Chapter 1: The Reemergence of One-Statism

"But over the past few years, Palestinian Arab intellectuals linked to the mainstream Fatah Party and living in the West have also begun talking openly about the desirability, or at least the inevitability, of a one-state solution—one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, inhabited by both Arabs and Jews. This marks a break from their at least superficial espousal during the1990s of a two-state solution and a reversion to the openly enunciated policy of the Fatah and Palestinian Liberation Organization in the 1960s and 1970s

...For many of these “Western” Palestinians, this represents nothing more than an emergence from the closet. In fact, these current one-staters never really identified with the Fatah’s professed advocacy in the 1990s of a two-state solution, with a partitioned Palestine divided into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab, living side by side in peaceful coexistence. Like their cousins in Palestine, both inside Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and in the main concentrations of the Palestinian diaspora—Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria—they had always believed, and continue to believe, that all of Palestine belongs to them, the Palestinian Arabs; that a Jewish state in any part of Palestine is illegitimate and immoral; and that, in the fullness of time, the whole country will eventually revert to Arab sovereignty. But the Western—American and European—governmental two-state mantra and the PLO’s apparent adoption of two-statism in the late 1980s and early 1990s forced them underground or into a duplicitous advocacy of, or reluctant acquiescence in, the two-state formula."

"A last group of one-staters, according to Khalidi’s definitions, are those who advocate “a binational approach . . . [that] would take into account . . . [the] two national realities within the framework of one state.” Khalidi acknowledges that all the one-state approaches have not taken real account of the “stone wall” of Israeli and American rejection of the dismantling of the Jewish state and run counter to the international warrant of legitimacy for Jewish statehood (and Palestinian Arab statehood) issued by the UN General Assembly partition resolution (number 181) of November 1947.2

The precipitants to this newfound candor about the desirability, or at least the inevitability, of a single state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River (and often the assertion of “inevitability” is mere camouflage for the propagation of its “desirability”) are three: PLO chairman Yasser Arafat’s rejection of the two-state solution proposed in July and again in December 2000 by Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and US president Bill Clinton, his rejection providing political impetus and cover for the in-principle subversion of two-statism; the rise of the openly rejectionist, one-statist Hamas to primacy in Palestinian Arab politics, as epitomized in the movement’s general election victory of January 2006 and its violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in 5"

**Judt's article and criticism

"In 2003 Judt, who has never worked academically on the Middle East, published “Israel: The Alternative” in the New York Review of Books.

...Judt’s arguments were fairly simple: the idea of Israel, as of ethnic nationalism in general, had (partly due to the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s) lost traction and was no longer adequate to underpin the continued existence of, and support for, a Jewish state.

...The only other alternative was for Israel to withdraw from the territories and facilitate the emergence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip of a Palestinian Arab state, which would allow Israel to remain both (largely) Jewish and democratic. But this could not and would not happen, said Judt; it is “too late for that.” There were “too many settlements [and] too many Jewish settlers.” The 400,000 Israeli settlers implanted in the territories since 1967 will not agree to live in a Palestinian Arab state, and no Israeli leader will have the guts, or political power, to forcibly 8 uproot, abandon, or crush them, as David Ben-Gurion back in 1948 had crushed the dissident right-wing Jewish militias

... So what was the solution? According to Judt, it was “a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians.”"

"Omer Bartov, a historian of Israeli origin at Brown University, wrote that the author was “strangely wrong-headed” and seemed to be writing from the perspective of “a café in Paris or London.” Compared to which nation state was “Israel an anachronism”? Compared to Syria or Saudi Arabia or Iran? And if the comparison was to modern Europe, surely Poland and Serbia were equally anachronistic because they, too, are “based on a unity . . . of nation and state.” Judt seemed to prefer, for Israel/Palestine, the model of interwar Poland, with its diverse populations, “rife with ethnic conflict and anti-Semitism.” Or 10 Yugoslavia, “which [recently] broke up in a sea of blood.” For Judt, these (unsuccessful) multiethnic models apparently were preferable to (peaceful) uniethnic nation-states.

In any event, according to Bartov, the binational model for Israel/Palestine is “absurd” because neither Israeli Jews nor Palestinian Arabs want it. Both groups seek to live in a country inhabited and governed by their own. On the Arab side, the Islamic fundamentalists regard shared sovereignty with the Jews as “anathema,” and the moderates know that “a binational state . . . would spell civil war and bloodshed on an unprecedented scale.”"

"Michael Walzer, a political thinker at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, took the ideological bull by the horns when he wrote: “Ridding the world of the nation-state is an interesting, if not a new, idea. But why start with Israel? Why not with France? . . . The French led the way into this parochial political structure that, in violation of all the tenets of advanced opinion, privileged a particular people, history, and language . . . Or [with] the Germans, or the Swedes, or the Bulgarians . . . all of whom have enjoyed these ‘privileges’ much longer than the Jews.”

But “the real problem” with Judt’s proposal, wrote Walzer, was that he was not really pointing the way to a binational state at all but “would simply replace one nation-state with another,” for in “a decade or so” there would be more Arabs than Jews between 11 the Jordan and Mediterranean, so what would emerge from Judt’s “binational” polity would be another Arab nation-state. “This is the explicit goal of Palestinian nationalists, and the recent history of the movement hardly suggests that they have given it up.”

Walzer wrote that Judt would have the citizens of his binational state rely on “international forces” for their security. But what people in their right mind would rely on such forces for their security?"

"Wieseltier pointed out that Judt failed to describe the character of his desired polity, which would quickly devolve into an Arab-majority state with a diminishing Jewish minority. It would be a terrorist state, not a democracy (look at the other Arab states, look at Gaza), in which an ethnic cleansing of the Jews would be more than likely. “Why is Greater Palestine preferable to Israel?” asked Wieseltier. “The moral calculus of Judt’s proposal is 12  baffling . . . Is the restoration of Jewish homelessness, and the vindication of Palestinian radicalism, and the intensification of inter-communal violence, really preferable to the creation of two states for two nations? Only if good people, thoughtful people, liberal people, do not keep their heads. But these are deranging days.”"

Aftermath

"Judt’s response to these criticisms was at once provocative and faltering. He kicked off by postulating that “the solution to the crisis in the Middle East lies in Washington. On this there is widespread agreement.” (I would say that, on the contrary—and on this there really is “widespread agreement,” at least among those who know something about the Middle East—the United States is completely powerless to effect a change in the rejectionist position of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian majority that supports them, and it is only marginally influential with regard to Israeli policies on the basic issues. American [and European] aid cut-offs during the past two years have left no impression at all on the policy of the Islamic fundamentalists, and Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in summer 2005 had almost nothing to do with American pressure and almost everything to do with Ariel Sharon’s character and calculations and Israeli self-interest.)"

"The Judt article, the telling ripostes notwithstanding, spawned a host of articles and books advocating the one-state solution. Clearly he had opened the floodgates, tapping into a strong current in the Arab world and in the Left and Right in the West that sought, simply, not Israel’s reform or the reform of its policies, but its disappearance, however affected and however camouflaged. As to be expected, most of these publications were written by anti-Zionist, not to say anti-Semitic, Arabs and their Western supporters, though some professed to be doing this also for the sake of Israel’s Jews."

"Daniel Lazar, a constitutional scholar and journalist, argued in the Nation in November 2003 that, contrary to Theodor Herzl’s founding vision, Israel is beset by war; is, with “what little democracy it still has,” “increasingly abnormal” among the democracies, which are steadily becoming multiethnic; is losing its Jewish population to emigration while Diaspora Jewry is flourishing; and is “one of the more dangerous places on earth in which to be Jewish” (apparently a reference to the actions and intentions of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran). And the world’s “Jewish problem” has only been ag-gravated by Israel, as anti-Semitism burgeons in the Islamic world and, it would seem, in Europe and the United States as well wholly or partly in reaction to Israeli actions. Lazar favored a binational state “based on internationalism, secularism, and democracy.” How exactly Palestine’s Arabs would be persuaded to adopt “internationalism, secularism, and democracy”—for which they, like their brothers and sisters outside Palestine, are not famous—was not explained."

**Omar Barghouti

"Omar Barghouti published a piece entitled “Relative Humanity: The Fundamental Obstacle to a One-State Solution in Historic Palestine.” Barghouti, an independent Palestinian analyst and doctoral student, asserted that “the two-state solution . . . is really dead. Good riddance!” and that “we are witnessing the rapid demise of Zionism, and nothing can be done to save it.” What remains is a one-state solution or, as he put it, “a secular democratic state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, anchored in equal humanity and, accordingly, equal rights.” But to this rosy outcome he quickly added a corollary: “the new Palestine” “first and foremost” must “facilitate the return of . . . all the Palestinian refugees.”5 Thus, at a stroke, he assured that the “binational” state he was proposing would instantly become a state with an overwhelming Arab majority."

**Virginia Tilley

"The rest of the article follows the selfsame logic. “The two-state solution . . . is an idea, and a possibility, whose time has passed.” This is so because Israel’s unrelenting settlement drive has made the unraveling of Palestine/Israel into two states impracticable—and “there can be no reversal of the settlement policy,” much as the expulsion of the country’s Arab population is unthinkable. So only a one-state solution, with Jews and Arabs coexisting, remains.

But Tilley admitted that for the Jews, “the obstacles” of converting their country into a binational entity were “clearly massive [and] . . . profound.” Moreover, many Palestinian Arabs might have a problem with a “democratic secular state”—after all, “many now favor” an “ethno-religious state based on notions of Arab and/or Muslim indigeneity of the kind taking hold in Gaza” (a polite way of describing a totalitarian fundamentalist Islamic Arab polity). Still, a one-state solution it must be because of irreversible Jewish Israeli expansionist and racist actions. Israel’s complete and successful pullout from the Gaza Strip in summer 2005, despite stiff opposition from Israel’s settler movement— concretely and loudly demonstrating the settlement enterprise’s reversibility—must have come as a rude shock to Tilley."

**Ali Abunimah - Cocreator of Electronic Intifada

"Giving history a series of mighty, distorting twists, Abunimah implied, ostensibly on the basis of his refugee grandparents’ and parents’ recollections, that there had been “peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Palestine before the creation of Israel”—and, if men and women of goodwill got together, this peaceful coexistence could be re-created.7

This recollected idyll is a whopper of truly gargantuan dimensions. Of course, on the individual plane, there were, here and there—in Jerusalem, in Haifa, perhaps in Jaffa—Arabs and Jews who interacted commercially and, in small numbers and on some level, even socially. But in general, British Mandate Palestine, 18 between 1918 and 1948, was characterized by two separate societies that did not interact or live “together,” except in the sense of sharing the same air and complaining about the same, or different, British officials.

And the truth is that since the fin de siècle, Palestine Arabs had been murdering Jews on a regular basis for ethnic or quasinationalist reasons. In 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936–1939, Arab mobs had assaulted Jewish settlements and neighborhoods in a succession of ever-larger pogroms. Had the presence and actions of the occupying British army not contained them, such bouts of violence would no doubt have been more frequent, widespread, and lethal.

At one point Abunimah casually mentioned one problematic incident—the unprovoked murder by an “Arab mob” of sixty-seven defenseless Orthodox Jews in Hebron in 1929. But he then dismissed the implications by arguing that, ever since, Israelis have made too much of the matter and would do better to focus on the fact that “most of the city’s [seven-hundred-strong] Jewish community were saved because Muslim neighbors protected them.”8 In fact, most were rescued by British police intervention and by the fact that many Jews successfully fended off their assailants for long hours—though, to be sure, Arab neighbors did save several families."

