Palestinians are a people. The groups that rule them today are not fit to lead. Hamas rules Gaza. The Palestinian Authority rules part of the West Bank. Both pay for violence. Neither faces voters. That is the core problem. It will not fix itself.
The map is split
The Palestinian system is not one government. It is a broken order. The Congressional Research Service lays it out. Since 2007, the Abbas-led PA has held parts of the West Bank. Hamas has run Gaza. No single authority holds the whole land, controls its own force, or answers to voters.
That split is not a minor detail. It means there is no accountable Palestinian state to talk to. Anyone who speaks of “Palestine” as if it were one functioning state is skipping the first fact.
No elections in nearly 20 years
There has been no Palestinian presidential vote since 2005. No legislative vote since 2006. The CRS notes that the Palestinian Legislative Council has stopped working. Plans for new elections keep getting pushed back or called off. When a ruling class stays in place for decades past its mandate, that is not a rhetorical complaint. That is a broken system.
Peace talks need real leaders. Statehood needs real leaders. A leader who has not faced voters in a generation cannot speak as a nation’s choice.
Hamas is a terror group, not a wing of a party
Hamas is on the U.S. State Department’s FTO list. The CRS brief on Palestinian politics treats that status as a legal fact. Hamas won the 2006 vote, then seized Gaza by force in 2007. A system where one core ruler is a designated terror group is not near statehood. It is in a crisis of legitimacy.
The polls are mixed, and that is the point
One easy story says Hamas speaks for every Palestinian. Another says Hamas is a tiny militia forced on a peaceful public. Neither story holds up. The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research is the most cited pollster in the field. Its October 2025 poll showed strong support for Hamas and majority approval of the October 7 attack. Yet a joint Israeli-Palestinian poll from September 2024 found real Palestinian support for a two-state outcome.
Both things are true. Rejectionism has a big base. Peace has a base too. Any real reform starts from that fact, not from wishful thinking.
Pay-for-Slay
The PA has paid prisoners for years. It has paid the families of people killed or hurt while attacking Israelis. Critics call it Pay-for-Slay. Congress acted on it with the Taylor Force Act. The law bars U.S. aid until the PA ends those payments and the law behind them.
In 2025, there was news. On February 10, official Palestinian media outlet WAFA reported that President Abbas had signed a decree. It said the legal basis for the fund would end. Aid would move into a new welfare plan. On February 21, the European Union welcomed the decree as a key step. By late 2025, Euronews reported that the European Commission was asking for proof after claims that the payments kept flowing through other channels.
The lesson is plain. Reforms on paper are not reforms in fact. Proof matters.
What real Palestinian self-rule would need
OZJF supports real Palestinian self-rule. We do not support pretending the current setup already is that. A credible path would need at least four things:
- Real national elections with honest monitors.
- One ruling authority, not a split between Ramallah and Hamas.
- Audited public money, cut off from any reward for violence.
- A mandate that backs peace and keeps armed groups under the law.
Without those steps, recognition would not fix the problem. It would lock it in.
The Rhodesia test
Here is a simple test. Some nations once recognized Rhodesia’s white-minority rule. That choice did not make the rule just. It made the recognizers look bad. Recognizing a government that still pays for terror and skips elections is the same kind of mistake. It rewards the wrong people and tells the next generation that violence pays.
Palestinians deserve better than permanent rule by unelected, divided, violence-tied groups. Saying that is not hostility to Palestinian self-rule. It is the price of taking the goal seriously.