Palestinian Rejections of a 2-State Solution

Once upon a time, anti-Israel agitation focused on Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the principal demand was Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders – i.e., to the agreed armistice lines at the conclusion of the 1948 war launched by surrounding Arab armies following declaration of a Jewish state. The current anti-Israel narrative, as illustrated by the chants of campus agitators like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), features demonization and deligitimization and backs violent eradication of Israel. Those campus demonstrators have embraced the cause of Hamas and Hezbollah, thus siding with acknowledged terrorist entities whose exclusive objective is liquidation of the Jewish state and its 8 million Jewish inhabitants. And the major declared justification for this objective is that Zionist Israel is a “colonialist” enterprise undeserving of continued maintenance.

A couple of historical points stand out in the face of campus scenarios endorsing Hamas and Hezbollah positions. Most importantly, the demonization of Israeli conduct by Hamas and Hezbollah supporters represents a continuation and amplification of longstanding fundamentalist Muslim, racist hostility toward Jewish presence in the middle east. That rejectionism of Jewish presence will be summarized below. Second, Israel’s establishment was and is a far cry from “colonialism.” The term colonialism applies to the conduct of a world power in conquering, occupying, and exploiting another nation and its people and resources (a la France in Algeria or Italy in Ethiopia). Israel’s creation as a refuge and haven for Jews involved neither advancement of world powers’ interests nor exploitation of any country or its resources.

The impetus for Zionism was restoration of a national homeland for Jews seeking refuge after two millennia of exile, persecution, discrimination, inquisition, and even pogroms. Palestine was an appropriate locale for multiple reasons. Jewish tribes once reigned for several hundred years as an indigenous people in greater Palestine. Despite ensuing diasporas, a small Jewish presence had continued in the territory. Also, in the early 20th century, when Theodore Herzl originated the Zionist movement, Palestine was largely a sparsely populated wasteland. Palestine then constituted not a nation, but rather a small province within the vast Ottoman Empire that for 4 centuries between 1517 and 1918 had controlled the entire middle east. Following the Ottoman defeat in World War I, the fate of the Palestinian province had to be resolved along with the fate of what is now Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and parts of Saudi Arabia.

The Zionist object was not to conquer, oust, or exclude indigenous Arab residents of Palestine. The object was to provide Jews with a refuge or haven in their historic homeland. The first Jewish “invaders” arrived in the early 1880’s in the wake of 1881 pogroms in eastern Europe. They purchased land and established an agricultural community in Zichron Yaakov. Additional Jewish immigrants arrived early in the 20th century following pogroms in 1903 and 1905. These Jewish migrants (from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Rumania, and Yemen) continued to acquire property by purchase and to develop educational and cultural institutions. In 1909, they founded Degania, the first socialist kibbutz, and began to build among the sand dunes north of Jaffa (the birth of Tel Aviv).

The foundations for a Jewish state as a refuge in Palestine did not implicate any conquest or oppression of indigenous Arab residents. Via the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Great Britain first endorsed the idea of a national Jewish homeland in Palestine, subject always to full recognition of the rights and interests of non-Jewish residents. The legal fate of Palestine, along with that of the rest of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, was then officially etched by a 1920 agreement of the victorious World War I powers. Those powers determined to create temporary “mandates” under which certain world powers would provide stewardship till independent nations could be nurtured and formed. The British received a mandate for the areas of Iraq and Palestine (including what is today Jordan, the West Bank, and Israel) while the French assumed supervision of what is now Syria and Lebanon.

In April 1922, the fledgling League of Nations (32 countries) adopted the allied powers’ 1920 plan for the former Ottoman empire. With regard to the British mandate over Palestine, the League of Nations endorsed the Balfour idea of a national home for the Jewish people without prejudice to the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish residents. (Also in 1922, the US Congress endorsed the Balfour principle by unanimous vote in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.)

The British mandate over Palestine sought to accommodate both Arab and Jewish interests. The mandate resolution espoused Jewish immigration and settlement toward a national home within Palestine without specifying any prospective boundaries. By late 1922, the British had unilaterally allocated a considerable territorial portion of greater Palestine to the Hussein family dynasty. That area became the independent Arab state of Transjordan (today’s Jordan).

In the remainder of mandatory Palestine, both Arab and Jewish immigration took place. In June 1922, Winston Churchill issued a White Paper reassuring the Palestinian Arabs that mandatory Palestine would not be wholly Jewish – i.e., leaving room for Arab national development as well as for a Jewish homeland. At that moment in time, there were 150,000 Jews among Palestine’s 700,000 total residents. Over succeeding years, while Jewish refugees arrived from the remnants of eastern Europe, Arab immigrants arrived from the surrounding Arab territories of Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. By 1948, the Jewish population had swelled to 400,000 and the Arab population had increased to more than a million.

