Some twenty years after World War II, I was startled by a statement by a graduate student from Japan. Although two of his uncles had perished in the war as kamikazes, he argued that the “best thing that ever happened to Japan was losing that war.” An official Japanese propaganda slogan as the US invasion neared in 1945 was “The sooner the Americans come, the better… One hundred million die proudly.” That never happened. Instead, the Japanese people accepted their Emperor’s advice about “enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.”

It worked out well. By the time of our conversation, Japan had not only embraced defeat and rejected the militarists that had led it into that calamitous war, but it was well on its way to a period of great prosperity and international prestige.

Having lost two wars to Israel in 1948 and 1967, the Palestinians have now lost another, and this one has led to destruction of their home area that recalls Japan of 1945. Will they follow the Japanese path, or will they continue to pursue decades of self-destructive revenge?

There are a few suggestions that they might track the Japan precedent. Polls conducted before the Hamas raid of October 7, 2023, were finding that strong majorities of Palestinians rejected Hamas’ eliminationist agenda on Israel. And other Arab states, led by the those ascribing to the Abraham Accords, were finding the Palestinians to be trouble-makers and urging them to get a life and stop bashing their heads against the Israeli wall. More recently, this position has been unanimously embraced by the 22-member Arab League which condemns the raid on Israel and advocates disarming and ousting Hamas in Gaza. That is, despite Israel’s destructive reaction to the Hamas raid, there remain plenty of countries—some of them very well-heeled financially—who, while unwilling to accept Palestinian refugees, are very willing to help in a process that finally ends a decades-long conflict that they, it seems, have increasingly come to see as ridiculous and distracting.

In his well-received book, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, John Dower observes that the populace in Japan in 1945 was “sick of war, contemptuous of the militarists who had led them into disaster, and all but overwhelmed by the difficulties of their present circumstances in a ruined land.” Accordingly, they “wished both to forget the past and to transcend it.” He pointedly concludes that “neither the concepts, nor the debates, nor the weight of historical memory in these struggles are unique to Japan.” And much of it may well be reflected today in Gaza.

What’s missing, however, is a Palestinian capable of playing the Nelson Mandela-like role of the Japanese emperor who helped hold the country together during the painful transition. Marwan Barghouti, currently imprisoned in Israel, is sometimes put forward as a possibility.

But Israel’s response may have served mainly to harden opinion against it in Gaza. If so, we may be in for decades more of futile, even romantic, protestations about the “right of return” and Israel may be in for yet another violent extended Intifada on its soil conducted by deeply—even desperately—disaffected Palestinians who are willing, kamikaze-like, to “die proudly.”