Over the last month, tensions have escalated and clashes have erupted in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. By the beginning of November, 74 Palestinians had been killed by the Israeli army and Israeli police (15 of whom were children), 2,600 had been injured with live and rubber-coated bullets, and more than 5,400 had received medical treatment due to Israeli tear gas. Over the same span, 10 Israelis were also killed and more than 100 injured, mostly from a series of stabbings of soldiers, settlers, and bystanders by Palestinians.

Readers familiar with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict recognize that confrontations and tensions exist on a daily basis. So why now? And, relatedly, what now?

The Israeli government claims that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas incited individual attacks and demonstrations in his September 30 speech to the United Nations General Assembly. But Israel gives too much credit to the old man. Few if any would argue that Abbas — unlike Yasser Arafat — is capable of igniting such mass mobilization. Indeed, according to a September opinion poll, two-thirds of Palestinians want Abbas to resign.

Since the breakdown of direct negotiations in 2010, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has tried to create a veneer of support among the populace. For example, students in schools and public employees were forced to participate in demonstrations glorifying the 2012 Palestinian campaign to obtain nationhood status at the UN.

But the stalemate in the recent indirect negotiations — which even US Secretary of State John Kerry blamed on Israel — coupled with dire economic conditions and decreasing international aid, has led the PA to finally admit that it is, as Abbas put it in his UN address, an “authority without authority.”

Abbas’s speech contained three key messages. First, he called for a UN peacekeeping force in the Palestinian Territory to protect Palestinians. Second, he confirmed that the PA would proceed with the International Criminal Court (ICC) process and file charges against Israel for war crimes. And finally, he stated that as long as Israel is not abiding by signed agreements, the PA is also not bound by the accords.

For many Palestinians, it was the first time in a very long while that they heard a PA official express sentiments with which they could relate. According to the aforementioned poll, more than half of Palestinians oppose a two-state solution, and the same percentage see the PA as a burden and favor its dissolution. Only 29 percent, the poll found, believe in the efficacy of negotiations. Yet the speech also underscored the PA’s political bankruptcy and its inability to propose ideas outside the boundaries that the international community and the PA itself have set.

If the PA has been ineffectual, then Israel has been draconian. Under the recent far-right  governments, a plethora of new laws and regulations have been enacted, including a penalty for throwing rocks at demonstrations of twenty years in prison and official support for the use of live ammunition against protesters in East Jerusalem.

One particularly important provocation has been the Israeli government’s indifference toward the increasing number of horrific attacks committed by Jewish settler extremists.  In 2014 a Palestinian child, Mohammad Abu Khdeir, was kidnapped and burned alive in Jerusalem. And in September of this year, Israeli settlers torched the home of the Dawabsheh family as they were sleeping — killing the mother, father, and their eighteen-month-old baby. Israeli intelligence reports have acknowledged that particular crime as the motivation for one of the first incidents in this current cycle of violence.

In addition, over the last year, a few Jewish ultraorthodox groups and members of the Israeli parliament have been constantly disrupting the religious life of Palestinians in the East Jerusalem Haram Al-Sharif/Temple Mount under the protection of Israeli police.

Yet more longstanding forms of oppression — going beyond murder, imprisonment, and physical destruction — have also helped produce an environment that has brought back collective struggle.

In the Gaza Strip, unemployment was at 42 percent in the second quarter of 2015 — a rate that jumps to a staggering 63 percent for those between the ages of twenty and twenty-four. Moreover, 39 percent of Gazans live under the poverty line, and 80 percent are classified as “aid dependent.”

In the West Bank, more than 60 percent of the land is completely controlled by the Israeli army. Technically called “Area A,” this territory is either considered within the regional boundaries of the settlements, as a closed military area, or facilitates the Israeli government’s complex network of 490 movement obstacles — checkpoints, roadblocks, earth mounds, barbed wires, etc.

Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and Israel are only slightly better off. They endure similarly dire economic conditions, receive little in the way of public spending, and constantly face efforts to erase their cultural and national heritage.

Oppression maps not merely over geography, but also along the fault lines of class. With the onset of the Oslo process in the early 1990s, there was an increasingly prominent marriage of capital and political power in the Palestinian society. The political elite of the PA and a number of Palestinian businessmen received preferential treatment, and through partnership with Israeli capitalists intensified the extraction of surplus from Palestinian workers.

Workers have always been worse off. Their job security is weak both in the public sector (which is completely dependent on aid, as well as work in Israel and the settlements) and the private sector (which is very sensitive to political instability; Palestinians also have no control over commercial borders).

With the reserve army of the unemployed increasing, real wages are also declining. In the second quarter of this year, the average wage was $274 in the West Bank and $188 in the Gaza Strip, and 36 percent of workers received less than the minimum wage ($375 per month, compared to $1,200 in Israel). Yet, under the Paris Protocol — the economic annex to the political agreement —Palestinians ($2,800 per capita) and Israelis ($35,000 per capita) pay similar prices for many imported goods.

To make matters worse, the distribution of Palestinian income is heavily skewed toward its capitalists. One study found that while employment grew between 2006 and 2010 (albeit not enough to absorb new entrants into the labor force), the vast majority of the almost 33 percent GDP increase went to profits, interest, and rent. In contrast, real wages decreased 11 percent (3 percent in the West Bank and 31 percent in the Gaza Strip).

Still, Palestinian capitalists are not facing the rosy future envisioned at the beginning of the political process. Due to the structure of the economy since the PA’s creation, Palestinian capitalists have not been embedded in production and industry as might be expected. Instead, their power lies in their proximity to the PA (monopolies and import licenses) and normalization with Israel (subcontracting and partnerships).

