Adam Oler on “The Keys to War: Why the Palestinian Grand Strategy may not be what you think it is.”

Today we hear from Lawfire^® contributor and LENS conference speaker Prof Adam Oler who helps us unpack one of the most complicated–and perplexing–issues of our day.

The Keys to War: Why the Palestinian Grand Strategy may not be what you think it is

By Adam Oler 

Last November, CBS Evening News aired a story about Nabil Alshurafa and his mother, after her harrowing escape from Gaza. At the end of the segment Dr. Alshurafa showed his relief as she finally joined him back home in California.

The moving segment ended as he handed his mother an heirloom in the form of a large, tarnished skeleton key enclosed in a glass case. When asked by the reporter about the key’s meaning, Alshurafa replied he wanted to give his mother hope, hope that one day they could go back to his mother’s home. 

Similar old house keys, or images of them, are common among Palestinians and their supporters. In meetings with U.S. Authorities, including President Biden, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abas has taken to wearing one on his lapel. He wore one on his jacket when addressing the UN General Assembly six weeks ago. The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Movement, which is at the heart of many campus protests, uses keys as a rally symbol at anti-Israeli demonstrations.

Many Palestinians pass keys down from generation to generation, and in both Hebron and Washington, DC, there are museum exhibits dedicated to key collections. Keys adorn everything now from pro-Palestinian coffee mugs to tee-shirts, and baseball caps to tattoos.

So what do the keys represent, and why are they critical to understanding the current conflict?  In short, they symbolize the so-called “Right of Return.” Too-often overlooked by political leaders and the media, the “Right of Return” is shorthand for a broader, long-term, grand strategy ultimately meant to compel the Jewish state into accepting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Palestinians into Israel’s internationally recognized borders. 

According to the strategy, once there, the Palestinians would eventually outnumber the Jewish population, forcing Israel into an impossible choice: either cease being a democracy, or end its status as the world’s only Jewish state. From an Israeli perspective, accommodating the Right of Return amounts to demographic suicide.

Despite the lack of attention paid to it, for Palestinians, the Right of Return is the principal objective for achieving Israel’s demise.  The keys, which represent the homes in which the Palestinians once lived, and the homes to which they will someday return, are the strategy’s consummate symbol.

Understanding the “Right of Return,” as much as anything else, is central to understanding why the conflict is so intractable, and what it would take to end it. 

If looking for the single-biggest obstacle to peace, it is here. And if peace is to attain in the region, the Right of Return must be dispatched, once and for all. Save for military success itself, this goal should be viewed by the new Trump Administration as foundational for Israel’s long-term security and achieving America’s overriding interest in stability across the region.

The Refugees, and their children, and their grandchildren…

During the Israeli War of Independence, approximately 750,000 Arabs fled into neighboring countries. Debates endure about why this occurred, but the principal cause was the first Arab-Israeli War, which began in 1947 and ended in 1949. As Sol Stern has noted recently, for much of the Arab World, and their allies on the Left, the mass exodus was the product of nascent Israel’s deliberate effort to ethnically cleanse the country of non-Jews, including through massacres and threats.

Over time, this version of events evolved into a trans-generational victimhood narrative styled as the Nakba. Meaning “disaster,” and symbolized by the ancient house keys, the Nakba is the essential event in the history of Palestinian nationalism. 

As Stern points out, however, the underlying premise of the Nakba is incomplete. In truth, the closest thing the Palestinians had to a national leader in 1947, Hitler confidant Haj Ali, admonished the Palestinians to flee of their own volition. Ali, like the Arab leaders who invaded Israel upon its creation by the United Nations, promised the Palestinians they would return home once victory was assured.

While it is unknown how many Arab families were driven out, and how many chose to leave in the face of a war started by the Arabs themselves, the Nakba narrative is at the center of the so-called Palestinian Right of Return. 

In the war’s aftermath, the United Nations established the United Nations Relief Works Agency, UNRWA.  Unlike the UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), which assists all other refugees worldwide, UNRWA’s sole mission is to support the Palestinians. Also, unlike the UNHCR, UNRWA passes refugee status to the multi-generational offspring of actual refugees, even when those descendants attain citizenship in another country.

While the number of surviving refugees from 1947-49 is roughly thirty thousand, because of UNRWA’s decision to allow refugee status to pass from generation to generation, more than eight million Palestinian “refugees” now exist. This figure includes nearly six million registered with UNRWA.  Thus, when Palestinian leaders and their interlocutors invoke the Right of Return of all refugees to within Israel’s borders, they are literally referring to millions of people.     

Identifying the Palestinians’ Desired End State

There are reasons why the Right of Return is often overlooked.  Egypt, Jordan, and the Abraham Accords signatories abandoned the idea years ago.  As a legal matter, UN 242 effectively discarded it as well. 

Above all, few can imagine Israel committing demographic suicide. Yet this lack of imagination causes too many leaders to overlook this most central aspect of Palestinian strategy. While it may seem farcical to some, the Right of Return is nonetheless foundational to the Palestinian world view.

