Rethinking the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often considered in the context of the current international world-order of sovereign nation-states. Viewed from an international perspective, the conflict is portrayed as a clash between two peoples both claiming sovereignty over the same geographical area—the land between “the (Jordan) river and the (Mediterranean) sea”. Negotiating the national interests of the two peoples is thus considered to be the principal means to resolve the conflict.
Ample historical evidence highlights the importance of understanding the conflict—and the means to resolve it—through a different lens, focusing on the civic relationship between the State of Israel and the Palestinian people under its rule. The civic lens zooms in on the primary ‘mechanism’ and its effect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the systematic violation of human rights and the rate of civilian casualties it spawns. I briefly examine the history of the civil conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people in the first part of the article. In the second part I discuss the necessary civic conditions that must be met to resolve the conflict.
The recent war between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip region demonstrates why the civil lens elucidates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict better than the common nationalist standpoint. The Gaza Strip has been under Israeli control since 1967. Hamas’ terror attack on Israeli Jewish civilians on October 7, 2023, ignited a civil war between Israel and the Palestinian population in the Strip. Hamas’ offensive did not aim to liberate the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip, create a Palestinian nation-state, or conquer and occupy Israeli territory. Its terror tactics were entirely unfit for achieving these aims. Rather, the main objective of the terrorist organization was to demonstrate its capacity to lead the Palestinian people’s resistance against the dominating power of the Jewish state.
In response to Hamas’ brutal assault, Israel’s counterattack aimed to demolish Hamas’ military capabilities and release the Israeli hostages it abducted. But the means to achieve these aims involved a systematic violation of the human rights of the entire Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army demolished large residential areas, including schools, hospitals, and mosques. Humanitarian aid was restricted and most of the population was displaced. As a result of Israel’s offensive, the entire Palestinian society in the Strip was severely fractured, its physical infrastructure pulverized and its economy destroyed.
The civil war between Israel and Hamas illustrates a pattern of action and reaction that shapes the entire history of the civil conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. Since its inception in 1948, Israel aims to secure its existence as a Jewish state through a regime of domination that consistently violates Palestinians’ human rights. In turn, the Palestinian population resists Jewish domination by supporting militias dedicated to terror attacks on Israeli civilians. Israel then retaliates to reinforce its domination.
As a political strategy, Jewish violation of Palestinians’ human rights preceded the founding of the State of Israel. During the first three decades of the 20th century, Zionist agencies purchased lands from Palestinian landowners and then expelled the communities of Palestinian fellahin that lived in and off those lands. The territorial expansion of the Zionist project, coupled with the growth of Jewish immigration, threatened to undermine the social and economic fabric of Palestinian agrarian society. The Zionist threat was one of the main factors leading to the Arab Revolt in 1936. The Revolt included terror attacks on Jewish settlements and violent resistance against the British administration that supported the development of a Jewish homeland in Mandatory Palestine in accordance with the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
The systematic use of Jewish state power in violation of Palestinians’ human rights began soon after Israel’s War of Independence ended in 1949. The war was the Palestinians’ Nakba: Over 700,000 Palestinians—more than half of the Palestinian population—were displaced and dispossessed, their society and culture shattered. Historians still dispute how many Palestinians left their homes voluntarily, and how many were driven out by Jewish military forces. But the correct number has little significance in the broad context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Nakba turned out to be a major milestone in the conflict because Israel refused to acknowledge Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their homes and lands once the war ended and ceasefire agreements were reached. Moreover, in the aftermath of the war Israel systematically demolished hundreds of Palestinian villages, obliterating a major part of the centuries-old infrastructure of Palestinian agrarian society.
The Palestinian refugee camps soon became the ideological and organizational seedbed of violent resistance to the Jewish state. In Israel, the government imposed military rule over the remaining rural population of Palestinians. The military rule, which lasted until 1966, provided the political framework within which Israel created a regime of Jewish domination of Palestinians, their lands, their society and their economy. Palestinian residents needed permits for travel in the country, faced restricted freedoms of political speech and assembly, and were subject to trial in military courts. Palestinian lands were also confiscated by the government, and new Jewish villages and towns were built to create Palestinian enclaves under military rule and isolated from Jewish residential areas.
Following the Six-Day War in June 1967, the Israeli government applied a similar regime of Jewish domination in the West Bank and Gaza. Military rule was imposed on the newly occupied territories to restrict freedoms across all aspects of Palestinian civilian life, Palestinian lands were confiscated, and Jewish settlements were gradually built to isolate Palestinian residential areas and curtail their future expansion. However, the relationship between Israeli domination and Palestinian resistance changed radically. Between 1949 and 1967, the Palestinian population in Israel had been separated from the Palestinian forces of resistance that were located in the refugee camps. After 1967, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip became an arena of direct confrontation between the dominant Israeli regime and the Palestinian resistance. Consequently, the motivation, opportunities and capacities of Palestinian militias to pursue terror increased. And when urban centers of Jewish population within Israel were subject to terror attacks, Israeli security forces retaliated by hunting down terrorists and enhancing its oppressive power over the Palestinian population in the occupied territories.
During the 1980s, vicious cycles of domination and resistance, terror and counter-terror, gradually led to diplomatic negotiations aimed at a comprehensive resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Brokered by the international community, the negotiations culminated in the Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 and in 1995 by Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat. Framed within the received view of the conflict as a territorial dispute between two national communities, the Accords divided the political authority over the West Bank and Gaza between Israel and an interim Palestinian Authority. The latter assumed the responsibility for conducting limited governance of civil affairs in the non-contiguous enclaves of Palestinian towns and villages, while the territory surrounding the enclaves including the Jewish settlements remained under Israeli rule.