**Moral and practical question/solution

"On one level, the debate is simply about Israel—whether it should or should not exist. This is both a moral and a practical question. The first, moral part, can be subdivided: Should a Jewish state have been established in the first place? And, once coming into existence, should it—now sixty years old and with some 20 5.4 million Jewish inhabitants—be dissolved or disestablished, at whatever cost that will entail (first to Israel’s Jews and the Jewish people, and then to anyone else)?

With regard to the establishment of the state in 1947–1949, a prominent component in the moral equation inevitably will be at what cost this establishment was affected in terms of Palestinian Arab displacement and suffering. A subcomponent will also have to be: Who was to blame for this displacement and suffering, the Zionist movement and the Jews, the Palestinian Arabs themselves, or some combination of the two?

The moral questions, regarding both the rectitude of what happened in 1947–1949 and the proposed dissolution of the Jewish state in our time, are complex and ultimately insoluble; the “answers” inevitably will be subjective in the extreme. But the problem of Palestine/Israel and its solution, in present circumstances, is also a practical question. It is a political science question relating to the best possible ordering of human society or two human societies in a given space, taking account of demographics, geography, politics, economic realities, cultural matters, and so on. The question boils down to the best possible con-catenation of demography and politics for the peoples living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean."

"More saliently, there are three realistic basic formulas for a one-state solution: a state with joint Arab-Jewish sovereignty, based on some form of power-sharing by the two ethnic collectives ( à la Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland) or on individual rights without any collective ethnic entities and entitlements (à la postapartheid South Africa), both of which can be defined as forms of binationalism; a state ruled by Jews, with or without a large or small Arab minority; and a state ruled by Muslim Arabs, with or without a large or small Jewish minority. I write Muslim Arabs because the proportion of Christians among Palestine’s Arabs has been declining steadily since 1947, when they were close to 10 percent of the population. Today less than 5 percent of Palestinian Arabs are Christians, and their numbers continue to diminish through emigration to the West (mainly from the West Bank—Bethlehem is now a Muslim-majority town). The proportion of Christians among Israel’s Arab citizens is higher, but given far higher Muslim birthrates and a measure of Christian emigration, the proportion of Christians in Israel’s Arab minority is also declining. So the Christian element in Israel/Palestine is negligible and politically irrelevant.

Palestinian Arab nationalists, of both the Fatah and Hamas 24 varieties, like to speak of Palestine’s “Muslims and Christians” when selling their case in the West—but this is a propagandistic device, wholly lacking in substance and sincerity (after all, the main reason Christian Arabs have been leaving the Holy Land has been fear of the Muslims and of future Muslim excesses, which is also the cause of the emigration of Iraq’s Christians). Many Christian Arabs from the 1920s through the 1940s would have been happy had British rule continued indefinitely, and some may have preferred Jewish to Muslim rule following the Mandate.

I will look at this more extensively later, but for now let me point out that the two simplest and most logical variants of a one-state solution are an Arab state without any troublesome Jews and a Jewish state without any troublesome Arabs. We are talking here about expulsion. The idea of an ethnically cleansed Palestine was raised consistently by the Palestinian Arab national movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, and there are good grounds to believe that that was the aim of the Arab onslaught on the Yishuv—the Jewish community in Palestine—in 1947–1948 (or, at least, that that would have been its outcome had the onslaught been successful). From the other side, the idea of a partial or full expulsion of Palestine’s Arabs by the Jews was discussed and supported by much of the Zionist leadership in the late 1930s and the 1940s, against the backdrop of the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939 and the Holocaust, and in some way this thinking contributed to the creation of the Arab refugee problem in 1948

So much, for the moment, for possible one-state solutions. Let us turn to two-state solutions. One two-state solution, hark-ing back to the Jewish Agency–Transjordanian agreement of 1946–1947, would see a two-state partition of Palestine between the Jews and the Kingdom of Jordan, based on a Jewish-Israeli state in western Palestine and a Jordan–West Bank state—a “Greater Jordan”—ruled from Amman to its east.11 Thus the partition—as also envisaged in the Israeli Allon Plan of the late 1960s—would see a two-state solution based on an Israeli-Jordanian division of the country, with no Palestinian Arab state and with most Palestinian Arabs living in the Jordanian-incorporated part of Palestine."

Chapter 2: The History of One-State and Two-State Solutions

**The Land

"When looking at past attitudes toward possible one-state and two-state solutions to the Palestine/Israel problem, it is well to remember that there was a twenty-five- to fifty-year hiatus between the two groups, the Jews and the Palestine Arabs, in the emergence of modern national consciousness and the development of their national movements. This hiatus, or, rather, what underlay it—differences in mentality and levels of cultural, social, economic, and political development—was in part responsible for the difference in attitudes toward the evolving problem and its possible solution."

"by the end of World War II, most of world Jewry—that which remained after the Holocaust—much of Western public opinion, and most Western governments came to support the establishment of a Jewish state.

National consciousness began to develop among the Palestine Arab elite only in the early 1920s, shortly after it had taken root among the notables of Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, and Beirut. Before the end of World War I, most Arabs in Palestine defined themselves as Ottoman subjects; as Arabs—meaning, they belonged to that large, amorphous Arabic-speaking collective, and territory, lying between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean, whose seventh-century origins lay in the Arabian Peninsula; as Muslims; as inhabitants of this or that village or town and members of this or that clan; and, vaguely, as inhabitants of “Syria,” an Ottoman imperial province that traditionally included Palestine in its southwestern corner.

Only gradually thereafter did a national consciousness per-vade Palestine Arab society and give rise to a mass movement. A Palestinian Arab national movement, with a popular base, can be said to have arisen only in British-ruled Palestine in the mid-1930s, against the backdrop of the Arab Revolt; and some would say, with considerable logic, that this occurred only a decade or more later."

"The two movements emerged in completely different political environments and among radically dissimilar societies. Zionism emerged amid a social and intellectual climate of both burgeoning nationalisms and, in some ways, a countervailing ethos characterized by the rise of liberalism, democracy, socialism, and modernization. The Arab nationalist movements that arose on either side of World War I, including the distinct Palestinian Arab national movement, were born in largely agrarian societies dominated by Islam, with its exclusionist attitude to all religious “others” and resistance to change, by the narrow rule of political despotism, and by the tribal mores of autocratic clans and families.

Given these variant backgrounds, though both movements sought self-determination, they experienced asymmetric evolutions and political trajectories. And this affected their attitudes toward a possible solution of the emergent conflict over possession of the land. Put simply, the Palestinian Arab nationalist movement, from inception, and ever since, has consistently regarded Palestine as innately, completely, inalienably, and legitimately “Arab” and Muslim and has aspired to establish in it a sovereign state under its rule covering all of the country’s territory.

The Zionist movement, while ideologically regarding the country as the ancient patrimony of the Jewish people and as wholly, legitimately, belonging to the Jews, has over the decades politically shifted gears, bowing to political and demographic diktats and realities, moving from an initial demand for Jewish sovereignty over the whole Land of Israel to agreeing to establish a Jewish state in only part of a partitioned Palestine, with the Arabs enjoying sovereignty over the rest."

"But Palestine at the time was not ruled as a united, single, separate administrative entity. It was subdivided into districts, each ruled from a distant capital...In other words, under the Ottomans the area traditionally known as “Palestine” ( eretz yisrael in Hebrew or falastin in Arabic) was undefined administratively or politically, and its inhabitants, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish, rarely defined themselves as “Palestinians.”"

"Ottoman officials, Europeans, and modern Jews regarded the territory lying between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as “the Holy Land,” on the basis of the early Jewish and Christian appreciation and designation of the land as such. Muslims subsequently adopted the term, although one thirteenth-century Arab text refers only to “the land around Jerusalem” (as far north as Nablus) as al-ard al-muqaddasa (the holy land) and the term al-quds (the holy) was used only for Jerusalem itself. As for Palestine, to many Muslims it was no more sacred than, say, Syria or Iraq or Egypt.1

The Jews, however, always regarded eretz yisrael or Palestine, whatever its exact geographical demarcation, not only as a political entity, imagined or real, but also as their holy land."

"A thin layer of the Palestine Arab elite began to consider “Palestine” as a separate geopolitical entity with a possibly distinct trajectory leading to self-determination and statehood during the 1920s, following the severance of Palestine from Syria through the French takeover of Lebanon (1918) and Syria (1920) and the British conquest of Palestine and Transjordan (1917–1918) and the subsequent institution during 1920–1922 of separate French and British mandates over these territories.

From that point on, the Palestinian Arab elite struggled tooth and nail to deny the “Jewishness” of Palestine. (An exception was the leading Palestinian intellectual and politician Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, who at the end of the nineteenth century wrote to Zadok Kahn, the chief rabbi of France: “Who can challenge the rights of the Jews in Palestine? Good Lord, historically it is really your country.”)2"

"The complete deletion of the Jewish presence in and history of the country is epitomized in the textbooks published by the Palestine National Authority since the 1990s, in the destruction by Palestinians of Jewish sites in the PNA-controlled territories during the Second Intifada (for example, the torching of “Joseph’s Tomb” in Nablus), and in the repeated “historical” pronouncements on this matter by the leader of the Palestinian national movement between 1969 and 2004, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat."

**The Jews

"given the geopolitical realities of the dying years of the Ottoman Empire, the movement was careful officially to avoid blunt expressions of its will to fully fledged self-determination, restricting itself to talk of a Jewish homeland or “homestead.” The latter expression— Heimstätte—was the term used by the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897 and chaired by political Zionism’s leader and prophet, Theodor Herzl, in its foundational resolution, defining the movement’s goal. Interestingly, the congress, bringing together, for the first time, representatives of the various Zionist groups and societies that had sprung up in the 1880s and 1890s across Europe, but mainly in the tsarist domains, spoke of “the creation of a Heimstätte for the Jewish people in Palestine”—rather than of converting all of Palestine into the Jewish homestead.4 The careful phraseology was the result of protracted debate among the members of the drafting committee. Talking bluntly about both all of Palestine and a sovereign state, it was felt, would antagonize the Turks and perhaps needlessly alienate Gentile supporters of Zionism.

But, to be sure, the movement’s aim, from the start, was the conversion of the whole country into a Jewish state."

"The Zionists saw the Arabs as interlopers whose ancestors in the seventh century had conquered—or stolen (albeit from the Christian Byzantine Empire, not the Jews)—and then Islamized and Arabized Palestine, a land that belonged to someone else. And, in the nineteenth century, the vast majority of the Ottoman Empire’s Arabs, though they shared a common language, historical consciousness, and culture, had no national ambitions or emotions; they were satisfied to live as subjects of the Muslim empire of the day."

"Zionist settlers began trickling into and settling Palestine in 1882. There may not yet have been Arab “nationalism,” but the Arab inhabitants of Palestine quickly resented and feared the burgeoning Zionist influx as a threat to the “Arab-ness” of their country and, perhaps, down the road, to their very presence in the land. Starting in 1891 they began to petition Constantinople to halt the Zionist influx, land purchases, and settlement and, at first hesitantly and infrequently, began to attack Jewish settlers.

For their part, the early Zionist settlers did not see themselves as protagonists in a drama of contending nationalisms or as rivals for the land. Like European settlers elsewhere in the colonial world, they saw the natives as objects, as part of the scenery, or as bothersome brigands, certainly not as nationalist antagonists. And as Zionists, they took it as self-evident that the Land of Israel belonged to the Jews and to no one else."

"what had been stipulated in the declaration, issued by the foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, on 2 November 1917. In it, the British had declared their support for the establishment of a “National Home” for the Jewish people “in Palestine.” They had thus adopted the language of Basel. “National Home,” to be sure, was a mite stronger than Heimstätte—but fell short of the idea of a full-fledged “state” (though, in expatiating on the declaration subsequently, Balfour, Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and other senior British politicians repeatedly spoke of a Jewish “state” as their intended, ultimate goal). The wording had deliberately left open the possibility that all of Palestine would become the Jewish “National Home” but also, alternatively, that the “National Home” would be constituted in only part of (a partitioned) Palestine."

