Is This How the War in Palestine Ends?

Sometime during the recent exchange of drones, missiles and bunker-buster bombs between Iran on one side and the United States and Palestine on the other, I realized that the Middle East has been at war all my long life — and for decades before I was born in 1941.

One way or another, the cause of the war has been the existence of Israel. We seem no closer to ending the war than we were when Sir Arthur Balfour issued his famous 1917 declaration supporting the idea of a “national home” in Palestine that would provide a haven for Jews while vaguely promising civil and religious rights for the residents of Palestine.

Well, we know how that worked out. But now, while missiles and drones fly through Middle Eastern skies, a group of Palestinians and Israelis is arguing seriously for the founding of a single confederated state including all of what we now call Israel and Palestine.

Such a new state would have to overcome more than a century of bitter conflict — conflict that the early Zionists believed was the only way to found and sustain an Israeli state.

In his book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2007, the U.S. historian Rashid Khalidi mentions a U.S. commission sent by President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 to study the wishes of those living in Palestine now that they were no longer part of the Ottoman Empire.

The commissioners learned from Zionist representatives that they “looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine,” and the Zionists believed that this could be accomplished only by force of arms — if not their own, then those of the British who had just received a League of Nations mandate to govern Palestine.

An all-too-accurate prediction

When the commissioners sent their report to Wilson, Khalidi tells us, they included a cover letter in which they wrote: “If the American government decided to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, they are committing the American people to the use of force in that area, since only by force can a Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained.”

We are now well into the second century of that war, and the commissioners’ predictions remain accurate. No one alive can recall a time when the Middle East was not troubled as a result of the establishment and maintenance of Israel. Its Arab and Muslim neighbours have known a century of turmoil, military coups, rebellions and revolutions, usually stemming from Israel’s persistent survival.

Those of us born in the 1940s have literally grown up with Israel, raised to honour and support the survivors of the Holocaust building a new country that would prevent genocide ever afflicting them again.

As for the Palestinians, they were portrayed in the news as merely “Arabs,” faceless adversaries who didn’t register in western minds as entirely human. I grew up when western movies featured onslaughts of “Indians” against wagon trains and stagecoaches; invariably the attackers were shot off their horses and the settlers proceeded to occupy their dead opponents’ land.

Israel’s founding had a similar story. The 1960 war movie Exodus, with a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, was described as “the first Jewish western.”

An imperialist foothold

Seventy-five years later, we can see the imperialist fingerprints all over the Middle East. The First World War destroyed four empires — Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans. The Second World War finished off the Japanese, British and French empires. The French tried to restore their empire in North Africa and Southeast Asia, but the British were burned out. They retreated from southern Asia amid a monstrous slaughter as the Republic of India and Muslim Pakistan were born, and they were eager to get out of Palestine as well.

But Israel was a kind of imperial legacy: a mostly European colony implanted in Arab lands, a platform from which the West could still indirectly project power.

Israel’s founding assuaged European guilt over Hitler and the Holocaust. After all, antisemitism had been a widespread, even fashionable attitude until the Nazis gave it a bad name. (And even then, it was still widespread.)

So the West found it worthwhile to support Israel from the start. Restoring peace was an endless concern, but every conference, agreement and accord seemed to become a dead letter. The same was true of the UN Charter and the endless resolutions calling for peace through some kind of two-state solution.

Almost 60 years after the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and east Jerusalem, it looks as if no such solution was ever seriously considered by any Israeli government. Subsequent wars kept postponing any hope of a settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. The Oslo Accords seemed to offer a process for settlement. But it was a disappointment in the end.

According to Khalidi, the apparent rapprochement of the Oslo Accords was really yet another indefinite postponement. He describes secret talks between Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that resolved the critical issue of security, in part by Arafat’s recognition of the state of Israel. But as Khalidi points out, Rabin did not recognize that Palestine was also a state — a lapse that was never remedied.

The Palestinians signed the Oslo Accords thinking further negotiations would resolve such problems. No such negotiations occurred.

Instead, Israeli settlers have gradually encroached on Palestinian land, backed up by the Israel Defense Forces.

