Peace between Jews and Arabs in Israel and Palestine (Gaza and the West Bank) has been elusive for a century. The United States has repeatedly aimed at brokering a peace deal, only to see the negotiations crash in a new round of enmity and violence. When Donald Trump unilaterally recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December 2017, over the strenuous objections of the other UN Security Council members and the UN General Assembly, the Palestinian Authority denounced the United States, abandoned the quarter-century of negotiations under the Oslo Agreement, and asserted that the Palestinians would never allow the United States to play the role of peace mediator again.
The truth is that such enmity has been present ever since the 1917 Balfour Declaration, by which the British Empire declared a Jewish homeland in the Ottoman region of Palestine. When the Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War I and subsequently collapsed, the British Empire took control of Palestine in 1920 and began to implement the Balfour Declaration, admitting Jewish settlers in large numbers into the British mandate. Since then, Arabs and Jews in Palestine (and after 1948, Israel) have clashed repeatedly and remorselessly. As with so many other conflict zones, the European imperial power (in this case Britain) turned the mess over to the United States after World War II. Since then, the United States has claimed to be acting as a broker and mediator between the two parties. In practice, the United States has been the guarantor and financier of Israel’s security, and the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected U.S. peace offers as one-sided in favor of Israel.
For the past one hundred years, one can track four positions in the often desperate clash of interests.
The first, held by Arab hard-liners today, is that the Jewish homeland of the Balfour Declaration, and later the state of Israel, are products of European imperialism, specifically the British Empire, and a violation of basic Arab rights. This position calls for an end to the state of Israel, and for the hardest hard-liners the dismantling and departure of the Jewish community.
The second, held by Jewish hard-liners today, is that the Jewish state marks the return of the Jewish people to the state promised them by God. The exile is over, and the Jews have returned to their biblical homeland. The Arabs have no claims to the Jews’ God-given lands and should be encouraged to leave the Jewish lands entirely, or at most to live in Jewish-controlled enclaves akin to the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa.
The third, apparently held by majorities of both Jewish Israelis and Arabs, according to countless opinion surveys over several decades, is that the region that was once Ottoman Palestine and later the British Mandatory Region should be divided into two states, Israel and Palestine, living peacefully with each other, with Jerusalem the capital of both countries (Arab-majority East Jerusalem in the case of Palestine). This, of course, is the “two-state solution.” The predominant idea, enshrined in UN declarations and the Oslo peace process, is that the division of the two states should occur along the boundaries of Israel before the 1967 war, with minor and mutually agreed small variations.
The fourth, considered a radical and idealistic vision by many or most, is a one-state solution with Jews and Arabs living side by side, with national (ethnic) rights for each community. Just as Belgium is divided between the Flemish and Walloons, the single binational state would be divided between Jews and Arabs.
Depending on one’s point of view, then, the Israel-Palestine conflict is (a) a fundamental clash of religious claims, Bible versus Koran; (b) a legacy of European imperialism; or (c) an issue in need of urgent, practical, mutual accommodation. In a real sense, of course, it is all of the above, since there are ardent advocates of each of these perspectives. There is a fourth perspective as well, the politics of regional power. Just as Britain’s control of Mandatory Palestine was part of Britain’s overarching imperial strategy for the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, America’s role in the conflict is part of America’s grand strategy as well, a piece of the exceptionalist world map. U.S. exceptionalism has made U.S. mediation ineffective at the least, and duplicitous in practice, failing to insist on the mutual accommodations by both sides that could lead to peace.
As in so many other parts of the Middle East, and indeed other parts of the world, the roots of today’s crisis go back to duplicitous dealings by the European imperial powers during and after World War I. Let us therefore return to the situation a century ago, to better understand possible solutions for today and the future.
The lands that today are Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank were over the course of the past 3,000 years parts of the biblical Jewish kingdoms of Israel and Judah, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greek (Selucid) empire, Hasmonean (Jewish) dynasty, Roman empire, Byzantium, various Muslim caliphates, Crusader Kingdom, Egyptian Mamluks, and starting in 1517, the Ottoman Empire for four centuries. During the Ottoman period, the region of Palestine was settled overwhelmingly by Arabs. Small numbers of religious Jews lived in Jerusalem for centuries, and greater numbers of Jewish emigrants began to arrive at the end of the nineteenth century following the anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia. The idea of a renewed Jewish homeland in the Jews’ biblical lands was revived at the end of the nineteenth century by Theodor Herzl, the Vienna-based founder of modern Zionism.
