Peace is Not the Price of Palestinian Freedom

Sinar Daily

a day ago

ACROSS political commentary and diplomatic discourse, a dangerous narrative persists.
Palestinians must first prove themselves peaceful and orderly before being granted recognition as a state. Often framed as pragmatic, this demand is anything but.
It reproduces a colonial logic that makes rights conditional, asking the oppressed to perform submission before they can be seen as worthy of sovereignty.
Such reasoning must be confronted, whether voiced by diplomats, pundits or settler-state apologists. It is not simply a matter of misjudged policy or misplaced optimism. It is a discursive tactic that recasts colonisation as a technical failure of negotiation, allowing those in power to defer justice indefinitely while appearing reasonable.
Beneath its surface lies an insistence that the oppressed must perform civility while being brutalised, that they must negotiate with the boot still on their necks. It reverses cause and effect, blames the colonised for their own erasure and casts the denial of basic rights as the path to peace.
Palestinians have not refused peace. They have refused surrender. And it is long past time we stopped asking them to earn their humanity.
Commentators often begin by expressing frustration with the lack of progress in the peace process. But this frustration quickly turns into blame, casting Palestinians as obstructionist.
The claim that Palestinians reject peace because victimhood is more politically expedient is not only dehumanising.
It is wilfully dishonest. It recasts systematic oppression as strategic manipulation. It imagines that suffering is staged, calibrated for political effect, as though Palestinian grief were a performance for international sympathy rather than a lived consequence of structural violence.
In doing so, it trivialises the enormity of their dispossession and shifts attention away from the systems that produce it. It suggests that Palestinians wear suffering as a costume, rather than being forced into it by decades of siege, displacement and military rule. A Palestinian woman reacts as she sits amidst the rubble of Yaffa School in the Tuffah neighbourhood of Gaza City following overnight Israeli strikes, on June 30, 2025. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP)
This narrative flattens the complexities of struggle into caricature. It positions Palestinians not as political actors navigating the violence of statelessness but as cunning performers whose pain must be doubted, dissected or delayed.
Such framing absolves those in power of accountability. It makes theatre out of survival and cynicism out of resistance.
Palestinians have not rejected peace. They have rejected the obliteration of their political agency. There is a difference. And what is often framed as intransigence is, in truth, a refusal to be erased.
It is a rejection of frameworks that ask the oppressed to forget their history, abandon their rights and sanitise their resistance in order to be granted the most basic political recognition. That refusal is not the barrier to peace. It is the condition of dignity.
Assertions that recognising Palestine would hinder peace depend on a deliberate rewriting of history. From the Oslo Accords to the Arab Peace Initiative, Palestinian leadership has accepted frameworks for a two-state solution. It is Israel that has repeatedly undermined these frameworks by expanding illegal settlements, fragmenting territory and cementing a system of apartheid.
Recognition of Palestine does not obstruct peace. Its denial is what has kept peace perpetually out of reach.
Claims that Palestinians do not need a state are not only weak but also morally bankrupt. No people living under foreign military rule, denied the ability to move freely, bombarded from land and air and stripped of political autonomy can be said to have no need for self-determination. That such arguments continue to appear in mainstream outlets shows how comfortably colonial thought lives in the present.
Some argue that recognising Palestine is merely performative. But the act of recognition is not symbolic. It is an affirmation of a right enshrined in international law. Palestinians, like all peoples, have a right to self-determination.
Recognition is not a reward. It is an obligation. Those who call it virtue signalling ignore the fact that Palestinian survival depends on visibility, accountability and recognition within the global legal and political system.
Critics often point to dysfunction within the Palestinian Authority as a reason to delay or deny statehood. But this misrepresents the cause of that dysfunction.
The Authority operates under structural constraint. It has no real sovereignty, no control over its borders and no reliable access to resources. It is regularly bypassed by Israeli incursions and administrative control. Its weakness is not evidence of Palestinian unfitness. It is evidence of occupation.
The most dangerous discourses are those that dehumanise.
Palestinians are described through metaphors of animals and threats. Crocodiles. Vipers. Shadows. These are not neutral descriptions. They strip people of moral standing.
They evoke fear, disgust and pre-emptive justification for violence. They make it easier to kill. And they make it harder for the world to care.
Assertions that Palestinians would exploit statehood to intensify violence reinforce this same logic. The colonised are cast as innately treacherous. Their empowerment is feared. Their resistance is criminalised. Their historical trauma is erased. Palestinians gather around a huge crater after the Israeli army targeted the tents of displaced people in the northern Al-Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City on June 28, 2025. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP)
Meanwhile, Israel continues to receive recognition, weapons and diplomatic protection without condition. It is not held to any standard of restraint or morality. It is only the colonised who are told to earn their rights.
The silences in these narratives are deafening. Nothing about the blockade on Gaza. Nothing about illegal settlements. Nothing about mass incarceration without trial. Nothing about the razing of entire communities. Nothing about the tens of thousands killed.
To speak of peace without acknowledging this is not neutrality. It is complicity.
Peace is not a gift to be awarded to the obedient. It is not a moral favour to be extended by the powerful. It is not something Palestinians must prove themselves worthy of. Peace follows justice. It does not precede it. And recognition of Palestinian statehood is not the final gesture. It is the first minimal step.
We must abandon any framework that requires the colonised to behave according to the expectations of their colonisers. We must stop asking Palestinians to soften their demands, their voice or their grief.
Justice does not accommodate comfort. It confronts power. And it reclaims the full humanity of those who have been denied it.
If peace is to be real, it must begin by acknowledging that Palestinian statehood is not a prize. It is not an aspiration. It is a legal right. And it is long overdue.
The world must stop rehearsing its moral credibility at the expense of Palestinian life. As long as we do, there will be neither peace nor justice. Only the deepening complicity of those who mistake neutrality for principle.
Dr Siti Nurnadilla Mohamad Jamil is a linguist and discourse analyst whose research focuses on language, ideology, and the legitimisation of violence in media and political discourse. She is currently a Visiting Researcher at Lancaster University and an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the International Islamic University Malaysia. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Sinar Daily.