There’s an old adage that holds that if you think you understand the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, someone hasn’t explained it to you properly. So how may it be explained properly? It’s a vital question, for if we fail to understand the essentials of the conflict, we can hardly expect to resolve it.
Of the plentiful explanations on offer, it’s probably fair to say that more than a few are simplistic, self-serving or heavily one-sided. Many reduce the conflict to a struggle between good and evil – which is which depends of course on which side you’re on. Variations on this theme portray it as a battle between modernity and feudalism, or democracy and dictatorship, or peace-seeking innocents and terrorism, or alternatively between a native population and foreign usurpers, or freedom fighters and the forces of imperialism.
Some view the conflict as a clash between David and Goliath, where the Israeli David is surrounded by the colossal Arab and Muslim Goliath or, contrariwise, the Palestinian David is dominated by the all-powerful Israeli Goliath. Others depict it as essentially a religious dispute between Islam and Judaism, or a historical “racial” struggle between Arabs and Jews, sometimes garnished by grotesque anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim images and stereotypes.
An influential faction of the evangelical Christian right in the U.S. sees the divine will as the principal driving force, whereby the “second coming” is dependent on all Jews moving to Israel and colonizing “Judea and Samaria,” commonly known as the West Bank. While ostensibly ardently pro-Zionist, this intensely ideological worldview is ultimately deeply anti- Semitic in that, at the moment of “rapture,” Jews would have to choose between converting to the true faith of Christianity or perishing forthwith.
Prominent adherents to this doctrine include the former U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence and the former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Former U.S. President Donald Trump relied heavily on the evangelical constituency – estimated to be around twenty-five per cent of the U.S. population – for political and financial support. (The Jewish population, by contrast, is roughly two per cent.)
The Jewish religious Zionist movement, grounded in the conviction that God gave the land to the Jewish people, has also viewed the resumption of Jewish sovereignty over the sacred land and the return of Jews to its soil as a holy duty and the materialization of a biblical prophecy, which will hasten the coming of the long-yearned-for messiah – but minus the genocide of the Jews!
Against this, some more orthodox Jewish sects consider Zionism to be a heresy, since the premature “ingathering of the exiles” and resumption of Jewish sovereignty sinfully pre-empt, and therefore may delay, the imminent coming of the messiah. Historically, the orthodox arrows were pointed mainly at the leftist secular Zionist movement which pioneered the Jewish state but is today more marginalized
Another worldview sees the conflict exclusively or primarily through an anti-colonialist lens, portraying Israel, from its inception, as a settler-colonial apartheid state. Almost everything, including the conflict’s complex history, is then folded into this narrative, bizarrely casting Jews who were fleeing a brutally anti-Semitic Europe for their lives as agents of European colonialism.
Former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert meets with Palestinian Authority President MahmoudAbbas in Jerusalem, November 2008 (Photo credit Moshe Milner GPO/Flash 90)
In this sense, their situation does not bear comparison with France’s colonization of Algeria, or Belgium’s of its Congo, or indeed Britain’s of South Africa. Jews were not fleeing to just anywhere, let alone for the glorification of an imperial power but, in their eyes, after two-thousand turbulent years, they were returning to the cradle of their civilization, as attested not just in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur’an but, more pertinently, in the hearts and prayers of a shattered people seeking to rebuild itself. Mooted alternatives such as Uganda, Argentina, Birobidzhan, and Madagascar, lacked any intuitive appeal.
A similarly one-dimensional worldview processes almost everything through the lens of relentless anti-Semitism, often portrayed as “the oldest hatred.” Palestinian resistance to dispossession, dispersion and exile is thereby not perceived as an authentic response to the catastrophe they suffered, and continue to suffer, but a knee-jerk anti-Jewish reflex. The Arabs and Muslims in general and the Palestinians in particular are viewed, in this frame, as the latest incarnations, in a long line of incarnations, of the eternal Jew-hater.
It is worth noting that both entrenched anti-Semitism and duplicitous colonialism did indeed play a central role in provoking the Arab-Jewish quarrel. This was in the form of centuries of virulent Christian European anti-Semitism at home and rampant European imperialism abroad which, between them, fomented Jewish nationalism, or Zionism, and Arab – and by extension Palestinian – nationalism.
This aside, common to all the aforementioned explanations is that they rely, to a greater or lesser extent, on pre-fabricated frameworks parachuted in from the outside – or in some cases from above. Accordingly, they tend to tell us more about the predilections of the explainers than about the conflict itself even if one or two of them throw some light on certain aspects of the conflict.
Viewing the Conflict through the Eyes of the Protagonists
In trying to make sense of it all myself decades ago, I eventually came to the realization that an essential first step was to view the conflict as the principal protagonists themselves view it, through their eyes, subjectively, each in turn, empathetically, with all the emotions and passions, and even distortions and fabrications, left in, rather than disregarded in the name of a phony objectivity.