During World War I, Britain planned for the postwar takeover of the Ottoman lands, including the lands of Israel and Palestine, which after the war and up to the time of Israel’s independence in 1948 would become known as Mandatory Palestine (so named for the League of Nations mandate giving Britain control over the area). British colonial strategists identified four main British interests regarding Ottoman Palestine. The first was to secure the eastern flank of the Suez Canal, which was the British Empire’s major trade route to Asia and its lifeline to British India. The second was to secure an Eastern Mediterranean port for Middle East oil, notably for the oil anticipated to come from British-controlled Mosul (now in Iraq). The third was to divide the Mideast spoils with Britain’s main wartime ally, France. And the fourth aim was to dangle promises regarding Palestine to other parties in order to gain support for Britain’s war effort.
For the fourth purpose, winning the war, Britain promised the land of what would soon become Mandatory Palestine three times over in contradictory commitments. Britain’s first promise was the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Treaty with France to divide the territory between Britain and France. Britain’s second promise, in the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, was to pledge the land to the Arabs in return for their revolt against the Turkish Ottoman overlords. The third promise, the Balfour Declaration, called for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The goal, according to historians, was in part to entice the United States to back the British war efforts, and even to entice the Bolshevik leadership (imagined by Britain to be pro-Jewish) to come onside as well.
Not surprisingly, these utterly contradictory commitments gave rise to the unending strife that has now lasted a full century. The world still reels from this remarkable episode of British imperial duplicity. In a similar way, the world still suffers from like-mannered machinations of the British and French regarding the post-Ottoman provinces of today’s Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria.
From the moment that World War I ended, the Arabs demanded the fulfillment of the promised reward for their fight against the Turks. Meanwhile, the Jews similarly demanded their homeland in Palestine. The famous Jewish quip that the new Jewish homeland was a “land without a people for a people without a land” was never remotely true. Nor was there ever Arab acquiescence in Britain’s diplomatic sleight of hand, promising Arab lands to both Arabs and Jews. The century-long contest between Jews and Arab Palestinians for political control and ownership over the land thus ensued.
During the Mandatory period (1923–1948), during which Britain had administrative control over Palestine and a responsibility of “tutelage” of the region, Britain faced unending difficulties in managing the bitterly conflicting claims of the Jews and Palestinians. Riots, intercommunal violence, and struggles over Jewish immigration to Palestine bedeviled the British mandate. The Arabs bitterly, and largely successfully, resisted Jewish migration, even as Nazism threatened the Jews’ very survival in Europe. Jews perished in unimaginable numbers because the immigration route to Palestine was blocked by the British in the face of Arab resistance.
At the end of the World War II, the sentiments of the United Kingdom and the United States were initially for a one-state solution. An Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in 1946 called for increased Jewish immigration of Holocaust survivors in the context of essentially a single state: “In order to dispose, once and for all, of the exclusive claims of Jews and Arabs to Palestine, we regard it as essential that a clear statement of principle should be made that Jew shall not dominate Arab and Arab shall not dominate Jew in Palestine.”1
Two years later, in 1947, the newly constituted UN General Assembly passed a nonbinding resolution recommending a two-state solution based on the partition of Palestine between Arabs and Jews, with Jerusalem becoming an international city. The Arab countries, and several others, heatedly rejected this recommendation and instead called for self-determination by the existing population of Palestine, which was predominantly Arab at the time. Britain unilaterally announced that it would end its mandate over Palestine in May 1948, signaling its imminent departure. In the lead-up to Britain’s withdrawal from Palestine, President Truman called for a temporary UN trusteeship until the issues of sovereignty could be peacefully resolved.
When Britain’s mandate ended, Israel immediately and unilaterally declared its independence and then was victorious in the ensuing war to defend its claim. In the course of the 1948 war, many Arab families fled their homelands and countless others were violently pushed out of their homes through the use of Israeli terror and force. In this way arose the Palestinian refugees who up to today claim the right of return to their homeland in Palestine.
The history therefore shows that the competing claims by the Palestinians and Jews have raged for a century, and that both the one-state and two-state solutions have been tabled at various times. Israel has established “facts on the ground,” as it were, to achieve control over most of the territory of mandatory Palestine, part of which is Israel of the 1967 borders and the rest, the territories captured by Israel in the 1967 war.
Practical politicians on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides, and in the United States, have argued for several decades for a two-state solution, based largely on a return by Israel to the borders as they existed before the 1967 Six-Day War, with some agreed border adjustments in Jerusalem and other places. Yet that two-state prospect has failed so far, in no small part because the Israeli government actively encouraged Jewish settlement in the West Bank; Jewish West Bank settlers now number around 400,000 and constitute a very powerful if not decisive force in Israeli politics.
Some analysts have recently argued that the settler position is now so entrenched that a two-state solution has become practically impossible. Others argue that a two-state solution is still possible, though just barely, and that the slim remaining prospects for a two-state solution will soon disappear as the Jewish population in the West Bank continues to grow. As a result, the one-state solution has garnered renewed interest in both its variants: a binational solution and a Jewish-nationalist variant.
