If there was no outside intervention and the aim was military neutralization, would Israel be a clear favorite over Palestine?
Interesting question, and one that will probably be moved before long. There can’t be a factual answer to this, since Palestine doesn’t exist as an independent nation with identifiable borders.
Do you mean to discuss an all-out war between Israel’s military and the Israeli citizens/aliens who self-identify as Palestinian? For the sake of the question, I’ll go with that premise.
I think the smart money would always be with Israel. Israel has an extremely well-trained and -equipped military; the Palestinians have second-hand Soviet weapons, most of which haven’t been used in years (rocks and Molotovs are more politically useful than AK-47s), and they have little or no training.
Israel can, in time of crisis, call upon almost all of its able-bodied Jewish citizens, since they’re required to serve a brief term in the armed forces and are bound by a reserve activation clause (this may only apply to males, but large numbers of females serve also). The Palestinians can conceivably field the entirety of their male population (they have a strong cultural bias against women fighting), but they are a minority – their numbers can’t match.
Israel has decades of experience fighting both within and beyond its borders. Most Palestinians have no valid combat experience; car-bombs and other terrorist-style attacks don’t work too well once you’re in a real war where everybody is armed and has their guard up.
In the end, what we’re talking about is a civil war, where one side greatly outnumbers and outguns the other, and is also better organized. The only time such a rebellion has worked was in Star Wars, and Yassir Arafat is no Princess Leia. The American and French Revolutions don’t really apply here – the American colonists were only fighting a fraction of England’s might, which England was projecting from across the Atlantic via slow boat. The French crown was fighting against almost the entirety of its citizenry, before the invention of automatic weapons.
Please note that, while I am Jewish, I don’t think any of the above is necessarily a good thing. I have no love for Israel or any other religiously defined state, though there is very good reason for Israel to exist as such. I would be thrilled if we could find the magic medicine that enables Israel to coexist peacefully with its disenfranchised Palestinian minority. Palestine, as desired by those who identify as Palestinian, is essentially Israel with no Jews in it. They don’t just want a nation of their own; they want the land that was taken from them by the British and given to the Zionists (literal definition).