I originally elaborated this approach in a Fabian pamphlet published in January 1973i when, after extensive research and travel, I endeavoured to sketch the two narratives. Here is a small flavour of each of them, filtered first through an Israeli-Jewish lens and then through a Palestinian-Arab lens.
The underlying case for a Jewish homeland was vividly, if inadvertently, put by Lord Byron as far back as 1815, when some of the worst tragedies to strike the Jewish people, including the Tsarist pogroms and the Nazi Holocaust, still lay a distance ahead. In one of his poems, Byron wrote: “The wild dove hath her nest, the fox his cave, mankind their country, Israel but the grave!” By “Israel,” of course, he meant the Jewish people.
Once the Zionist movement eventually came into being, however, several decades later, all sorts of conspiracy theories and malevolent intent were fastened onto it by its detractors, some of it giving off a familiar anti-Semitic whiff, reminiscent of that which played the decisive role in winning so many Jews and others to the Zionist cause in the first place.
Conceptually, Zionism was a distressed people’s proud, if defiant, response to centuries of contempt, humiliation, discrimination, expulsion, and periodic bouts of murderous oppression. The Israeli state was the would-be phoenix to rise from the Jewish embers still smouldering in the blood-soaked earth of another continent. The underlying purpose was the affirmative one of achieving safety and justice for a tormented people, not the negative one of doing damage to another people.
Yet, in the attempt to rectify the enduring Jewish calamity, the reality – as we switch from one lens to the other – is that
Damage was inflicted on another people, on the hapless Palestinian Arabs who paid a heavy price and are still paying it. The Palestinians, like all colonized peoples, had long yearned for their independence free from foreign rule, only to find that, in their case, another people, mostly from foreign parts, was simultaneously laying claim to the same land. Naturally, the Palestinians resisted. Any people would have resisted.
The Palestinians, in like fashion, did not set out to damage anyone but aspired to what they felt was rightfully theirs. Displaced, dispossessed and deserted, they were among the principal losers in the geopolitical lottery that followed the horrors of the Second World War. Their original felony was, in essence, to be in the way of another distressed people’s frantic survival strategy, fuelled by an industrial genocide for which the Palestinians’ bore no responsibility.
Virtually everything that has happened since then is in some way a consequence of all of this.
Viewing the conflict through the respective lenses has the unique benefit of enabling the absolute minimum core aspirations of both peoples to be probed and distilled. In both cases, they may be reduced to self-determination in a state of their own in the country that each claims as its own. Logically, this gives rise to only one type of solution and explains why, decades on, the two-state paradigm continues by far to be the front runner.
So, if the two-state solution is, in essence, the only plausible solution, the burning question is: is it still feasible, mindful in particular of the extensive Israeli settlement project in occupied Palestinian territory captured in June 1967?
There are an estimated 700,000 Israeli settlers now living in roughly 160 settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, all of which are regarded as illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this if you accept that, in reality, the alternative to a state for each people is perpetual conflict – with an alarming propensity for its toxins to seep into other parts of the globe – the answer has to be that the international community, all of us, must find a way to make it feasible. I will come back to how this may be tackled after a brief look at the modern evolution of the paradigm.
The Growth of Support for a Two-State Solution
In the aftermath of the 1967 war, a small number of individual Palestinians, Israelis and internationals began to advocate the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, but it took many years to catch on. By the mid-1970s, the PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, had been won over. In 1988, the organization formally adopted this position and in 1993, under the Oslo Accord, it officially recognized Israel which, in turn, recognized the PLO, which previously it had outlawed as a “terrorist gang.”
Among the people as a whole, support steadily grew, peaking at over 70 percent of both Palestinians and Israelis in 2002. Three Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, edged towards deals structured around two states. In March 2002, the Security Council finally adopted the two-state goal as official UN policy and the Arab League simultaneously launched the Arab Peace Initiative at its Beirut summit conference, predicated on two states. It would be absurd – would it not? – to start all over again at this crucial time with a different, untested, idea.
For years, the opportunity was allowed to slip by. But complacency was given a rude shock with Hamas’s horrific attack on 7 October, 2023, and the Israeli government’s horrendous response, which have shattered the illusion that the conflict could be managed, that the Palestinians could be sidelined and that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories it had captured in 1967 could continue indefinitely. Desperate now for an end to the conflict, one country after another has publicly recommitted in recent months to the two-state solution as the only way to achieve it.