A binational one-state solution, similar to the Belgian model, could have practical appeal and viability. The Arab and Jewish communities would be self-governing regarding religion, local policing, family, and other intracommunity law, and broadly speaking, in municipal affairs if one community or the other predominates. There would have to be constitutional agreements on national security, foreign policy, internal migration, and the endlessly knotty issue of the return of Palestinian refugees.
None of this would be easy, but it could be possible. Nothing in the Holy Land has been easy for at least the past 3,000 years. The Middle East is indeed in the middle of competing claims: by religion (Jewish, Christian, Muslim), ethnicity (Arab, Turkish, Persian, Jewish, Druze, Kurd, other), and geopolitics (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, the United States, the European Union, and others). Compromise among competing interests is the sine qua non for any kind of peace arrangement.
Hard-liners argue for a very different one-state solution, in which Palestinian political rights would be severely limited. This one-state vision is one of apartheid: Arabs living as second-class citizens under Jewish control. Sensible Israelis and true friends of Israel should understand that most of the world will never accept such a solution, and it would prove deeply corrosive to Israel’s democratic norms and the moral code of the Jewish people. It might be possible to impose for a while out of sheer force, but it will lead to hatred, backlash, and political illegitimacy. It cannot be a peaceful equilibrium.
The Israeli government accuses the UN Security Council and UN General Assembly of anti-Israeli virulence. It’s true that votes in the UN run strongly against Israel’s settlement and occupation policies, but they also run strongly for a peaceful, two-state solution. The UN member states are not so much against Israel as they are against Israel’s occupation policies, and the attempt by some Israeli hard-liners to create an apartheid state by annexing lands conquered in 1967, an action that would be starkly in violation of international law. The UN votes against Israeli settlements (as in December 2016) reflect a widely shared interpretation of international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, that bars settlements by an occupying power in territories occupied in war. The adoption in December 2016 by the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) of a law allowing the expropriation of privately owned Palestinian land triggered similar global opprobrium and even the revulsion of mainstream political parties and legal experts in Israel itself.
Trump’s unilateral recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in December 2017 brought about a similar international rebuke of both the United States and Israel (which gleefully but naïvely applauded Trump’s move). Under international law and countless decisions by the UN, the final status of Jerusalem should be decided by negotiation, not unilateral action by the United States or Israel. Trump’s action was therefore rebuked in the UN Security Council by a vote of 14–1 against the United States, and in the UN General Assembly by a vote of 128 to 9, with 35 abstentions, and that despite a threat by the United States to cut off aid to countries that voted against the U.S. action.
Many Israeli religious hard-liners cite the Jewish belief in God’s covenant to the Jewish people promising the land of Israel exclusively to the Jews. Yet such claims are doubly problematic. One obvious difficulty is that conflicting claims by Jews and Arabs based on differing religious convictions result in irreconcilable positions that lead repeatedly to tragedy, suffering, and stalemate rather than peace. Fortunately, the majority of both Jews and Arabs agree on the feasibility of compromise and mutual accommodation, rather than the all-or-nothing, negative-sum struggles envisaged by the religious hard-liners on both sides.
There is another deep reason for worry within the perspective of Jewish belief itself. The Jewish Scriptures, it is argued by many devout Jews, do not demonstrate an unconditional Jewish hold on the lands promised by God to the Jewish people. The great prophetic texts of the Jewish people (for example, in the books of the prophets Hosea, Amos, Jeremiah, and Isaiah) describe how the iniquity of the Jewish kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the days of the First Temple of Jerusalem would eventually lead to their conquest by foreign powers. These great Jewish prophets underscored that the threat to the survival of the Jewish states of those days lay not in the military power of Assyria and Babylonia but in the decline of moral reverence by the Jewish people. The Jewish states, declared the prophets, would be lost because of internal iniquity, not external force.
Those prophetic teachings should resonate today for Israel’s closest friends, including the United States. Israel’s threats today are not only, or perhaps even mainly, external, for Israel is militarily strong; arguably, the direst threat lies in the weakening of Israel’s resilience, unity, and morale if it turns away from the requirements of justice, including toward the Palestinian people. Israelis and Palestinians remain challenged by British actions a century ago: the promise of the same land to two peoples. If a hard-line one-state solution is a moral and practical dead end, and if Israel won’t countenance a binational solution, the Israeli government should quickly reinvigorate the two-state solution before it’s too late.
Trump’s belligerence toward the Palestinians and his unilateral actions in declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel have only made compromise and trust that much harder to achieve. We will have to clean up after Trump’s rash and irresponsible actions as a prelude to a just solution for the peoples of Israel and Palestine.