"In 1919 Chaim Weizmann, representing world Zionism, laid out the movement’s claims before the World War I victors at Versailles. The map he presented, buttressing his oral presentation, spoke in effect of a “Greater Palestine”—all of Palestine west of the Jordan as well as the strip of territory just east of the river, to a depth of twenty miles (up to the Hijaz railway line), and the area of present-day southern Lebanon south of Lake Karaoun as constituting the requisite territory of the “National Home.”10

...The leadership decided, contrary to Tolkowsky’s original proposal, to exclude the length of the Hijaz railway line from the Jewish National Home. The leaders recognized it as a “special Moslem interest,” which serviced the Haj, but, persuaded by Aaronsohn, argued that economically and hydrologically, the hill country east of the river up to a line just west of the railway line should be joined to the core of Palestine west of the river.12"

"Weizmann and Ben-Gurion had hoped, in the fluid post–World War I circumstances, that Transjordan or at least the hilly spine east of the Jordan would remain part of Palestine and open to Jewish settlement, ultimately becoming part of the future Jewish state. But in March 1921 Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill met the Arabian Hashemite prince Abdullah and decided to deposit the area east of the river—henceforth dubbed “Transjordan”—into his safekeeping, at least temporarily. The official League of Nations Palestine Mandate of 1922–1923, while nominally including Transjordan, specified that the area east of the river would not be opened to Jewish settlement. Henceforth, the British “High Commissioner for Palestine and Transjordan,” who sat in Jerusalem, in practice governed only Palestine west of the river, with the area to the east ruled by Abdullah, under the supervision of a British “Resident” who answered directly to Whitehall.

The mainstream Zionist leaders “gave up” Transjordan with great reluctance. As Churchill was making up his mind on the matter, Weizmann wrote him an impassioned, multilayered appeal:

... But Churchill was unmoved. And in the end, the mainstream Zionist leadership acquiesced in the victors’ truncation of Palestine, formalized in Churchill’s white paper of 1922. The 1918–

1919 demand for a swath of land east of the river was dropped— though periodically over the coming two decades, under the recurrent impress of Palestine Arab opposition to continued Jewish immigration and settlement, the Zionist leaders raised the possibility, among themselves and with Abdullah and the British, of opening up Transjordan, too, to Jewish settlement. But repeated British and Transjordanian rebuffs during the 1920s and 1930s eventually persuaded Ben-Gurion and his colleagues that looking east of the river for settlement venues was unrealistic, and they continued to focus their gaze and pin their hopes for the growth of the Zionist enterprise on the land lying west of the river and on the Negev Desert, down to the Gulf of ‘Aqaba.

However, the right-wing fringe of the Zionist movement, which never won more than 20 percent of the votes in any major Zionist forum before 1948 (indeed, before 1973), stuck to the movement’s 1919 map and goal of a pre-Churchillian “Greater Palestine.” In 1925 right-wing journalist and defense activist Ze’ev Jabotinsky gave this vision political form by founding the Revisionist Movement in large measure to counter mainstream Zionism’s acquiescence in the loss of Transjordan. The Revisionists denounced the Churchill white paper and demanded that Transjordan, all of it, be reintegrated fully in the Palestine Mandate, meaning that it become, or become again, officially, part of the promised “National Home.” In April 1931, at the first world Congress in Danzig of Betar, the Revisionists’ youth wing, the movement resolved “to turn the Land of Israel, on both banks of the Jordan, into a Jewish state, with a Jewish majority.”16
Jabotinsky’s vision included a large Arab minority in the Jewish state, with full individual civil rights but without collective “national” rights. That year, at the Seventeenth Zionist Congress, Jabotinsky spoke of resurrecting what he called the historic borders of the Land of Israel, on both banks of the Jordan.17 He left vague his hopes and ambitions regarding the fate of the bulk of Transjordan, the area east of the Gilead-Moab-Edom line. But the Zionist majority rejected Jabotinsky’s call—to which he responded by denouncing the congress and tearing up his delegate’s card."

**Binationalism

"The principal advocates during the Mandate period of a binational polity were Brit Shalom—literally, the peace covenant or the peace association—and its successor  organization, Agudat Ihud (the unity association), and the Marxist Hashomer Hatza‘ir Movement and, later, party."

**Binationalism: Brit Shalom

"The initial spark for the founding of Brit Shalom seems to have been the realization, after a visit to Egypt, by Professor Joseph Horowitz, who founded the university’s Middle East Institute, that Islam was on the rise and that Muslim scholars were deeply hostile to Zionism. He conveyed these thoughts to Arthur Ruppin, the prominent Zionist executive and sociologist, and other Zionist officials and Jewish scholars, at a meeting in Ruppin’s home on 26 April 1925. Horowitz wanted “to persuade Jews and Arabs to work together,” Ruppin recorded in his diary.19 By November Ruppin was speaking of a Jewish-Arab “understanding under the watchword ‘Palestine, a Binational State.’”20

That year, Ruppin told the Zionist Congress meeting in Vienna that “Palestine will be a state of two nations.” Robert Weltsch, editor of the influential German Jüdische Rundschau, had predicted that the future of Palestine lay in the coexistence of the two peoples: “We do not want a Jewish state, but a binational Palestine community . . . We want to become once again Easterners,” he wrote.21

Brit Shalom’s aim, as defined in 1928, was to “pave the way for understanding between Hebrews and Arabs [‘ ivrim ve‘ arvim] for cooperative ways of living in the Land of Israel on the basis of complete equality in the political rights of two nations [each] enjoying wide autonomy and for various types of joint enterprise in the interest of the development of the country.”22"

"A split quickly developed within Brit Shalom regarding the core issue of Jewish immigration. The Arabs flatly opposed all Jewish immigration. Some Brit Shalom stalwarts, like Akiba Ernst Simon, a Berlin-born educator and philosophy professor, were willing to make do with permanent Jewish minority status in the binational polity. In March 1930 Simon called on the Jewish Agency to restrict Jewish immigration and officially to declare “our desire to remain a minority” in Palestine (he usually spoke of a permanent “40 per cent”).24 Others, such as “Rabbi Binyamin” (the pen name of Yehoshua Radler-Feldmann), a journalist, and Ruppin, were less accommodating to the Arabs. Ruppin said: “What the Arabs are willing to give us is at most minority rights for the Jews in an Arab state, according to the pattern of minority rights in Eastern Europe. But we have already had sufficient experience of the situation in Eastern Europe [on this score].”25

In effect, Brit Shalom, which never had more than several dozen members, began to disintegrate in August 1929, against the backdrop of the widespread Arab riots, which claimed more than 130 Jewish lives. Among the dead were 67 ultra-Orthodox Jews slaughtered by an Arab mob in central Hebron. In the weeklong violence, the Arabs had persuasively demonstrated that they did not want the Jews in Palestine. In October, Ruppin recorded in his diary: “I have searched out my Browning revolver which has been lying in my writing desk undisturbed for ten years; now it lies on my bedside table. After all, one can never be sure that nothing will happen.”26

During the following years, with the rise of a young, radicalized Arab elite and the start of massive Jewish immigration to Palestine from eastern and central Europe, Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine only deteriorated. Things came to a head in 1936, with the outbreak of the Arab Revolt, which sought to oust the British and suppress the Zionist enterprise. Ruppin despaired: “I have adopted the theory . . . that we are living in a sort of latent [permanent?] state of war with the Arabs.”27 Binationalism, he concluded, was nothing more than a pipe dream. Or as British Foreign Office official Alexander Cadogan put it, the dream of binationalism was “pure eyewash.”28 By mid-1936, for all effects and purposes, Brit Shalom had disappeared."

**Binationalism: Agudat Ihud

"The association’s platform included a call for Arab-Jewish cooperation and, while avoiding explicit reference to binationalism, called for “the creation in the country of a government based on equal political rights for its two peoples.”30 Magnes favored continued Jewish immigration (though not of dimensions that could either endanger the country’s Arab majority or permanently assure the Jews’ minority status. How a permanent, exact fifty-fifty parity could be assured he was never able to explain). He met repeatedly with Arab nationalist leaders. Yet his Arab interlocutors consistently opposed any Jewish immigration.31

Buber believed that the establishment of a Jewish state would lead to war for generations and would require the Jewish state to behave like a militarist nation, “and he does not want to be a citizen of such a state.”32 To say that Agudat Ihud—like Brit Shalom before it—had few supporters in the Yishuv would be a perverse understatement: ten months after its establishment, Agudat Ihud—which, unlike Brit Shalom, actively sought new members—had on its rolls only ninety-seven members (though its monthly, Be‘ ayot Hayom [Problems of the day], had three hundred subscribers and sold another three hundred copies in shops).33

Brit Shalom and Agudat Ihud also faced deep ideological conundrums. Translating the binational idea into a blueprint for political praxis proved immensely difficult. Some members were willing to commit to a permanent Jewish minority though they were unable to find a mechanism that would assure the minority’s rights—indeed, safety—in an Arab-majority state. Others sought further Jewish immigration until numerical parity was achieved— though none knew how to assure its permanency or to practically offset the Arabs’ far higher birthrates. Still others—including, during World War II, Magnes—hoped that the Arabs would agree to open-ended Jewish immigration that would eventually result in a Jewish majority. All sought some form of political parity with the Arab community—through an equal number of Jewish and Arab autonomous zones and shared power in a joint government (whether or not there was demographic parity). But none knew how to finesse the problem posed to democratic principles by a Jewish minority enjoying equal powers with an Arab majority. Last, none knew how to persuade the Arabs, who wanted dominance in and over all of Palestine, to accept the binational principle."

**Binationalism: Magnes

"Politically, the most important figure linked to Brit Shalom and Agudat Ihud was Magnes. He enjoyed a strong following among American Jews and was respected by the Mandate government; his diplomatic, oratorical, and intellectual skills also won the sneaking admiration of Ben-Gurion and other mainstream Zionists. The American-born and -trained Magnes, a rabbi and pacifist, viewed the call for a Jewish “National Home” in Palestine, to which he immigrated in 1922, as, above all, a call for the creation of “a Jewish spiritual, educational, moral and religious center,” as he put it in a letter to Weizmann in 1913.34 In this, he was an heir to the spiritual or cultural Zionism propagated by Ahad Ha’am (Asher Hirsch Ginsberg, 1856–1927), the great Russian Jewish essayist. Magnes supported immigration (or Jewish “ingathering” in Palestine) and hoped the country would become “the numerical center of the Jewish People.”35 He opposed the idea of conquest, which he called “the Joshua way,” and did not believe in the Great Powers’ right to dispose of the country as they saw fit.36 Like the Jews, the Arabs also had historical rights to the country, he believed. So Palestine was the home of two peoples and three religions and belonged neither to the Arabs nor to the Jews nor to the Christians: “it belonged to all of them.”37

The Balfour Declaration “contains the seed of resentment and future conflict. The Jewish people cannot suffer injustice to be done to others even as a compensation for injustice [over the centuries] done to them,” he wrote in 1920.38 The Jewish “National Home” should not be established “upon the bayonets of some Empire.”39 Magnes, like Buber, feared that the Jews in Palestine would “become devotees of brute force and militarism as were some of the later Hasmoneans, like the Edomite Herod.”40 Magnes dissented from Brit Shalom in that he believed that its desire for an accommodation with the Arabs was tactical and practical rather than deeply felt; he knew that most of its members, including Ruppin, who at times espoused the transfer of Arabs, were not pacifists.41

All of this left Magnes with a somewhat fuzzy picture of what a future Palestine should look like. He spoke variously about both open-ended “international control through a mandatory”— that is, perpetual rule by a foreign power—and “a binational [ Jewish-Arab] government.”42

The problem with binationalism, however—apart from mainstream Zionist opposition—was that Brit Shalom and Magnes could find no Arab partners, or even interlocutors, who shared the binational vision or hope. As Magnes succinctly put it as early as 1932: “Arabs will not sit on any committee with Jews . . . [Arab] teachers . . . teach children more and more Jew-hatred.”43 In this sense, things only got worse with the passage of time, the deepening of the Arabs’ political consciousness, and the increase in Jewish immigration.

