence that Jewish historical trauma must never be forgotten and rightly so. At the same time, the Nakba is denied while Palestinians are told that it must be erased from memory for peace to flourish: in July 2009, the Israeli education ministry banned the term Nakba from the textbook.

This is an egregious double standard which says that remembrance is sacred for some, but pathological for the other. In this version of the truth, remembrance becomes a radicalising threat only when Palestinians practise it.

This amnesia is enforced.

As of December 2024, Israel holds nearly 10,000 Palestinians in specially-designed retributive prisons, as political prisoners. A significant number of them are children, teenagers and young women.

About 35% of whom have never been formally tried, say Addameer, a Palestinian human rights organisation, B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organisation, and Al Jazeera. None of this is new. Since 1967, Israel has imprisoned about one million Palestinians, that is 20% of the entire population.

In other words, captivity is a shared experience for one in every five Palestinians. Mass incarceration, in the guise of securing Israel, is an enduring architecture of control and a generational inheritance for Palestinians under occupation.

Peace does not require Palestinians to surrender history. It requires structures that make dignity possible in the present. That means an end to military occupation, equality before law and recognition of both peoples’ right to dignity, security without domination.

To argue otherwise is not to promote peace, but bigotry while clothing cruel inequality as pragmatism. The tragedy is not that Palestinians have refused to abandon their past, but that they are forced to live in it, every single moment.

Pius Fozan is a photojournalist and public policy graduate from the Willy Brandt School and Central European University.

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