Since the Oslo Accords were confined to the national interests of Israel and the PLO, the issue of human rights, which was always the core of the civil conflict between Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian populations, was pushed aside. The divided governance over the West Bank and Gaza did not diminish the power of Jewish domination but merely changed its geopolitical structure. Furthermore, for the first time in the history of the conflict, Jewish domination was implemented in collaboration with an official Palestinian governance. Many Palestinians, and especially leading members of the Hamas movement, considered the Oslo Accords a betrayal of the ideal of a politically free Palestinian homeland. On the other side of the conflict, right-wing Israeli politicians considered the Accords a dangerous appeasement of the PLO, the archenemy of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. Shortly after the Accords were signed, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, Israeli right-wing parties came to power, and Hamas became the leading movement of Palestinian resistance. The vicious cycles of hostilities between Israel and its unwilling Palestinian subjects escalated during the 2000s and 2010s, reaching an unprecedented level of civilian death and destruction during the Gaza war that began in October 2023.
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For a hundred years—from 1920s to 2020s—the civil conflict between Israeli and Palestinian peoples demonstrates a recurring pattern: A superior Jewish economic, political, and military power is exercised through the violation of Palestinians’ human rights, encounters their violent resistance, and then, in an act of self-defense, is unleashed with greater ferocity.
The Oslo Accords were supposed to end the hostile relationship between the two peoples by creating a path toward a comprehensive resolution based on the two-state solution. Other models, such as a single binational-state, or models that involve Jordan as a confederate partner for Palestinian national self-determination, have also been considered as alternative paths to a comprehensive resolution. However, none of these options can succeed unless it solves the civil problem of Jewish domination and Palestinian resistance. Ending this pattern of action and reaction is not a negotiable option for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; rather, it is a necessary condition. Given the asymmetrical nature of the relationship between Jewish domination and Palestinian resistance, the conflict between the two peoples will not end unless the regime of domination is dismantled. The regime was created by Israeli-Jewish society and can only be dismantled through a collective political decision to assume responsibility and commit to respecting Palestinians’ human rights. If Israeli Jews seek to resolve their conflict with the Palestinian people, they should make this decision regardless of the prospects for a diplomatic resolution with Palestinian leaders.
Unequal distribution of rights between Jews and Palestinians pervades Israel’s political culture and is the institutional pillar of Israel’s regime of Jewish domination. A public commitment to end the regime and assume the obligation to recognize Palestinian rights is a years long process of gradual transformation of Israeli politics. But, however radical the transformation may seem, it reflects a return to the historical roots of Zionism in the late 19th century. Jewish nationalism originated in reaction to the swell of nationalist anti-Semitic violations of the human rights of Jews in eastern and central Europe. The moral justification for the Jewish people’s right to a national homeland logically implied that this right was shared with other peoples. The Jewish people’s right was not absolute and, therefore, they could not exercise it by violating the Palestinians’ right.
During the 1920s, equal rights for Jews and Palestinians was advocated by Zionist leaders, notably Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Anticipating Arab leaders’ outright rejection of the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine, Jabotinsky claimed that a robust military defense system—an “Iron Wall”—would need to protect the territorial integrity of the Jewish state. But he insisted that, within its protective wall, the state would be founded upon democratic principles that would grant Palestinians equality before the law and the opportunity to take an active role in its government. The rationale behind Jabotinsky’s Zionist vision is still valid: Affirming Zionism’s inextricable affinity with universal human rights is a necessary condition for a sustainable coexistence of a Jewish state and the Palestinian people in the same geopolitical environment.
Equal distribution of human rights between Jewish and Palestinian populations contributes to their coexistence by ensuring that the quality of life enjoyed by one population is directly related to the quality of life enjoyed by the other. Conversely, undermining the direct relation breeds animosity and violence. These correlations are clearly demonstrated by a comparison between Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza and those who are citizens of Israel. The latter group enjoys considerably higher standards of living—measured by access to healthcare and education services, levels of employment and income, and rates of economic productivity. Rates of violent resistance are accordingly much lower among Israeli Palestinians than among Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.
Israeli Palestinians are less hostile to Israeli Jews because they enjoy more rights and opportunities to promote their well-being—individually and collectively—than Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Nevertheless, Israel’s political system systemically discriminates against Palestinian citizens. Despite their equal voting rights, Israeli Palestinians are systematically excluded from positions of power in government, state administration, and the national economy.
Israel is nominally a democratic and a Jewish state, but a Jewish majoritarian rule that undermines Palestinians’ human rights and quality of life is incompatible with the fundamental values of democracy and Judaism. Israel’s current government has it on a path of becoming a pariah state in the international community of liberal-democratic countries. A growing number of Jews who live in these countries decline to regard today’s Israel as the homeland of world Jewry.
It is, therefore, in Israel’s national interest to invest in the economic and political development of Palestinian communities in Israel and, more urgently, in the West Bank and Gaza, in accordance with its obligation to respect Palestinians’ human rights. Israel’s national security interests should be redefined to include policies that support the rise of a Palestinian leadership that aims to strengthen the Palestinian economy and civil society rather than organize acts of hostility against Israeli Jewish civilians. An enduring human rights framework of Jewish-Palestinian coexistence will delegitimize and marginalize extreme Jewish and Palestinian groups that aim to undermine peaceful coexistence and, thereby, diminish the capacity of radicalized actors to create terror organizations.
As the prospects for a comprehensive resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seem highly uncertain, Israel’s commitment to transform its national interests in alignment with human rights principles is more urgent than ever. Israel has no other means to deescalate the conflict, create more favorable conditions for future negotiations with Palestinian leaders, and secure the support it needs from liberal democratic countries and their Jewish communities.
[I am grateful to Alan Hartman for his editorial assistance.]