In 1937, in the privacy of his study, against the backdrop of the bloody Arab Revolt, Magnes took off the gloves: “The great drawback on the Arab side was the lack of moral courage. If only one man would step out now and brave his people and plead that his leaders should sit down with Jewish leaders, the situation would be saved . . . [but] not even one Arab stood up.” Yet perhaps it wasn’t so much a matter of the Arabs’ lack of courage as of Arab convictions. “Islam seemed to be a religion of the sword,” a momentarily despondent Magnes concluded.44"

"As the revolt unfolded, the mufti and kadi of Nablus toured the surrounding villages “preaching that anyone who killed a land seller would reside in paradise in the company of the righteous.”48 The language of the rebellious nationalists was commonly the language of jihad. ‘Abd al-Fatah Darwish, a peni-tent land seller, swore in May 1936: “I call on Allah, may He be exalted, to bear witness and swear . . . that I will be a loyal soldier in the service of the homeland. I call on Allah and the angels and the prophets and the knights of Palestinian nationalism to bear witness that if I violate this oath, I will kill myself.”49 A placard hung on walls in the village of Balad al-Sheikh, outside Haifa, after the murder of a collaborator, read: “Nimer the policeman was executed . . . as he betrayed his religion and his homeland . . .

The supreme God revealed to those who preserve their religion and their homeland that he betrayed them, and they did to him what Muslim law commands. Because the supreme and holy God said: ‘Fight the heretics and the hypocrites; their dwelling-place is hell.’”50)"

"Magnes occasionally found an Arab willing to meet and talk with him—and ready to hear what he, Magnes, might be willing to concede. In 1936 he met Musa al-‘Alami, a Palestinian Arab “moderate” and Mandate government senior official, and agreed to the limiting of Jewish immigration to thirty thousand per year. In late 1937 or early 1938, Magnes met the leading Iraqi politician Nuri Sa‘id. Sa‘id apparently proposed a ten-year truce during which the Jews would promise not to exceed 40 percent of the country’s population (though Magnes later always insisted that he had never agreed to permanent minority status for the Jews).51 But these contacts and their outcome were hardly the comprehensive, final binational accord Magnes was striving for. (And, of course, neither ‘Alami nor Sa‘id were leaders of the Palestinian national movement.)"

"By mid-World War II Magnes realized that an open-ended international mandate was no longer feasible. He had despaired of ever reaching substantive Jewish-Arab negotiations or agreement and decided that the only solution would be an externally imposed “union between the Jews and the Arabs within a binational Palestine.” Further, he determined, this union would need to be subsumed or incorporated in a wider economic and political “union of Palestine, Transjordan, Syria and Lebanon” and linked to and guaranteed by an “Anglo-American union.” And the binational state would have to be “imposed [on the Jews and Arabs] over their opposition” by the United States and Britain.52 The binational state would need to be based on “parity,” in terms of political power, between the two constituent groups, in order to guarantee the rights of whichever group was in the minority.53

By mid-1948, with the first Arab-Israeli war in full swing, Magnes was deeply pessimistic. He feared an Arab victory: “there are millions upon millions of Muslims in the world . . . They have time. The timelessness of the desert.”54 An Arab ambush on 13 April 1948 of a Jewish convoy bearing doctors and nurses traveling through East Jerusalem to the Hebrew University–Hadassah Medical School campus on Mount Scopus—in which seventy-eight were slaughtered—was in effect the final nail in the coffin of Magnes’s binationalism. It was not that he publicly re-canted. But he understood that it was a lost cause—and that his own standing in the Yishuv had been irreparably shattered. Within days, he left for the United States, and within months, never returning to Palestine/Israel, he was dead"

**Binationalism: Hashomer Hatza'ir

"World War II sped up the movement’s transformation into a political party and pushed it toward greater political clarity. In 1942, at the sixth meeting of the Kibbutz Artzi council in Mishmar Ha‘emeq, the movement at last spoke bluntly: “The political program of the Zionist Organisation should include the readiness to establish a political binational regime in the country, based on the unhindered advancement of the Zionist enterprise and governmental parity without taking account of the numerical ratio between the two peoples. Moreover, the Zionist Organisation should regard positively the perspective [that is, idea] of establishing a federative tie between the Land of Israel and the neighboring countries.” The resolution called for continued Jewish immigration in line with the country’s “maximal absorptive capacity”—and, during the transitional period before the Land of Israel fully integrated into the federation, “Jewish immigration would continue in dimensions that will assure that the Jews cease . . . to be a minority in the country.” The binational state was to be based on “a common front and cooperative organisation between the workers of the two peoples”—in other words, a shared socialist outlook and goals. To this end Hashomer Hatza‘ir would act to help “set up a socialist movement” among Palestine’s Arabs.57

Apart from its Marxist discourse and socialist goals, Hashomer Hatza‘ir differed from Brit Shalom in that it always sought to achieve a Jewish majority in the binational state (albeit with political parity between the communities, regardless of the demographic tilt). And, against the backdrop of World War II, it focused on saving European Jewry and solving Europe’s “Jewish Problem.”58"

**Other advocacies of binationalism

"Between the two world wars, for a time, binationalism also held attractions for mainstream Zionist leaders like Weizmann and Ben-Gurion. But their approach was always tactical. Given the reality of overwhelming Arab numbers, a binational model that gave Jews political parity, while allowing for continued Jewish immigration that they hoped would one day result in a Jewish majority, was ephemerally attractive, even though it ran contrary to the deepest Zionist endgame aspirations. Haim Arlosoroff, soon to be named head of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department—and, as such, the movement’s “foreign minister”—in 1922 asserted that there was no alternative to “setting up a common state in Palestine for Jews and Arabs as equal nations in their rights.”59 Eight years later, Weizmann wrote to a friend that “[for] now we should be content with a binational state.”60 Weizmann told the Zionist Congress, in Basel, in July 1931 that “the Arabs must be made to feel” that the Jews do not seek political domination—nor do they want to be dominated—and “we would welcome an agreement . . . on the basis of political parity.”61 Even Ben-Gurion, under the impact of the 1929 riots, briefly spoke of “absolute political equality” and “political parity.” In 1939 he recalled that in 1930 he had been “in favor of political parity. I use this wording and not binationalism because the latter expression is not clear to me . . . In 1930 I tried to develop a complete constitution based on political parity in stages of development . . . Inside my movement I fought for parity . . . I went to the Arabs . . . [But] they did not want to hear about it .”62 So far, he had said three years later, “not a single Arab leader has been found to agree to the principle of parity”—and this without even mentioning their complete and utter rejection of continued Jewish immigration.63"

"A variant of the binational idea that surfaced during the late 1920s and 1930s was the concept of cantonization or “regional autonomy.” Each community would have a region or regions in which it ruled itself, with core powers relating to defense and foreign relations vested in a central authority, possibly located in Jerusalem. At least initially, the idea was that the British would continue to play this central governmental role—but some variants had it that the central government, either immediately or down the road, would be controlled by the majority population. At one point Mussolini was reported to favor the idea.64

... But the idea appealed to neither side, as the Peel Commission insightfully pointed out that year: it contained “most, if not all, of the difficulties presented by Partition without Partition’s supreme advantage—the possibility it offers of eventual peace.” Cantonization, simply put, “does not settle the question of national self-government. Cantonal autonomy would not satisfy for a moment the demands of Arab nationalism . . . Nor would it give the Jews the full freedom they desire to build up their National Home . . . nor offer them the prospect of realizing on a small territorial scale all that Zionism means. And in the background, still clouding and disturbing the situation . . . [and] in-tensifying the antagonism between the races, would remain the old uncertainty as to the future destiny of Palestine.”66 In short, ruled Peel, cantonization would solve nothing."

**Two-Statism: Peel Proposal

"In effect, under the dual impress of resurgent violent anti-Semitism in Europe, spearheaded by Nazi Germany, and the Arab Revolt against British rule and the Zionist enterprise, the year 1936 marked a watershed. The first development underlined the urgent need for a safe haven for Europe’s Jews, and as the Western democracies closed their doors to Jewish immigration, the Zionist leaders came to understand that it could be afforded only by a Jewish state. Hence the leadership’s conclusion in the mid-1930s that it was imperative and urgent to establish a Jewish state and its readiness, running counter to the thrust of the previous fifty years of Zionist endeavor, to abandon the vision of self-determination in the whole Land of Israel. The mainstream leaders, after thorough and painful deliberations, concluded that to save European Jewry it was necessary to agree to partition and to accept a Jewish state in part of Palestine, and to push the possibility of a state on the whole Land of Israel out of their minds or at least to a distant, ill-defined point in the future. Only the immediate establishment of a Palestinian haven could save Europe’s Jews.

The second development, the Arab Revolt, propelled the British to curtail Zionist immigration and to appease the rebels, in light of the British Empire’s need for safe lines of communication, running through the Arab lands, which spanned the Suez Canal and the string of airfields running eastward from Palestine through Transjordan and Iraq. The British needed to pacify the Arab Middle East, which also harbored large reserves of oil, as they faced the prospect of a three-front global war against Japan, Italy, and Germany. The Zionists understood this and were keenly aware both of the open window of opportunity for Jewish statehood that was likely to disappear in short order and of the need to exploit it, immediately, even at the price of giving up a large part of Palestine.

These factors coalesced to push the Zionist leaders in 1936–1937 to agree to the principle of partition, as enunciated by the Peel Commission, sent out by the British in November 1936 to investigate the causes of the Arab Revolt and to suggest means of amelioration. The commission published its report in early July 1937. Magnes defined the report as “a great state paper . . . It is a pitiless document . . . It exhibits in all of its nakedness our miserable failure—the failure of each of us, Jew, Arab, English.”67 The commissioners recommended that the Mandate be dissolved and that something less than 20 percent of the country—the Galilee and the northern and central sectors of the Coastal Plain—be awarded for Jewish statehood, with the bulk of the rest (some 70–75 percent of the country) earmarked for Arab rule. The commission further recommended that the Arab area eventually be joined to Transjordan, to create a “Greater Transjordan,” under the rule of the Hashemite prince Abdullah. (The remaining 5–10 percent of the country—Jerusalem and Bethlehem, with religious cachet, and a strip of land from these towns, through Ramla, leading to the Mediterranean coast—was set aside by the commission for continued British rule.)68

The Zionist movement spent July–August 1937 agonizing over the proposal. There were bitter debates within the leading parties, most notably the socialist Mapai, whose head, David Ben-Gurion, was the chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive (in effect, the Yishuv’s “prime minister”), and then a full-scale show-down in the emergency Twentieth Zionist Congress, in Zurich.

Browbeaten by Ben-Gurion and Weizmann, the congress, by a majority of approximately two to one, accepted the principle of partition while seeking to negotiate an enlargement of the prospective Jewish area, the less than 20 percent of Palestine 62

The History of One-State and Two-State Solutions being deemed extremely unfair and insufficient for the absorption of the persecuted millions who were projected to arrive.