Through all the years of wars and intifadas, most Arab nations and the Islamic Republic of Iran bitterly criticized Israel. By the time of the Oslo Accords, such threats had created a Fortress Israel attitude in Israelis and their governments, and the two-state solution was dead.

A country endlessly at war

After Oct. 7, 2023, the Israeli counterattack on Hamas in Gaza has gone on suspiciously long: the most powerful army in the region seems incapable of defeating Hamas. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not only has failed to win in Gaza; he has also launched attacks on Lebanon, Syria and now Iran. He seems content to rule a country that is endlessly at war, while intoning the mantra of “Peace through strength.”

Israelis themselves seem divided about living in a warfare state. According to a December report in the Israeli news outlet i24News, 117,000 Israeli citizens had left the country since Oct. 7, 2023 — triple the number who left in previous years.

Many of those who stay fill Israeli streets in enormous protests, calling for the return of the surviving hostages and an end to the war. They get nowhere. And even if all the hostages were returned to their families, and combat ended in Gaza, both sides know yet another war will inevitably break out.

Israel has staked its existence on endless military superiority, which means one serious defeat could end the country. That gives its enemies every reason to plan for another war, and another.

A few Israelis and Palestinians, however, are actually working together to inform one another and find some kind of lasting peace. +972 Magazine offers “independent journalism from Israel-Palestine,” with articles by both Israelis and Palestinians that are highly critical of both the conduct of the war and Israel’s policies in general.

‘One shared homeland’

+972 Magazine recently ran an article about a Palestinian citizen of Israel, Rula Hardal, and May Pundak, an Israeli human rights lawyer and the daughter of the late Ron Pundak, a man who helped frame the Oslo Accords.

Coming from very different positions, the two women are co-executive directors of A Land for All, which since 2012 has promoted “two sovereign states — Israel and Palestine — in one shared homeland.”

Rather than divide Palestine into two wholly separate countries, A Land for All calls for shared responsibility for resources like water systems, electricity and public health. But two independent states would exist, with “recognized borders, right for self-determination, equal rights, and security for both peoples.”

People would be free to travel across both states and to live in either one; Israelis could live in Palestine, and Palestinians in Israel. Jerusalem would be the capital of both states, and freely accessible to both peoples. Their justice systems would “include recognition and compensation for past wrongs — without creating new ones.”

In its 2024 vision statement, A Land for All makes an inarguable point:

More than a hundred years of conflict have taught us that no nation can be the sole lord of this land. Occupation, annexation and denial of rights do nothing but deepen the conflict and fan the flames of hatred, and the concept of separation has failed as it ignores the complex reality of two peoples living in the same land. Unilateral solutions have also failed time and time again. We boldly say: Mutual recognition that this land is a shared homeland — a homeland for Jewish Israelis and for Palestinians — is a must.

A Land for All’s proposal seems breathtakingly impossible. How would such adversaries sit down and draw a border between a new Israel and a new Palestine? Would Israeli settlers in the West Bank give up the homes they’ve built there? Would Palestinians seriously try to reclaim the homes they were driven from in 1948?

Perhaps they would, or perhaps they would start new homes — Palestinians choosing to live in Israel, Israelis choosing Palestine.

It would certainly be difficult to overcome the suspicion, mistrust and vengefulness each side feels toward the other.

Some kind of truth and reconciliation commission would have to reopen some very old wounds in order to heal them. A generation of careful negotiations might be needed just to build the institutional foundation for two new states in a single country.

Two equal states within one nation

And it might even take international pressure to bring the adversaries to the table. We could tell the Israelis: You are creatures of the United Nations you now reject. We will no longer sell you weapons. We will sanction your businesses, your government officials, your scholars, your senior military officers — unless you agree to negotiate as equals with the Palestinians to build two equal states within a single nation.

And we could tell the Palestinians: Enough of revenge. You will receive compensation for your losses, and you will compensate the Israelis for theirs.

And what, after all, would be a reasonable alternative to reconciliation? Another century of slaughtered children, of violence and terror inflicted on one’s neighbours?

Another century of dependence on some superpower to provide military strength that mocks the idea of peace?

If the visions of A Land for All seem like hallucinations, that only shows how we have regarded this past nightmare century as unchangeable reality.

Ending that delusion would be an invaluable gift — for both sides.