This is one of the main reasons why the PA’s dwindling power and the Israeli government’s ideological actions over the last few years have raises questions about the long-term viability of the current arrangement. One recent example is Rawabi, a project city seen by many as a symbol of normalization yet which has now incurred a loss of $200 million and, if its CEO is to be believed, nearly sent the company running the city into bankruptcy. In addition, few Palestinian capitalists still have the permit cards needed to travel into Israel, and none are permitted to use the Israeli airport (which means a full day of procedures at the crossing point in the Jordan Valley).

No extra tears should be shed for Palestinian capitalists. But what’s clear is that the situation is not as promising as it was twenty years ago, to say the least. Capitalists who established strong business ties with Israelis are finding it harder to justify such connections, given the emergence of a new generation who accuse them of funding the state that occupies them and facilitating cheap Palestinian labor that subsidizes the colonization of their lands.

This is evident in recent campaigns calling for a boycott of all Israeli products — not just those from settlements. (The largest campaign was recently organized in response to last year’s war on Gaza, which claimed more than 2,220 Palestinian lives.)

After twenty years of the political process, few people close to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would argue the process was a fair deal. After the First Intifada in the late 1980s, Israel needed to burnish its tarnished image around the world. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), for both subjective reasons (the “outside” PLO, headquartered in Tunis, was threatened by a rising local leadership within the territories) and objective reasons (the fall of the Soviet Bloc and the repercussions of the PLO position on the Iraq invasion of Kuwait), was in one sense happy with whatever it could get. The Oslo accords were signed, and the PLO were recognized as the sole representative of Palestinians. In return, Israel received a much greater prize: the recognition of the Zionist narrative in Palestine/Israel.

While symbolically significant for Palestinians, one also cannot ignore how the PA, created by the US-orchestrated Oslo Accords, has since then directly and indirectly, intentionally and unintentionally, aided in the creation of the “new” Palestinian. National liberation mode was over, and though it took over the role of the Israeli civil administration in providing health and education services, the PA’s ultimate role was to keep the Palestinian people in check.

Nothing demonstrates this better than the admission of Lt General Keith Dayton in a 2009 speech. The head of the US Security Coordinators’ team — a group of American, British, and Canadian security officers sent to the Middle East — Dayton said that once the Israeli commander met the new group, he immediately called Dayton and said, “How many more of these new Palestinians can you generate, and how quickly?”

The development of the new Palestinian has been limited to the security forces. Firstly, the definition of “Palestinian” shifted from encompassing 12.1 million around the world to describing a mere 38 percent of that figure — all residing in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Only those 4.6 million get to vote, or are asked what they think in opinion polls.

Secondly, in opting to only boycott products of Israeli settlements, the PA implicitly held that while the 1967 occupation was illegal, the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 was not. Or that somehow taxes paid by settlement businesses fund the occupation, while taxes on businesses in Israel magically fund food aid for the children of Gaza.

Third, USAID funding or employment was only awarded to those without family connections to Palestinian political parties, and only channeled to apolitical activities. Fourth, Abbas himself effectively opposes the right of return, stating on Israeli TV that he accepts if he ever goes back to Safad (the town his family was expelled from in 1948), it would only be “as a visitor.”

And finally, the social fabric of the Palestinian society has been ripped apart by “techno-fetishism” and neoliberal policies that have driven up personal debt from $494 million in 2009 to around $1 billion in 2013. Credit-granting institutions prioritize consumer loans over business loans, gradually shifting the collective burden of oppression to an individual burden of debt.

According to the Palestinian Monetary Authority (PMA), only 7 percent of credit in 2014 was channeled to agriculture and manufacturing projects, compared with 21 percent channeled to real estate and construction and 30 percent to vehicles/cars financing and other consumption loans, including credit card debt.

The fundamental flaw of this normalizing approach adopted by the international donor community and the PA was its preoccupation with shifting the Palestinian narrative rather than trying to alter Israeli practices.

But now, efforts to domesticate Palestinians seem to finally have evaporated. This is partly due to the intensification of the Israeli government’s policies, and the inability of the international community and the PA to create an alternative economic reality that would somehow spur Palestinians to disregard the political reality.

For the last twenty years, various plots have been hatched to cover up the conditions Palestinians face. This uprising is a message from Palestinians to the Palestinian leadership, Israel, and the international community. It is time for the rest of the world to finally see the clothes-less emperor.

More specifically, the message for the international community is twofold. The first is to recognize Israel as the settler-colonial project it is. The second is to acknowledge that the two-state solution has failed and to realize that, in the colonial context of Palestine/Israel, a “consensual” resolution is unlikely to succeed. In fascist Europe and apartheid South Africa, systematic oppression was not met with calls for negotiations but rather with external pressure.

A message should also be received by both Palestinians and Israelis. The continuous revolts of Palestinians and the rising efforts of BDS around the world are two examples of the gradual — yet visible — shift in public opinion inside Palestine and abroad. Those developments should open up space for two necessary conversations currently absent from Palestinian and Israeli societies.

Palestinians need to start a comprehensive internal discussion about their vision of the one-state solution, and the future leadership capable of creating that reality. And Israelis, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, must recognize that the wide array of opportunities and advantages they enjoy are conditioned on a colonial project in Palestine. That project was built on the theft of Palestinian land and resources, ethnic cleansing of part of its population, and exploitation of Palestinians.

Without those two honest — albeit difficult — conversations there can be no talk of political or social justice. And without justice, there can be no peace.