But nothing came of the Peel proposals. They were rejected not only by the Palestinian Arab leadership and the Arabs outside Palestine but by the British government, which, after initially endorsing the recommendations, quickly about-faced. By May 1939, in the MacDonald white paper on Palestine, Whitehall completely disavowed the idea of partition and Jewish statehood and charted a future that, within ten years, would see the emergence of an independent Palestinian state governed by its majority Arab population.

The Peel recommendations had also provided for a transfer of a large part of the three hundred thousand Arabs who were living on the “wrong,” Jewish side of the prospective partition line to the Arab-earmarked areas, or to neighboring Arab states, in order both to vitiate the possibility of irredentism and to provide space for the expected Jewish immigrants. One commission member, Reginald Coupland, in a “Note for Discussion” by the commission as it was preparing its report, compared the recommendation to the Greek-Turkish exchange of population in the 1920s: “Fortunately there is the encouraging precedent of the compulsory shifting . . . of 1,300,000 Greeks from Asia Minor to Thessaly and Macedonia and 400,000 Turks the other way round. The whole thing was done in 18 months, and since then the relations of Greece and Turkey have become friendlier than ever before. This is the ideal solution because it leaves no minorities to cause friction (as in Europe since Versailles) . . . The hardships of [the Greco-Turkish population exchange] . . . have been compensated by the creation of peace and amity.”69

Ben-Gurion had used the Peel transfer recommendation to persuade the Zionist Congress to accept the offered ministate. And in private, he had added that he hoped that the emergent ministate would serve as a springboard for a future expansion of Jewish sovereignty over the whole of, or at least over additional parts of, the Land of Israel—indicating that his acceptance at that time of a partitioned Palestine, as a final settlement, was not completely sincere.70"

**Zionist Transfer Thinking and the One-State and Two-State Solutions

"There is a glancing mention of the idea, albeit only once, in Herzl’s diaries;71 Ruppin, Leo Motzkin, Menahem Ussishkin,72 and others occasionally proposed the notion; Frederick Kisch, chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, in 1930, in a letter to Weizmann, recommended transferring Arabs to Iraq, which hungered, he believed, for additional manpower.73 All thought in terms of a one-state solution covering all of Palestine and in which all or some of the troublesome, or potentially troublesome, Arabs, would be moved out to make way for Jewish immigrants and to speed up the process by which a Jewish majority would be achieved. A Jewish state with an Arab majority was generally regarded as inconceivable, and a Jewish state with even a very large Arab minority—say, a 55 to 45 percent ratio—was seen as highly problematic, not to say unviable. But although the transfer idea periodically gripped the imagination of this or that Zionist stalwart during 1882–1936, it was never adopted as a goal or policy platform by the Zionist movement or any of the main Zionist political parties, not then and not later. All understood that its adoption might alienate the successive Ottoman and British rulers of the land, and some, primarily socialists, also had moral misgivings.74 At the time, though, the forced migration of populations usually did not exercise people’s moral scru-ples. The Turkish-Greek exchange of population agreements, which involved massive, forced transfers of population in the 1920s, were in fact approved by the League of Nations and lauded by most Western observers. The prevailing view was that such transfers averted the persecution of minorities and the bloodletting engendered by majority oppression, minority rebellions, and communal clashes, not to mention irredentist wars, in which nation-states supported national or ethnic minorities living in neighboring states. This view was only reinforced during the 1930s when Nazi Germany used the German minorities question to subvert Czechoslovakia and Poland and justify the launching of what turned into World War II."

"The transfer idea also impinged on, and was used to justify, the partition of Palestine and the two-state solution recommended by the Peel Commission and accepted by the Zionist movement. The commission had argued that for the two-state settlement to be viable, it had to be accompanied by a transfer of Arabs...The Jews were getting only a small part of Palestine; it was therefore justified that, at the least, the area they receive be empty of Arabs. As he put it in a letter to his son, Amos: “We never wanted to dispossess the Arabs. But since England is giving [the larger] part of the country promised to us for an Arab state, it is only fair that the Arabs in our state be transferred to the Arab area.”76"

"Without doubt, the surge in Zionist leadership discourse during 1937–1941 about transfer was precipitated by the Peel recommendations. But even more important in its precipitation was what had engendered the Peel Commission in the first place—the Arab Revolt, which aimed at evicting the British from Palestine and rolling back, if not destroying, the Zionist enterprise. It was Arab attack, and the threat to Jewish existence in Palestine, that triggered Zionist transfer thinking"

"the idea that partition and a two-state solution would have to be accompanied by a transfer of Arabs, or “the Arabs,” out of the territory of the prospective Jewish state, was accepted during the countdown to the actual partition of Palestine, in 1947–1949, also by prominent Arab leaders, including Nuri Sa’id, Iraq’s premier politician, King Abdullah of Jordan, and Jordan’s prime minister, Ibrahim Hashim.80"

"Hence, forever worried about demography and Jewish-Arab population ratios, some Israeli politicians continued to harbor, if not always publicly to speak about, the “transfer” idea. In 1949 and the early 1950s, generals like Moshe Dayan—later Israel’s defense minister (1967–1974) and foreign minister (1977–1980)—and politicians like David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister in 1948–1953 and again in 1955–1963, thought occasionally about transferring Israeli Arabs to Arab states or Latin America and even initiated small, covert voluntary transfer (with compensation) schemes."

"The idea of transfer—vis-à-vis Israel’s Arab minority or the Arabs of the occupied territories or both—continues to characterize the pronouncements of some Jewish two-state advocates and one-staters. In both cases, reducing the number of Arabs or completely eliminating their presence is seen as facilitating the maintenance of Israel’s Jewish character and grip on the territory under its control. But it is well to note that Kach and Moledet— single-issue transfer parties—at no time won more than 3 seats in Israel’s 120-seat parliament, and Yisrael Beiteinu, which also represents other issues (such as Russian immigrant rights and benefits), is also a minority party (it won 11 seats in the 2006 general elections). And it is important to add that at various times over the past sixty years, especially during Arab assaults on Israel, particularly terrorist assault, many Israelis polled have supported the idea of transfer, their number ranging from 10 to 30 percent of the Jewish population. The thinking, or gut response, illuminating this posture is best conveyed in graffiti occasionally seen on walls of Israeli public buildings: “No Arabs, no terrorism. ”"

**After Peel

But most of the opposition to partition within the Zionist mainstream—and the most significant debate was within the center and left, not between “Right” and “Left”—stemmed from pragmatic, political calculations rather than metaphysics and ideological considerations. One state simply made sense, geographically, politically, and economically. The problem, as Berl Katznelson, one of Mapai’s leaders, put it, was that Zionist agreement to partition would merely truncate the homeland—but without resulting in Jewish-Arab peace; it would not lead to a settlement or to security for the Zionist enterprise.83 Yitzhak Tabenkin, the ideologue of the socialist Ahdut Ha‘Avodah Party, argued that the country was indivisible for practical geographic reasons and that a Greater Israel ( eretz yisrael hashleima, the whole Land of Israel, or ahiduta shel haaretz, the country’s unity) was necessary for reasons of immigrant absorption and settlement. But Tabenkin was also keenly attentive to the country’s historical cachet, which drew Jews to Zion in the first place; without Hebron and Bethel and Jerusalem, the Jewish state would arise devoid of the magnetic loci of the historic homeland.84

On the right, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the Revisionist leader, was consistently forthright. He rejected partition and spoke of a state encompassing the whole Land of Israel, which ultimately would have, he believed, a Jewish majority and a large Arab minority. It would be Jewish-ruled. He denounced the Zionist mainstream’s acceptance of partition. “No Jew,” he argued, could accept a Jewish state without “Jerusalem, Hebron, and the Land of Gilead [east of the Jordan].” It was a recipe for Arab irredentism that would continue to “covet” the Jewish area. Jabotinsky described the Peel proposal, positing a Jewish ministate, as providing “less than a drop in the ocean of Jewish distress, in the sea of its hunger for territory.” He dismissed Ben-Gurion’s secretly voiced hope that the ministate would serve as a “Jewish Piedmont,” a springboard for future expansion (as Piedmont had served as the initial minuscule core of the Italian state during the Risorgimento). The Great Powers and the Arabs would not allow Jewish expansion, either through war or through “penetration” (that is, peaceful Jewish settlement in Arab areas).85

**After Peel: Accepting partition principle

"In the solid center was the coalition of socialist and liberal parties led by Ben-Gurion. And whether or not Ben-Gurion in 1937 really resigned himself to partition and Jewish sovereignty over only part—a small part—of Palestine, during the following decade the Zionist mainstream, including Ben-Gurion, internalized and came to accept the principle of 74 partition. The mainstream abandoned the goal of a Jewish one-state solution encompassing all of Palestine. To be sure, in no small measure it was the Holocaust that persuaded the Zionist leaders to make do with what history had to offer, while it was still on offer. But more important, between 1937 and 1947, the international community—under the impress of the Holocaust and the dictates of logic—had itself gradually come to accept the principle of partition and Jewish statehood in part of Palestine as the only reasonable basis for a solution to the conundrum. And the Zionist movement understood that it would have to bow to that community’s will. History—meaning the British, the Americans, the Soviets, all under pressure by the Arab world and by the realities of Palestinian demography—would simply not award the Jews all of Palestine. So partition it had to be."

"In 1946–1947 the Zionist leadership negotiated and concluded a somewhat hesitant, vague agreement on the partition of Palestine—a two-state solution—with Hashemite king Abdullah of Transjordan. In July 1946 Ben-Gurion drew up a partition scheme in which the Jews would create their state—“Judea”— in parts of Palestine and Transjordan and Abdullah’s state— “Abdulliya”—would encompass most of Transjordan and the heavily Arab-populated part of Palestine (roughly the West Bank).90 In principle, it was agreed between Jewish Agency representatives Elias Sasson (in August 1946) and Golda Myerson (Meir) (in November 1947) and Abdullah that a Jewish state would arise in the Jewish-populated areas of Palestine (exact borders were never discussed—but the Coastal Plain and the Jezreel and Jordan valleys were implied; the fate of Jerusalem was left open)—and that Jordan would occupy and annex the core Arab-populated area that included all or most of the territory subsequently known as the West Bank (Hebron, Ramallah, Nablus and Jenin, Qalqilya and Tulkarm); that Jordan and the Jewish state would live in peace; and, it was implied, that each would recognize and accept the other’s sovereignty in the respective areas. The Jordanian takeover of the core Arab area of Palestine was approved by Whitehall in February 1948 as, implicitly, was the agreement with the Jews.91"

**UN 181 and the West Bank after '48

"But these were minority views: the Yishuv’s political mainstream full-throatedly hailed the UN partition resolution as a laudable turning point in Jewish history and endorsed a two-state solution. Ben-Gurion pronounced: “The UN decision to reestablish the sovereign state of the Jewish people in part of its future [sic] homeland is an endeavor of historical justice that at least partially atones for . . . what has been done to the Jewish people in our generation and previous generations.”96 This time, unlike in 1937, Ben-Gurion’s declarations had the ring of sincerity, and he was to remain fixed in his advocacy of partition throughout the 1948 War while supporting the limited expansion of Israel at the expense of parts of the areas allotted to the Palestinian Arabs, on the peripheries of the core Arab area (Lydda, Ramla, and the Jerusalem Corridor) and in the northwestern Negev and southern Coastal Plain (Isdud/Ashdod and Majdal/Ashqelon). It is true that on 26 September 1948 he tabled a motion supporting a renewed IDF offensive in parts of the West Bank (Ramallah and the Hebron Hills), which, if launched and successful, would have added East Jerusalem, and perhaps the whole of the West Bank, to the Jewish state; but he probably knew in advance that his fellow ministers would reject it, as they did in the vote that afternoon.97 And later, in March 1949, just before the signing of the Israel-Jordan armistice agreement, when IDF general Yigal Allon proposed conquering the West Bank, Ben-Gurion turned him down flat.98 Like most Israelis, Ben-Gurion had given up the dream of the whole land and had internalized the necessity, indeed inevitability, of partition and a two-state solution, be it because the Great Powers would not allow Israel to have it all or because of the unattractive prospect of coopting the more than half a million additional Arab inhabitants of the West Bank in the Jewish state."

