It won’t work for many reasons. Let us examine some.

1. Palestinians are struggling for a state, for a national identity. Even if they could attain prosperity under Occupation, that isn’t what drives most of them. Identity is at the core of the human self, and Palestinian identity has been deeply damaged by the condition of statelessness in which Israel holds them. Most Palestinians will not cease their struggle short of statehood.

This point really should not be hard to understand. Americans in 1776 could have saved themselves an economic disaster by just putting up with the tyranny of King George III. They would all have been much wealthier if they hadn’t fought a debilitating 7-year-long war. The 1780s were not good economic times, despite the advent of independence. The revolutionaries wanted liberty, not access to luxury goods like tea, if the tax on it was going to be set by some distant authority in London.

2. The Palestinians know their own history and they know that the post-WW I Versailles peace conference and then the British empire itself promised them a Palestinian state (the latter by 1949). While Jewish nationalists or Zionists make a big deal out of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, it says nothing about erecting a state in Palestine, and League of Nations deliberations repeatedly scolded the British for ignoring the national development of the indigenous Palestinians, the primary function of a Class A Mandate like Palestine. Palestinians are a people as Syrians and Iraqis are a people, and all were promised a state by the League of Nations. Only Palestinians did not get one. They won’t rest until they have a passport.

3. The sad fact is that economic prosperity is impossible for most Palestinians to count on as long as they are stateless. Philosopher Hannah Arendt once observed that “citizenship is the right to have rights.” Without citizenship in something, Palestinians do not have the right to have rights. Stateless people are never really sure they own their own property, since Israeli squatters can usurp it at will or Israeli authorities can order it destroyed. You can’t reliably do business under such a situation. Business requires firm property rights.