But one government that is resolutely opposed is the ruling Israeli coalition, comprising a bizarre assortment of strictly orthodox hardliners and ultranationalist fanatics, strung together to keep Prime Minister Netanyahu, who faces domestic charges of bribery, corruption and fraud, out of jail. It is, in my view, an aberrant government that is unlikely to have a long life. Like Hamas, its goal is a one-state future from the river to the sea. The difference is that its vision is a Jewish state, while Hamas envisages an Islamic state. This said, Hamas has periodically indicated, including in recent times, that it may be prepared to accept a settlement based on a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders.
But in the light of the many changes on the ground over the past 57 years, the shape and character of the two-state idea needs an injection of fresh thinking. A more apt model today than the sharp binary one of “us here and them there” may be the 1993 division of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This was a peaceful transition based not on enforced population transfers, but on mutually agreed jurisdictions, with open borders and free movement. It was about political sovereignty over demarcated territory, not ethnic purity. There may be a supplementary need in the Israel-Palestine case for equitable land swaps, an idea which had been suggested during the Camp David talks between Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak in 2000, sponsored by President Clinton, and later included in the Arab Peace Initiative. This could be coupled with time-limited compensation for recalcitrant Israeli settlers in the West Bank plus a firm deadline for the withdrawal of the army – the protector of the settlers – from the territory.
The Confederation Idea
An idea that is attracting growing support and takes account of both peoples’ affinity to the whole land, is an Israeli-Palestinian confederation broadly analogous to the European Union (EU). Two grass-roots proposals of this type, jointly spearheaded by Israelis and Palestinians, propose that all inhabitants may live anywhere in the confederation but may only vote in the state of which they are a citizen.
Their main weakness, as I see it, is that they don’t include Jordan, without which I doubt their feasibility or sustainability. West Bank Palestinians in particular have close familial, cultural and social links with Jordan, of which they were once a part, and which already has a majority Palestinian population. It is hard to imagine Palestinians wanting to further distance themselves from the Arab state to their east while cementing their ties with an avowedly non-Arab state to their west, even under a dubious assumption of political and economic parity.
A more credible option may be an Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian confederation, broadly along the lines of Benelux (Belgium-Netherlands- Luxembourg). But, in either case, the first step would have to be Palestinian independence, as a confederation is a voluntary arrangement between two or more states. Otherwise, given the huge power imbalance, it would be either an Israeli hegemonic state or an Israeli-Jordanian condominium over Palestine masquerading as a three-state confederation.
What is Needed Now
So, what is imperative now is a concerted, international effort to be directed, without diversion or delay, towards the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The more countries and other institutions that bang on about it the better, with the aim of stimulating new political currents in Israel and forcing two states firmly back onto the Israeli political agenda in good time for the next Israeli election. In the last few rounds, the Palestinian question played no role. In the next election, it will again be dominant. By then, it must be abundantly clear that the world will not tolerate a future that does not include the Palestinians having their own state alongside Israel. Every Israeli voter will need to know and process this.
A major carrot for Israel could be the prospect of recognition by and full diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, the most influential player in the Arab world. The Saudis have repeatedly stated that Palestinian statehood would have to be part of any deal. If they stick to their guns, this could be a game-changer. It is important they do not surrender this concession cheaply.
Of all countries, the UK has a special historic responsibility in this area as the author of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and as the mandate authority over Palestine from 1922 to 1948. The UK government should be pressed to join the more than 140 other governments who have already recognized the state of Palestine and to persuade the U.S. to drop its veto on full Palestinian membership of the UN. I was told by two Labour foreign ministers in 1975 that they agreed that Palestinian statehood should be recognized but then was not the right time, a slogan still parroted by their ministerial counterparts today. But if not now – some 49 years later – then when exactly?
Finally, this may be an opportune time to revive a slogan proposed in April 2014, by the Palestinian thinker Sam Bahour and myself along the lines of “a Palestinian state now or equal rights until there is a solution.”ii Under this principle, equal individual rights in the occupied West Bank would replace the status quo of full citizenship rights for one people and almost no rights for the other people as the default position, pending the realization of a Palestinian state (or indeed any other proposed solution). We are not naïve enough to believe that the Israeli government would accept this proposal but, by publicly presenting Israel with a sharp choice, it is another way of focusing the issues and bringing pressure to bear, whether external or internal.
The aim would be to build a momentum around the slogan, trigger a bandwagon effect and turn the slogan into firm international policy. It could herald a new, more promising, era and lift us all out of the defeatist mood of doom and gloom.
This article is an extended version of a presentation to the Barbican International Affairs Discussion Group in Central London on 16 May 2024
Dr. Tony Klug has written extensively on Israeli-Palestinianissues and has been advocating an independent sovereignPalestinian state alongside Israel since the early 1970s.He has been a special advisor on the Middle East to theOxford Research Group and a consultant to the PalestineStrategy Group and the Israel Strategic Forum.