"While the Herut Party, the successor to the pre-war Revisionist Movement, the Ahdut Ha‘Avodah Party, representing the expansionist wing of the socialist movement, and a bevy of IDF generals longed, with greater or lesser ardor, through the years 1949–1967 to add the West Bank to Israel, the state, led by successive Mapai-dominated coalitions, preferred the territorial status quo and turned down every suggestion of an Israeli-initiated war with Jordan in pursuit of “Greater Israel.”

Even Ben-Gurion, who occasionally during the first post–1948 War years toyed with the idea of expansion, in the end always pulled back, his natural caution overcoming his ideological pre-dispositions."

"Given that Jordan had taken over the West Bank and that the area had not turned into the core of a Palestinian Arab state, the dominant Israeli view resembled the Peel partition scheme—which saw the core Arab area of Palestine ultimately joined to Jordan—rather than that of the UN partition resolution of November 1947, which had prescribed the emergence of a separate Palestine Arab state alongside Israel. But still, partition and two-statism governed Israeli political thinking and reality in those two decades before the Six-Day War in June 1967. The official policy of the successive Labor-led Israeli governments, under Ben-Gurion (1949–1953), Moshe Sharett (1953–1955), again Ben-Gurion (1955–1963), and then Levi Eshkol (from 1963), was to allow the territorial partition that resulted from the clash of arms in 1948 to stay. Indeed, no effort was made by Israel to exploit this or that local bout of hostilities to annex the West Bank or even the Gaza Strip"

**Six Day War

"The idea that the whole Land of Israel/Palestine, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean—for the first time in the modern era wholly under Israeli rule—should permanently remain under Jewish control, had received a major boost. Many religious Zionists regarded the victory as divinely ordained and as heralding the messianic redemption. And some secular Jews, moved by the grandeur of the moment, were driven to embrace the vision of “Greater Israel,” meaning a policy geared to permanently holding onto the newly conquered territories for both historical-ideological and strategic reasons. Writers like Natan Alterman, Israel’s leading poet, and Moshe Shamir, a major novelist—both men of the Left—signed on, as did a host of lesser figures, not only from the traditional Right but also from the center-socialist mainstream. Alterman called 1967 “the zenith of Jewish history.”100

Even level-headed, moderate politicians, such as Prime Minister Eshkol, in those post–June 1967 days toyed at least briefly with the idea of permanently retaining the Arab-populated hills of “Judea and Samaria” (as the West Bank henceforward was officially called) and the flatland of Gaza. Dayan spoke of granting the Palestinian population “autonomy” and Eshkol defined the Arab inhabitants as “strangers”—resident in Palestine, to be sure, but usurpers of a land that was not theirs.101 (But the retired elder statesman, Ben-Gurion, immediately—and iconoclastically—called for Israel to withdraw from the West Bank, though not from East Jerusalem.) And although on 19 June the Israeli cabinet secretly resolved to offer to hand back Sinai and the Golan Heights, respectively, to Egypt and Syria, in exchange for peace, it failed to agree on the future of the West Bank and Gaza.

The deadlock between “hawks” (who included Begin and, in this respect, Dayan), who for strategic or ideological-historical or religious reasons sought to retain these territories, and “doves” (including the powerful finance minister, Pinhas Sapir), who were willing to exchange them for peace, left the Israeli government paralyzed and in open-ended retention of these areas. And, to be sure, the Arab states did nothing to help. Indeed, having been humiliated in the war, the Arab League, at the Khartoum Summit in September, responded to the secret Israeli overture regarding Sinai and the Golan Heights—conveyed to Cairo and Damascus through the United States—with a resounding triple “no”: “no” to recognition of Israel, “no” to negotiations, and “no” to peace.102"

**Six Day War: The Allon Plan

"In July–August 1967, Allon, the veteran general from 1948 and now head of Ahdut Ha‘Avodah, presented a plan that tried to square the circle—to hold onto (much of ) the Land of Israel, Ahdut Ha‘Avodah’s traditional goal, while giving up the hilly spine, including Hebron, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin; to expand Israel without adding Arabs. The plan called for the handover, in exchange for peace, of the hill country of the northern and southern segments of the West Bank to Jordan while retaining East Jerusalem and the almost unpopulated stretch of the southern Jordan Valley west of the river along with the whole western shoreline of the Dead Sea. The riverside was deemed crucial for long-term strategic reasons; the IDF must sit on the Jordan to prevent the entry of a large hostile army from the east (on the exgeneral’s mind was principally Iraq, which had sent large expeditionary forces in 1948 and 1967). A narrow Jordanian-controlled east-west strip of land, running through the Jordan Valley at Jericho, would connect Jordan with the Arab core area of the West Bank. Allon was loath to hand over the core of the West Bank to the Palestinians lest, once under their rule, it serve as a springboard for future Palestinian irredentist pressure and campaigns to reconquer all of the country.

The Allon Plan harked back to the Peel Commission recommendations and the secret 1946–1947 understanding between the Jewish Agency and King Abdullah. It reendorsed a two-state solution—but with the Arabs receiving less of Palestine (only 70–90 percent of the West Bank) and with Jordan rather than the Palestinian Arabs as the political beneficiary. But there were two problems. First, no Arab ever accepted it as a basis for agreement, not King Hussein of Jordan (who wanted back all the West Bank, including East Jerusalem) or the Palestinians (the PLO wanted all of Palestine, and for the Palestinians, not Jordan); and second, it was unacceptable to the Israeli cabinet and, hence, never became official Israeli policy.

Allon could not swing a majority in the cabinet. So the plan both did and did not represent the policy and will of the Labor Alignment, the amalgam of social democratic parties in which Ahdut Ha‘Avodah was in a minority, and the successive Labor-led coalition governments. Most Labor ministers vaguely supported the plan or some two-state variant. But the coalition cabinet, which always included parties of the Right—for a time, also Herut-Gahal and, throughout, National Religious Party representatives—refused to endorse it. Indeed, within weeks, the Right declared, in the words of Menachem Begin, that it was “inconceivable” to “hand over to any form of Gentile rule . . . even one inch of our country”105 (though after 1967 he was gradually and quietly to drop the Revisionists’ traditional claim to part of Transjordan and to limit his vision of “Greater Israel” to historic Palestine west of the river).106

So the Allon Plan had a twilight life. It was the only game in town—and it wasn’t; it was both on and off the table. Labor ministers repeatedly discussed it with Jordan’s King Hussein, Abdullah’s grandson. It appears that the Israelis initially offered Hussein some 70 percent of the West Bank—the hilly spine from Hebron through Ramallah to Jenin and the territory to the west, to the Qalqilya-Tulkarm line. Then, in the succession of secret meetings—with Eshkol’s successor, Golda Meir, Allon himself, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, Defense Minister Shimon Peres, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—they gradually upped the ante, according to Hussein, “to something like 90 per cent of the territory, 98 per cent even, excluding Jerusalem.” But the king continued to demand all 100 percent, including East Jerusalem—“I could not compromise,” Hussein recalled—and it was never completely clear whether he was offering full peace in exchange for the 100 percent (after all, he had signed on at the Khartoum Summit in September 1967 to the rejectionist “three nos”).107 So nothing was ever resolved or agreed."

**The Arabs

"In the 1920s and subsequently, the Palestine Arabs defined Palestine...following the contours of the British Mandate borders. No clearly defined “falastin” having existed before, administratively or politically, they had no other definition to go by."

"From inception, the Palestine Arab national movement, backed by the national movements and societies in the surrounding Arab countries, demanded that Palestine become an independent sovereign Arab state (except for the Syrian nationalists, who generally claimed and wanted Palestine as part of the future Syrian state) and rejected the notion of sharing the country with the Jews, either demographically, in a binational structure, or geographically, through partition."

"The so-called Third Palestine Arab Congress...completely, flatly rejected Jewish claims to Palestine: “Palestine is the holy land of the two Christian and Muslim worlds and . . . its destiny may not pass into other than Muslim and Christian hands.” The Congress denounced the Balfour Declaration as contrary to “the laws of God and man.”108 (At the time, there were some eighty thousand Jews and seven hundred thousand Arabs in Palestine. About 10 percent of the Arab population was Christian. The Muslims were highly suspicious of their Christian neighbors. Many believed that the Christians were happy with British rule and favored its perpetuation. The reference in the congress’s resolution to “Christian” rule is an obvious sop to the British—not an indication of a desire by the Muslims for power sharing with their Christian compatriots or of a concern for Christian interests.)"

"The leaders of the national movement rejected the Jewish claims to the country and, indeed, the Jews’ ties to the land: “We have shown over and over again,” they wrote to Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, “that the supposed historic connection of the Jews with Palestine rests upon very slender historic data. The historic rights of the Arabs are far stronger" ... The Arabs wanted all of Palestine and refused to share power with the Jews or to divide the country with them."

**The Arabs and binationalism

"As Susan Hattis, the first historian of the binational idea in Palestine, has put it, the Arabs regarded the Jewish binationalists as “suspect, for as the Arabs saw them, they were simply a sugar coating on a bitter pill which the Arabs refused to swallow. The Arabs were usually suspicious of the Jewish bi-nationalists and their intentions, refusing to take them at face value.” They viewed them as Zionists in sheep’s clothing, ultimately pursuing and facilitating the emergence of a Jewish state.111

Even the most moderate-sounding Palestinian Arabs rejected binationalism. Sharing sovereignty with a people who were traditionally a subject minority, seen as alien upstarts and usurpers, and newly come, was unthinkable and contrary to every fiber of their Islamic, exclusivist being. But, given the reality of Mandatory rule and the necessity of attuning their arguments to Western mores, Palestine’s Arab elite often, at least in public, brandished Western principles as the core of their argumentation. Hence, Palestinian spokesmen regularly invoked slogans like democracy, majority will, and one man, one vote—catchphrases and norms that, in fact, were completely alien to their history and social and political ethos and mindset."

"Yet although Arab attitudes to binationalism were invariably dismissive, one variant, the cantonization scheme, earned at least passing, if tactical, approval from one important local intellectual. Ahmed Khalidi...told Magnes that “until the Jews realize that there must be some sort of reasonable limit to the practical application of the National Home both in land and population, it is difficult to see how the Arabs could be convinced to attempt to create a ‘rapprochement.’” In other words, there needed to be a “reasonable fixed quota” on Jewish immigration, leaving “an Arab numerical majority versus a rich and enlightened Jewish minority.” He added that “the friendship of the Arab should be in the long run more precious to Jews than obtaining millions of dunams or introducing thousands of [new] immigrants.”114

In the end, Khalidi’s plan envisaged a unitary state consisting of Transjordan and Palestine under Prince Abdullah’s rule, with an autonomous Jewish canton in the Palestine lowlands and with a limitation on Jewish immigration, assuring a permanent Arab majority—not exactly the polity envisaged by the Jewish binationalists."

