Why resolving the Palestine-Israel conflict requires more than grandstanding
By Tiko Okoye
In the first of a two-part series, I’ll delve a little deeper into the complicated issues bearing on the Palestine-Israel saga as a prelude to outlining some ‘normal’ (or known-knowns) and innovative (or known-unknowns) for bringing a win-win full closure on the world’s longest-running conflict.
To be quite candid, and to call a spade a spade, there’s nothing that happened – or is happening – in the current cycle of mayhem, violence and senseless killings in the Gaza Strip in particular and Palestine in general that’s new. The more things seemed to change, the more they remained the same, with the intensity and the deadliness of the ensuing brickbats being the only noticeable difference.
After the defeat of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire in WWI, the League Of Nations – the forerunner of the United Nations – placed Palestine under the military and administrative control of Great Britain (known as the British Mandatory Palestine or BMP for short). The Balfour Declaration of 1917 aka “the Mandate for Palestine,” as approved by the League of Nations, included a “binding obligation for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
The immediate effect was to ratchet up early tensions after waves of Jewish immigration. The horrendous slaughter of about six million Jews in Nazi Germany during WWII made the quest to find a safe haven for Jews of greater urgency and intensity. But as civil strife and violence between Jewish and Arab communities of the Palestinian territories intensified, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly passed Resolution 181 on 29 November 1947 calling for the partition of the Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab, with an international, UN-run body specifically established to administer Jerusalem.
The UN Partition Plan never saw the light of day due to all manner of centripetal and centrifugal push-backs by major state and non-state actors. The Palestine-Israel sectarian conflict has its main tap root in the varying claims on land possession by the respective camps. While Jews – adherents of Judaism – regard the BMP as their non-negotiable ancestral homeland, the Pan-Arab Movement see it as historically and currently belonging to Arab Palestinians who are overwhelmingly Muslims.
Nations, groups and individuals have sided – and continue to largely side – with one camp or the other, depending on religious affiliations (accident of birth or domicile) and which version of the Creation Story they believe. But one thing for sure is that if we are to reckon by who originally owned territories controlled by sovereign nations in the modern age, countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Russia, the USA and a large swathe of South America would simply vamoose into thin air!
Equally worth noting is that the phrase in the Balfour Declaration that called for the “establishment in Palestine a national homeland for the Jewish people.” This presupposes that the returning Jews were to be placed in a part of a territory belonging to Palestinians. It’s also pertinent to note at this juncture that as many as 66 years before the creation of Israel, Jews were purchasing tracts of land in Palestine from their Arab owners for establishing Jewish settlements and engaging in agricultural production. Make of this whatever you will.
The snowballing tensions in the area finally came to a head when the British Mandate over Palestine expired on 14 May 1948. At the stroke of midnight, Jewish leaders led by David Ben-Gurion unilaterally declared the establishment of the State of Israel, and just as they did in the latter case of Rhodesia, the foxy British diplomats notoriously ran with the hare even as they were simultaneously galloping with the hound. But the entire Middle East is yet to enjoy a single night of blissful sleep ever since then.
The first of several wars between Israel and the broader Arab League coalition started same year. Egypt (backed by Saudi Arabian, Sudanese and Yemeni troops), Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria attacked Israeli positions in the BMP. It lasted just under 12 months, and by the time it ended in 1949, about 750,000 Palestinians were forced to flee massacres, mass expulsions and forcible transfers in an exodus they call nakba (Arabic for ‘catastrophe’), as the new nation of Israel was being birthed.
The land area previously designated and known as Palestine was subsequently carved into three parts: Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Quite interestingly, the victorious Israelis not only retained the territory envisioned for it by the UN, but it also captured and occupied some of the areas designated for the imagined Palestinian state as well as West Jerusalem. And the scramble for Palestine then got curiouser and curiouser.
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Egypt annexed the Gaza Strip while Jordan annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including the Old City and its historic Jewish quarter. The irony is that nearly all the major Arab combatants, except Iraq and Syria, have since signed a formal treaty or peace agreement with Israel, seemingly leaving Palestinians out in the cold!
The obvious divide-and-rule rapprochement initiated by Israel with several Arab Sunni Muslim states like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and fortified three years later by the Abraham Accords, in a bid to frontally take on Iran, was seen by many as sounding the death knell of a negotiated good-faith resolution to the Arab-Israel conflict. It is generally believed that the October 7 attacks by Hamas militant inside Israel were teleguided by Tehran (Iran is a competing Shiite Muslim state) to derail the evolving Israeli normalisation with the Gulf States.
The 1967 Six-Day War saw the victorious Israeli military gaining territorial control over Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt; the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan; and the Golan Heights from Syria. Israelis call the West Bank Samaria, and anyone with an understanding of the nature of the relationship between Jews and Samaritans as depicted in the Old Testament (or the Jewish Talmud) would readily appreciate its highly combustible nature.
It would also help explain why, by using the offensive slang, ultra-Orthodox and far-right parties that prop up Netanyahu’s equally conservative Likud Party, consider Palestinians vermin and treated as such, despite their own maltreatment in pre-WWII Europe. Upon signing the Peace Agreement with Egypt in 1979, Israel abolished the military governance system in Gaza and the West Bank, in favour of Israeli Civil Administration.
In 1987, hundreds of thousands of frustrated Palestinian youths embarked on a prolonged string of protests and riots called the First Intifada. The 1993 Oslo I Accords mediated the uprising, establishing a framework for the Palestinian National Authority to assume control of Gaza and the West Bank from Israel. The 1995 Oslo II Accords included proposals for a two-state solution, which involves the creation of an independent Palestinian state existing side by side with Israel.
The two-state proposal initially enjoyed tremendous public support in both Israel and the Palestinian territories. But resolving the ‘final status issues’ has proven to be a bridge too far to cross. These include the status of Jerusalem, international borders, Israeli settlements, security, water rights/sharing, Palestinian freedom of movement and the Palestinian right of return. The Jordanian royal family – the Hashemites – are supposedly responsible for custodianship over Muslim and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem but this is a matter for discussion on another day.
Given the asymmetrical risk-reward paradigm, no sitting or aspiring political leader in Israel would dare show any form of public support for most of these outstanding issues, more so a cabinet of hawks led by Netanyahu that’s bent on implementing policies designed to derail the two-state solution and keep Palestinians in perpetual servitude.
The deep mutual distrust and reciprocal scepticism about the other party’s commitment to upholding obligations in an eventual bilateral agreement have made it very difficult to resolve these thorny issues, but unless they are adequately resolved, the area would continue to constitute a maelstrom.
UN General Assembly Resolution (UNGAR) 194 resolved that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return.” UNGAR 3236 also affirmed “the inalienable right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return.” The all-powerful UN Security Council followed up with its Resolution 242 – which the USA surprisingly assented to – affirming “the necessity for achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem.”
But despite all these resolutions, and more than 70 years on, more than two million denationalised or stateless Palestinians have been systematically denied of their right to return and are still living in squalid refugee camps in Lebanon and North Africa, principally the USA consistently uses its veto power to prevent Israel from suffering any consequences arising from failure to comply with UN Resolutions.
As a matter of fact, all members of the Hamas leadership council were born in these squalid refugee camps hence they tend to be more militant and less forbearing than their compatriots in the Palestinian National Authority who administer the West Bank.
- To be continued…