In one of the most widely read (and assigned) books about the Middle East, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Columbia University’s Rashi Khalidi presents the Right of Return as the central issue in Arab-Israeli affairs.

Khalidi describes Israel’s creation and enduring survival as an example of “settler colonialism,” a term ubiquitous now among anti-Israel advocates. He asserts the Israeli army ethnically cleansed the land of Palestinians, and that justice can only be achieved by allowing all refugees and their generations of descendants to return.

Khalidi is an accomplished scholar, and his book is vitally important because it captures the Palestinian national movement’s narrative so accessibly. It deserves to be widely read, if only to appreciate the perspective that informs not just the views of countless Palestinians, but those on the American Left—particularly on U.S. campuses—who have adopted the settler colonialist narrative. 

That said, Khalidi’s book is more a work of advocacy than scholarship; it reads like a closing argument that downplays or ignores unhelpful facts. Among Khalidi’s omissions are the Palestinian leadership’s alliance with the Nazis in World War II, the brutal character of Palestinian terror long before October 7^th, and Khalidi’s failure to distinguish between the legal authority of a UN Security Council Resolution and non-binding votes by the General Assembly. 

Above all, Khalidi effectively throws out three millennia of Jewish ties to the land, something he is compelled to do if his “settler colonialism” narrative is to survive. He also gives short shrift to the role of the Palestinians themselves in causing the 1947-1949 war in the first place.

A second revealing book is Noura Erakat’s Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, wherein she argues for a return of the refugees to within Israel’s recognized borders. Erakat, however, is emphatic that the return itself is not the optimal outcome, but a prerequisite to a larger solution. For her, international law has been wielded to trap the some Palestinians, often willingly, into a framework that ultimately serves Israeli interests.

Given her role as a leading BDS proponent, a co-founding editor of the Middle East online journal Jadaliyya, and one of the academic left’s most activist “decolonization” advocates, Erakat deserves to be read closely. In short, Erakat argues Israel had no legal right to defend itself following the atrocities of October 7^th, that its very existence violates international law, and that the concept of Israel as a Jewish state is immoral.   

The Eliminationist Agenda

In his 1995 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Harvard Professor David Goldhagen defined the concept of Eliminationist Anit-Semitism as a brand of antisemitism unusually “violent in its logic” and harboring a goal to “promote the ‘elimination’ of Jews by whatever means necessary and possible, given the prevailing political and ethical constraints of the time.” Today’s efforts to remove a majority Jewish State from the Middle East amounts to no less than Eliminationist Anti-Zionism. “Zionism” began as a movement to establish a Jewish-majority state.

Since the creation of modern Israel in 1948, Zionism encompasses the effort to preserve and protect that state.  By no means are all Palestinians intent on Israel’s violent destruction, nor do all pro-Palestinian protestors on college campuses or certain corners of Congress seek this outcome.

Others, however, do. Those openly pursuing Jewish Israel’s demise, whether violently or otherwise, include not only Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but groups such as BDS and Students for Justice in Palestine. Together, they form the self-styled “Palestinian Resistance,” which has as its one shared agenda eliminationist ant-Zionism. These groups often draw their support from left-leaning academics, certain members of Congress, and a number of journalists.

Palestinian Grand Strategy

Although the concept of “grand strategy” is hard to define, a helpful approach is to think of it as an umbrella strategy under which all other subordinate strategies should align. Successful strategies begin by identifying the root problem at hand, then devising a clear political aim that, when realized, resolves or ameliorates the problem.

For the Palestinian Resistance, the “problem” is the presence of a Jewish State in a land once controlled by Arab Muslims. While there may be a mix of religious, political, and other drivers that shape how the problem is viewed by Israel’s antagonists, the Jewish State’s presence is at the heart of the Palestinians’ struggle.

So it follows that the Palestinian political aim is an Arab-led Palestinian State, stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and from the Lebanese and Syrian frontiers to Eilat. When pro-Palestinian protestors chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” this is precisely what they are advocating.

While at first this may appear reductionist or too simple, it shouldn’t. The proponents of a Palestinian State that runs from the River to the Sea have been telling us this since the 1930s.

The challenge for the Palestinians, of course, is how to achieve their ends.  Listening to what the Resistance is actually saying and doing, one can readily discern a trio of objectives that once achieved, would bring about the stated political aim. While these objectives aren’t necessarily sequential and reflect a strategic approach that could take decades to achieve, they are orchestrated to support one another.  

For the Palestinians, the first objective is a delegitimized Israel, susceptible to sufficient economic and diplomatic coercion to compel its acceptance of the Right of Return. The second objective is an Israel with transformed demographics, such that returned refugees and their descendants, when added to Israel’s 2.5 million Arab citizens, eventually becomes the majority. The third objective is democratic elimination of Israel’s status as a Jewish state, and its replacement with an Arab Palestine. Where does the current war fit into this strategy? 

Theoretically at least, the Palestinian Grand Strategy could be achieved non-violently through a combination of civil disobedience, domestic pressure on Western governments, and an increasingly effective social media campaign. Indeed, many BDS proponents, among others, do not call for violence—at least not directly. Neither Khalidi nor Erakat should be considered militants. Indeed, theirs is not a military strategy at all.