"In general, the Palestine Arabs opposed the idea of a binational one-state entity in principle. In the early 1940s, one ‘Omar Salah al-Barghouti, a member of the Opposition to Husseini, discussed the idea with members of the League for Arab-Jewish Rapprochement and Cooperation, a Jewish body led by Haim Margaliyot Kalvarisky, and with Magnes. The body, founded in 1939, included several ex–Brit Shalom intellectuals (Simon and Sali Hirsch) and representatives of the Marxist Left Po’alei Zion Party and Hashomer Hatza‘ir in its ranks. Barghouti reportedly said that such a binational state could arise only within the framework of a pan-Arab federation of Middle Eastern states and appeared to agree to demographic parity at some point in the future between the Arab and Jewish populations. But he appears to have represented no significant element in the Palestinian Arab public or political opinion, and no agreement was ever signed.118"

"A few years later, a similar fate befell the more advanced negotiations between Fawzi Darwish al-Husseini, of al-Tur village, east of Jerusalem, and his minuscule Falastin al-Jadida...sought to establish a joint Arab-Jewish political party or at least an Arab equivalent to the Rapprochement League. He sought “equality in everything . . . and the membership of a bi-national Palestine in a League of Arab States.” On 11 November 1946 al-Husseini, in the name of Falastin al-Jadida, signed a vaguely worded agreement with the league. The agreement spoke of Arab-Jewish “cooperation,” political equality, Jewish immigration limited only by the country’s economic absorptive capacity, and the inclusion of Palestine in a league of neighboring Arab states. But twelve days later he was murdered by Arab gunmen."

"Binationalism, indeed, had never found a toehold in any substantial segment of Palestinian Arab society. As Albert Hourani, one of the more reasonable al-Husseini spokesmen (he apparently loathed al-Husseini but, a wise man, kept his thoughts to himself ), who went on to become a professor of Middle East history at Oxford University, put it in testimony before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in 1946: “A bi-national state of the kind that Dr. Magnes suggests can only work if a certain spirit of cooperation and trust exists and if there is an underlying sense of unity to neutralize communal differences. But that spirit does not exist in Palestine . . . If a bi-national state could be established—it would lead to one of two things: either to a complete deadlock involving perhaps the intervention of foreign powers, or else the domination of the whole life of the state by communal considerations.”120 There may still have been a few Palestinian Arabs, perhaps in Zionist pay, perhaps infused with vengeful anti-al-Husseini feelings (al-Husseini gunmen in the late 1930s and the 1940s killed a great many moderate Palestinians who had unforgiving fathers, children, and brothers), willing to join Magnes in his advocacy of binationalism. But they were largely silent and probably could have been counted on the fingers of two hands."

"The thrust of Palestinian Arab nationalist feeling in the matter was officially laid out by al-Husseini’s Arab Office—which represented the movement in Britain—in August 1947. Its memorandum (probably penned by Hourani), “The Future of Palestine,” which was submitted to UNSCOP, stated:

All responsible Arab organisations oppose binationalism uncompromisingly... The fundamental Arab objection to the bi-national state is . . . one of principle: that to give a minority a political status equal to that of the majority is essentially undemocratic, the more so as it is certain that the minority will use its power to override the will of the majority . . . Furthermore, the condition put forward by the advocates of the bi-national state, that immigration should continue at least until the Jews reach numerical equality with the Arabs and possibly become a majority eventually, is again a denial of democracy, and if adopted would in fact turn the Arabs into a minority immediately. It is thus clear that the proposals for a binational state put forward by Dr. Magnes and his group are nothing but another way of reaching the objective of Zionism, that is, the creation of a Jewish state. For this reason, the Arabs regard the views of Dr. Magnes as no less extreme and perhaps more dangerous than those of the official Zionists, because they are cloaked in an aspect of moderation and reasonableness.121"

**The Arabs and partition

"Husseini and the AHC flatly rejected the Peel recommendations, though, curiously, they did so in an initially hesitant fashion and only after eliciting the opinions of the neighboring Arab leaders. Most of these leaders were unequivocal. Saudi Arabia’s king, Ibn Sa‘ud, said that establishing a Jewish state was unthinkable in Islamic terms.122 Iraq’s prime minister, Hikmat Sulaiman, acting as the Arab states’ point man, denounced the partition proposal and declared: “Any person venturing to agree to act as Head of such a [truncated Palestinian Arab] State would be regarded as an outcast throughout the Arab world, and would incur the wrath of Moslems all over the East. I declare both as head of an Arab Government and as a private citizen, that I should always oppose any individual ready to stab the Arab race in the heart.”123 Sulaiman’s pronouncement was apparently backed by a fatwa by the Shi‘ite ulema of Karbala and Najaf, who forbade acceptance of the “throne of Palestine” on pain of being declared apostate; “his evidence as a witness would be held inad-missible, he would be refused burial in a Muslim cemetery, and he would be held accursed until the day of Resurrection.”124"

"And, indeed, Abdullah, a British ward, was the sole Arab ruler who (initially) spoke out favorably about the Peel recommendations, which had suggested that, eventually, the Arab part of Palestine would be joined to his emirate, under his rule. But within weeks he, too, fell into line with the rejectionist Arab position."

"The Husseini position appears to have enjoyed widespread backing inside Palestine. A special correspondent of the London Times, after touring the country immediately after the publication of the Peel recommendations, reported: “Any Arab who makes a conciliatory move or does anything short of rejecting the partition scheme as impossible may expect to find himself denounced as a traitor or exposed to terrorism.”126"

**The Nashashibis

"The Nashashibis had been spo-radically supported by Emir Abdullah and the British, and, occasionally, Zionist officials were wont to call the Nashashibis, who in the mid-1930s launched the National Defense Party, “moderates” in counterpoint to the “extremist” Husseinis.

But the fact is that, although there was a difference in the tone of the two parties’ pronouncements, in their methods (the Husseinis blithely used terrorism against both their enemies, the Jews and the British, and against their Arab rivals, primarily the Nashashibis) and in their seeming readiness to fall in with British plans, the two parties were at one in their objectives—a Palestine ruled solely by the Arabs, perhaps with a Jewish minority. Ragheb Nashashibi put it well in an interview with A. J. Brooks of the Manchester Guardian: “In fact, there is not among them [that is, the Palestine Arabs] any one Arab who can be described as ‘extremist’ and another as ‘moderate,’ for our cause is that of a whole nation, and our entire nation is in agreement . . . If those who use the words ‘extremist’ and ‘moderate’ believe that there are Arabs who could accept what the whole nation refuses [that is, partition], the only thing one can say about them is that their belief is without foundation.”127 Nashashibi apparently did not like being called a “moderate” (at least in Palestine and the Arab world). In fact, there were no substantive Arab “moderates”; there were spokesmen who sounded more mellow and mellif-luous and others who sounded more radical. As one British senior official put it during the Arab Revolt (after the Nashashibis and Husseinis had become estranged), “All Arabs including Christians are quite definitely . . . utterly opposed to partition in any form . . . There is no moderate political opinion on this political issue.”128 The decades-long battle between the Nashashibis and Husseinis was over power and its benefits, not about a possible compromise with the Jews."

"Perhaps to curry favor with the British and the Zionists, who provided the Nashashibis with funds, during the early months of 1937 the National Defense Party, against the backdrop of rumors that the Peel Commission might rule in favor of partition, appears to have expressed a measure of support for the idea.129"

"Nashashibi was no two-stater or binationalist. He “fiercely opposed . . . Zionist ambitions,” as his biographer, Nasser Eddin Nashashibi—no pro-Zionist himself—put it.133 Indeed, as early as 1914, on the eve of elections to the Ottoman parliament, Ragheb Nashashibi declared: “If I am elected as a representative I shall devote my strength day and night to doing away with the scourge and threat of . . . Zionism.”134 But he was keenly aware of Palestinian Arab weakness and thought that “the only rational line to take is to be friendly and conciliatory with the British,” that is, to try to wean them away from pro-Zionism and gain their support for the Palestinian Arab cause.135 In short, Nashashibi’s momentary support of partition, as of a series of earlier and later British proposals that in some way favored Zionism, was tactical."

**The Husseinis

"As a rule, vagueness disappeared. The discourse of the Palestinian national movement’s leader during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was starkly expulsionist. Under his aegis, the Arab leadership sought and fought not only to halt Jewish immigration but also to roll back and destroy the Yishuv. Its mindset and ideology were expulsionist and, in great measure, anti-Semitic, though, given prevailing Western norms, they often obscured this in conversa-tion with Europeans. But when speaking and writing in Arabic, they were nothing if not forthright. Husseini was later to write of the Jews: “One of the most prominent facets of the Jewish character is their exaggerated conceit and selfishness, rooted in their belief that they are the chosen people of God. There is no limit to their covetousness and they prevent others from enjoying the Good . . . They have no pity and are known for their hatred, rivalry and hardness, as Allah described them in the Koran.”141 Hence, it is unsurprising that the Arab mobs that periodically ran amok in Palestine’s streets during the Mandate—in 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936–1939—screamed “idhbah al yahud” (slaughter the Jews).

Occasionally, the leaders of the national movement, when pressed, let down their guard also with Western interlocutors. As early as 1919, spokesmen for the Jaffa Muslim-Christian Association, representing the Arab notability in Palestine’s main town, told the King-Crane Commission, sent by the Allied powers to investigate the Palestine problem: “We will push the Zionists into the sea—or they will send us back into the desert.”142 Indeed, throughout the Mandate years the Palestinian Arabs viewed the conflict as a zero-sum game that allowed of no compromise and would necessarily end in one side’s destruction or removal."

"Through the Mandate years, al-Husseini espoused a one-state solution in which only Jews who had been permanently resident in Palestine before 1917 (or, in some versions, 1914) would be allowed to stay (or, in another version, be granted citizenship). In 1938, one of al-Husseini’s representatives, Musa Husseini, a relative, told Ben-Gurion that Haj Amin “insists on seven per cent [as the maximal percentage of Jews in the total population of Palestine], as it was at the end of the [First] World War.”144"

"Husseini was to repeat a similar formula in 1974, shortly before his death in exile: “There is no room for peaceful coexistence with our enemies. The only solution is the liquidation of the foreign conquest in Palestine . . . and the establishment of a national Palestinian state on the basis of its Muslim and Christian inhabitants and its Jewish [inhabitants] who lived here before the British conquest and their descendants.”146 It is not without relevance that the Palestine National Council in the 1960s adopted a similar formula in the Palestinian National Charter"

"The fact that Haj Amin al-Husseini sat out most of World War II in Berlin, was employed by the German Foreign Ministry as a broadcaster of anti-Allied jihadist propaganda to the Arab world, and helped recruit Muslim soldiers in the Balkans to fight the Russians on the Eastern Front is clearly salient to understanding the thinking of the Yishuv during 1945–1948: Palestine’s Jews believed that the Palestinians intended to slaughter them in a second Holocaust. And at least some Arabs, too, believed that such a denouement was imminent. Matiel Mug hannam, the Lebanese-born Christian Arab head of the Arab Women’s Organization, affiliated to al-Husseini and the Arab Higher Committee, at the start of 1948 told an interviewer: “[A Jewish state] has no chance to survive now that the ‘Holy War’ has been declared. All the Jews will eventually be massacred.”147"

**The 1960's

"In 1964, Egypt, partly for internal Arab reasons, arranged the convocation of a Palestine National Council, consisting of representatives of the Palestinian communities and organizations in Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora. The PNC first met in Jerusalem in May 1964, there establishing an executive wing, the Palestine Liberation Organization, with a former al-Husseini aide, Ahmed Shukeiry, as its first president.

At that meeting, the PNC set out its political goals in a document entitled “The Palestinian National Charter (or Covenant),” henceforward the PLO’s constitution. In it, the “forces of international Zionism” are defined as “evil” and the Palestinian people are enjoined “to move forward on the path of holy war [jihad] until complete and final victory.”

Zionism is defined as “a colonialist movement, aggressive and expansionist in its goal, racist in its configuration, and fascist in its means and aims . . . Zionism [is] an illegal movement and [the nations should] outlaw its presence and activities.” Palestine is “an Arab homeland . . . [and] part of the great Arab homeland.”