What remained constant from the outset of the Zionist enterprise at the turn of the 20th century was widespread Arab rejection of any Jewish immigration or any Jewish self-governance in Palestine. Many Muslim Palestinians abhorred any notion that Arabs might be governed by Jews whom they stereotyped as greedy infidels who had been cursed by Mohammed and who would destroy the sacred Al Aqsa mosque. That demonization was the message from Arab leaders like Haj Amin al-Husseini who became the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the head of the Supreme Muslim Council. That starkly rejectionist message toward Jewish presence provoked 1929 riots in Jerusalem, Tzvat, and Hebron inflicting extensive casualties on Jewish victims. And even though the British had begun to impede rather than promote Jewish immigration to Palestine, the Arab population revolted against the British administration in 1936.

In 1937, Great Britain, alarmed by Palestinian Arab outrage and violence, issued the Peel Commission report proposing partition of remaining mandatory Palestine (Transjordan already having been allocated to an Arab ruler). The Peel plan called for a Jewish state on a scant 17% of the area between the Jordanian border on the east and the Mediterranean Sea on the west and excluded the holy cities of Jerusalem and Hebron. While the Zionist leadership very reluctantly acceded, the Mufti and his minions utterly rejected the partition notion. This was the first, but not the last, Palestinian Arab repudiation of a 2-state solution to governance of Palestine.

The next repudiation came 10 years later. In 1948, when David Ben Gurion, following up on a 1947 UN resolution calling for the partition of Palestine, declared a fledgling Jewish state, 5 Arab armies attacked the lightly armed defenders of the 500,000 Jewish residents. Again, the prevailing radical Muslim doctrine would tolerate no Jewish presence in Palestine, let alone Jewish self-rule. After the IDF miraculously prevailed against the Arab attackers, the armistice lines became the boundaries of Israel for the indefinite future.

Arab repudiation of a 2-state idea continued. Israel’s territorial control expanded to include the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) following the 6-day war in 1967 when the IDF preempted invasions from Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. When Israel offered to negotiate the fate of the West Bank in 1967, the Arab League states issued their infamous three no’s: no recognition of Israel, no negotiations, no peace. Instead of negotiations, Egypt and Syria launched the 1973 Yom Kippur war that almost overran Israeli forces but ended with Israel still in control of the West Bank. Once again, the Palestinian Arabs’ representatives were adhering to their racist themes of Jewish greed and cunning in rejecting tolerance of a Jewish national presence in Palestine.

Radical Muslim rejectionism of Israel’s existence has endured. It surfaced in 2001 when Yasser Arafat, to the consternation of host Bill Clinton, rejected Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s offer to create a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza, and part of Jerusalem. Instead, Arafat’s PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) initiated a second intifada featuring terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. And in 2008, Mahmoud Abbas (successor to Arafat) rejected Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s similar offer for establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

Since 2008, Hamas has pursued its declared goal to destroy Israel. For years that meant primarily missile bombardment, but on October 7, 2023, the Hamas tactic became a murderous cross-border onslaught culminating in over 1200 Israeli-connected deaths, over 3,000 wounded, and over 200 hostages – many of them still being held underground in Gaza. Hamas’ 2023 atrocities included sexual violence, torture, dismemberment, and mutilation of bodies. Hezbollah, starting on October 8, 2023, has relentlessly pounded northern Israel with missiles and drones prompting Israel’s recent invasion of southern Lebanon.

All this rejectionist history underlies the current campus calls to destroy Israel. Contemplation of that history evokes strong parallels between current campus demonizations and the historic, racist rejection of Jewish presence in Palestine on the part of radical Muslim representatives of Palestinian Arabs. Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s adherence to this liquidationist posture fortifies Israel’s determination to uproot those terrorist sects. And persistent Palestinian rejectionism also underlies the Israeli public’s prevailing skepticism and wariness toward any notion of a 2-state solution. (Of course, the dehumanizing savagery of October 7’s onslaught also reinforces Israeli incredulity about a peaceful Palestinian neighbor). The Palestinian Authority has done little to allay Israeli concerns. At the same time, continued Israeli administration of the West Bank, with imposition of second-class status upon millions of non-citizen Palestinians, is also a dismal prospect.

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The above essay notably benefitted from Alex Ryvchin’s book “Zionism: The Concise History” (2021) and from the article by Simon S. Montefiore, “The Decolonization Narrative is Dangerous and False,” The Atlantic (October 2023).