Neither Hezbollah nor Hamas can win a conventional war against the IDF. Rather, the War in Gaza and on Israel’s other fronts, should be seen as only one line of effort waged in support of a much more sophisticated strategy. The military instrument of power is important, but the Palestinian theory of success is far more reliant upon the informational, economic, and diplomatic instruments. Understanding how and why is critical to defining the real threat Israel faces, and what achieving peace will entail.

The current war is designed to help achieve objective one – a delegitimized Israel.

The role of the military instrument of power—force used by HAMAS and its cohorts—must be properly understood in the broader context of the Palestinians’ plan. Again, the war on Israel’s frontiers is not intended to defeat the IDF, let alone conquer Israel by force.

Rather, in this strategy the use of force is a supporting instrument designed primarily to serve the informational instrument of power. First tested in 2014 during that summer’s Gaza battles, and explained so well by David Patrikarakos’ War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century, HAMAS’ goal is to compel Israel into military operations that produce widespread images of destruction, dead children, and starvation. 

This imagery—and not the IDF’s battlefield defeat—is the operational effect HAMAS seeks.  Two related points merit consideration here. First, HAMAS’ goal of furthering Israel’s delegitimization is an excellent example of Sun Tzu’s second rule of the offensive—get between one’s enemy and his allies.

Second, as appalling as HAMAS’ willingness to sacrifice thousands of Palestinian civilians may be, it is a learned strategy first perfected by Lenin and his concept of the vanguard. The idea is that for a Revolution to succeed, a vanguard elite must be in charge and survive. That elite must also be willing (at the very least) to accept vast numbers of casualties among the population so the envisioned utopia can be achieved.

False Hope is the Conflict’s Fuel

To be sure, a handful of Israel-aligned scholars have identified the Right of Return as the primary obstacle to peace. In a book initially published forty years ago and since updated, Why the Jews?: The Reason for Anti-Semitism, the Most Accurate Predictor of Human Evil, authors Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin note Israel is alone among nations being required to accept massive numbers of refugees back into its borders.

More recently, Israeli writers Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf published The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace, the most direct work on the subject to date.

Wilf in particular stresses the unseemly and self-serving role UNRWA plays in perpetuating the conflict. The jobs and other services it provides allows the Palestinians to keep fighting, while the lessons taught in UNRWA schools nurture young Palestinians with a sense of victimhood, grievance, and eliminationist expectations. Without the prospect of success, the Palestinian Grand Strategy fails, and UNRWA is a principal purveyor of eventual Palestinian victory.

It is hardly alone as a source of motivation, however. When the International Criminal Court indicts Israeli leaders, or countries in Europe recognize a Palestinian State without restating a commitment to Israel’s survival as eternally Jewish, it signals to the Palestinians their strategy is working. Similarly, when the U.S. abstains from a UNSCR vote critical of Israel, or cuts off certain arms to the IDF, it tells the Palestinians their first objective — Israel’s delegitimization — is getting closer. 

For some American leaders, the delimiting of supplies is viewed as symbolic, after all Israel’s ability to strike targets is marginally impacted.  But for Palestinians whose first objective is premised on isolating Israel, the lesson they take is to continue fighting and sacrificing. So, too, when members of Congress attempt to block air defense equipment to Israel, Presidential candidates allegedly defer choosing a running mate because he is too pro-Israel (or because he is Jewish), and American campuses are flooded with Hamas-adjacent protestors.

Thoughts for the new Administration

Israel is receiving justifiable criticism for its failure to define its political aim. While the Abraham Accords have proven to be one of the great diplomatic achievements of the early 21^st Century, their full potential won’t be realized until the Palestinian conflict is resolved.

Regardless of whether a two-state solution emerges or not, one thing is clear: Whatever Israel and its interlocutors settle upon, Israel’s Palestinian antagonists must recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, in perpetuity. This means ending the Right of Return, not only as a Palestinian objective, but as a narrative.

Under leadership from the White House, the Palestinians must be induced or, if necessary, compelled into abandoning their pursuit of eliminationist anti-Zionism.  This will require ending UNRWA’s role in the region once and for all and replacing it with an international body focused on ending the conflict, not perpetuating it.  A process much like de-Nazification will be required and include scrutiny of student textbooks and social media, in particular.

As important will be the replacement of the Right of Return with tangible improvements in the lives of Palestinians. Whether in the form of new schools, improved infrastructure, job opportunities, or in the trappings of statehood or other forms of agency and self-governance, hope for a better future will be essential.  In the end, this will be the only key that truly matters. 

About the Author:

Adam Oler is an associate professor of strategy and department chair at the National War College, National Defense University, in Washington, DC. Professor Oler spent twenty-four years as a judge advocate, serving multiple tours in Europe, Korea, and the Middle East. At the National War College, he instructs on national security design and implementation, the Middle East, and national security law. You can follow him on Twitter at @aonwc11.

Disclaimers: 

The opinions in this piece reflect the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of any U.S. Government entity, including National Defense University..

The views expressed by guest authors do not necessarily reflect my views or those of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, or Duke University.  See also here.

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