“Palestine, with its boundaries at the time of the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit . . . The people of Palestine [will] determine its destiny when it completes the liberation of its homeland.” “The people of Palestine” are defined as “those Arab citizens who were living normally in Palestine up to 1947, whether they remained or were expelled. [Moreover], every child who was born to a Palestinian father after this date, whether in Palestine or outside, is a Palestinian.” The charter goes on to declare: “Jews of Palestine origin are considered Palestinians if they are willing to live peacefully and loyally in Palestine . . . The partitioning of Palestine, which took place in 1947, and the establishment of Israel are illegal and null and void . . . The Balfour Declaration . . . [is] null and void. The claims of historic and spiritual ties between Jews and Palestine are not in agreement with the facts of history or with the true basis of sound statehood. Judaism, because it is a divine religion, is not a nationality with independent existence. Furthermore, the Jews are not one people with an independent personality because they are citizens in their [various] states.”"

"At its meeting of 1–17 July 1968, the PNC removed a number of loopholes in the original document and clarified various clauses. Article 15 now stated: “The liberation of Palestine . . . is a national duty . . . and aims at the elimination of Zionism in Palestine.”"

"Article 6—modified and “improved”—now stated: “The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.” The PLO normally dated the “beginning” of the Zionist invasion to the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 (though a more rigorous definition, also in common Palestinian use, located the start of Zionism in 1882). Hence, only Jews who had lived in the country permanently before 1917 (or 1882) would be considered citizens of post-Zionist Palestine. Of course, by 1968 few of Israel’s 2.5 million Jews had been permanent residents of Palestine before 1917 (or 1882). What was to be done with those still living from among the millions of post-1882 or post-1917 immigrants and their descendants was not explained.

It is worth noting that the charter, in both its original 1964 and its amended 1968 versions, failed to define the nature of the state the PLO intended to establish, beyond the provision for freedom of worship. Only during the 1970s did some Palestinians hesitantly begin to refer, especially when talking to Westerners, to a “democratic Palestine” or a “secular, democratic Palestine” as their objective (of this, more later)—but this goal was never introduced at any time into the charter, perhaps to avoid alienating Muslim believers, to whom both democracy and secularism were anathema.

In recent years, Palestinian advocates in the West began to be-little the charter, because its insistence on destroying Israel and supplanting it with a Palestine Arab state was impolitic and did their cause little good in Western public opinion. Hence, Palestinian-American historian and activist Rashid Khalidi, in The Iron Cage, wrote: “The fact is that it [that is, the charter] was amended at different times [Khalidi’s mendacious implication here being that it was amended in a positive, two-state direction], that as time went on most Palestinians paid it less and less heed, and that the political programs adopted by successive PNCs progressively contradicted it, was rarely considered by those who had an interest in showing that there had never been any evolution in the Palestinian position.”149 But the fact is that the PNC was and remains the Palestinian national movement’s supreme, sovereign body and its resolutions, including the charter, with its various emendations, were, during the subsequent decades, certainly down to the end of the twentieth century, representative of the Palestinian people’s sovereign will."

**The 1960's: Fatah

Fatah’s ideology was always straightforward and clear. As Anglo-Palestinian historian Yezid Sayigh has put it, Fatah’s “ultimate goal,” from inception, “was . . . to destroy . . . Israel as an economic, political, and military entity and restore Palestine as it still existed in the minds of most Palestinians, the [Arab] homeland that was before 1948 . . . There was little difference between Fatah and any other Palestinian group in this respect (with the solitary exception of the communists [who, directed from Moscow, supported a two-state solution]). There was little room for the Jews in this outlook.”150 A Fatah tract from 1967 that Sayigh quotes stated: “[The] military defeat [of Israel] is not the only aim of the Palestinian liberation war, but also elimination of the Zionist character of the occupied homeland, both human and social.”151

Fatah’s ideology is embodied in “The Fatah Constitution,” drawn up by the movement in 1964. It has never been revoked or amended. Article 1 states that “Palestine is part of the Arab world”; Article 4 that “the Palestinian struggle is part . . . of the world-wide struggle against Zionism, colonialism and international imperialism”; Article 6 that “UN projects, accords and resolutions . . . which undermine the Palestinian people’s right in their homeland are illegal and rejected”; Article 7 that “the Zionist movement is racial, colonial and aggressive”; and Article 9 that “liberating Palestine and protecting its holy places is an Arab, religious and human obligation.” The constitution defines Fatah’s goals (Article 12) as the “complete liberation of Palestine, and [the] eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence” and (Article 13) “establishing an independent democratic state with complete sovereignty on all Palestinian lands, and Jerusalem is its capital city, and protecting the citizens’ legal and equal rights without any racial or religious discrimination.” Armed struggle is posited as the means for “liberating Palestine . . . [and] uprooting the Zionist existence . . . [and] demolishing the Zionist occupation.” (“Occupation” here refers to those areas that became the State of Israel in 1948–1949, not to the territories conquered by the IDF in 1967.) This struggle “will not cease,” states Article 19, “unless the Zionist state is demolished and Palestine is completely liberated.” (The constitution, of course, also posits the establishment of a “progressive” society, the necessity of “self-criticism” and a “collective leadership,” the desire to achieve “international peace,” the need for “[non-]discrimination against women,” and so on.)152

What should happen to the Jews living in “Palestine” (Israel) 116 was nowhere explained. But clearly Fatah’s leaders had some level of expulsionist intent. As Salah Khalaf (“Abu Iyad”) put it (in A Dialogue about the Principal Issues), hinting, or more than hinting, at the goal, the movement had asked the Arab states “to allow former Jewish nationals to reclaim their citizenship and property, with the aim of opening a floodgate for ‘reverse emigration’ from Israel.”153 Kamal ‘Udwan, another Fatah leader, also spoke of pushing the Jews “into reverse emigration,” though he added, somewhat contradictorily, that the “option of comprehensive cleansing [is] unacceptable in historic, human and civilizational terms.”154

**The 1970's: Arafat's phased struggle

"In 1970 Yasser Arafat said that the movement’s aim was to liberate Palestine “from [the Mediterranean] sea to [the Jordan] river, and from Rafah to Naqura [on the Lebanese border].”155 But the years wore on, and no liberation was in sight. Following the October 1973 War, the PLO began to moderate its position tactically, if not strategically. The Palestinians were under pressure from the moderate Arab states, led by Anwar Sadat’s Egypt, who was headed for peace with Israel, and the West. At issue was whether the PLO should agree to establish a ministate in the West Bank and Gaza Strip should Israel agree to withdraw from these territories as a result of Israeli-Egyptian negotiations or an international peace conference. The Palestinian hard-liners feared that some might interpret Palestinian agreement to establish such a ministate as a statement of inability or unwillingness to continue the struggle to liberate the rest of Palestine; in effect, that the Palestinians were at last making do with, or accepting the principle of, partition and a two-state solution.

Not so, said Arafat, the PLO’s chairman and Haj Amin al-Husseini’s heir as the leader of the Palestinian national movement. The Palestinians should accept and establish their state on any part of Palestine relinquished by Israel; but this would be only the first stage in what was, and should be regarded as, a phased struggle."

"The idea of a phased struggle to achieve the gradual elimination of Israel and a one (Arab)-state solution was enshrined in the Palestine National Council resolutions of 8 June 1974. These asserted the Palestinians’ “national rights” as “rights to [a refugee] return and to self-determination on the whole of the soil of their homeland.”"

"as Salah Khalaf, Arafat’s deputy, put it: “What were the mistakes of our previous leaders? Their mistake was adher-ing to our people’s historical rights without adopting stage-by-stage programs of struggle.”158 And in interviews, Arafat continued to enunciate the traditional policy of “no concession of our historic rights,” “no reconciliation,” “no negotiations,” no recognition of Israel, and no peace.159"

"In other words, they adopted a conciliatory face to appease the West, but in effect, Arafat and company saw 1974 merely as the acceptance of the need for the elimination of Israel in stages rather than in one fell swoop, given the diplomatic and military realities."

"Several months later, Arafat was invited to address the United Nations General Assembly. In his famous “Gun and Olive Branch Speech” of 13 November 1974 (he stood at the podium with a holstered gun at his hip), Arafat lambasted Zionism as “the chief form” of racism in the world: “it is united with anti-Semitism in its retrograde tenets.” And he laid out his vision: “[I] dream [of] a peaceful future in Palestine’s sacred land . . . Let us work together that my dream may be fulfilled, that I may return with my people out of exile . . . there in Palestine to live . . . in one democratic State where Christian, Jew and Muslim live in justice, equality and fraternity. As chairman of the PLO . . . I proclaim . . . that when we speak of our common hopes for the Palestine of tomorrow we include in our perspective all Jews now living in Palestine who choose to live with us there in peace and without discrimination.”

Arafat thus appeared to have dropped the National Charter’s stipulation about Jews resident in Palestine after 1917. But, while Palestinian propagandists at the time were busy telling the world that the PLO was beginning to accept the notion of a two-state compromise, Arafat was reiterating the PLO’s traditional one-state goal, albeit dicing it up as a “democratic” polity."

"Through the 1970s, the rejectionist Palestinian groups, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Islamists, continued to oppose the PNC’s enunciated phased approach and the establishment of a temporary Palestinian ministate as the first step toward “liberating the whole of Palestine.” And following Sadat’s November 1977 visit to Jerusalem, the PLO formally joined, or rejoined, them and returned to the bosom of the “steadfastness and confrontation front,” composed of rejectionist Syria, Libya, and other Arab states that officially and openly sought Israel’s destruction. The meeting of the rejectionist states (and the PLO) in Tripoli on 2–5 December, in its concluding resolution, denounced Sadat, rejected UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, and reiterated the “no peace, no recognition, and no negotiation” formula adopted by the Arab League at Khartoum in 1967. Salah Khalaf signed the resolution for Fatah, Hamid Abu-Sitta for the PLO; Arafat, always the agile operator, stayed away from the signing ceremony.

But his inclinations and position were clear. In Beirut in December 1980 he told a meeting: “When we speak of the Palestinians’ return, we want to say: Acre before Gaza, Beersheba before Hebron. We recognize one thing, namely that the Palestinian flag will fly over Jaffa.”166 Acre, Beersheba, and Jaffa—unlike Gaza and Hebron—are parts of Israel proper, indeed deep in Israel, in its pre-1967 configuration.

During the 1970s and early 1980s, a number of PLO dissidents—and here we appear to be talking about real as opposed to make-believe PLO “moderates”—struck out on their own, secretly “negotiating” or, rather, debating with left-wing Israelis, and hesitantly raising the idea of a two-state solution (usually based on the UN General Assembly Resolution 181 borders, that is, the partition resolution of November 1947). But all were gunned down, ad seriatim, by their less moderate Palestinian colleagues. The best known were Said Hamami, the PLO representative in London, murdered on 4 January 1978, ‘Izz al-Din Kalak, murdered on 3 August 1978, and Issam Sartawi, murdered on 10 April 1983."

**Did the PLO subsequently accept a two state solution?: Oslo years under Rabin

"The text of the Declaration of Independence was apparently written largely by the leading Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, normally resident in Paris. The English-language translation was drafted by Edward Said, the leading Palestinian American academic.

During the PNC deliberations in Algiers before the publication of the declaration, in the keynote address on 14 November, Arafat’s deputy, Salah Khalaf, reiterated the PLO’s policy of a phased takeover of all of Palestine: “This is a state for the coming generations. At first, [the Palestinian state] would be small . . .
But] God willing, it would expand eastward, westward, northward, and southward . . . [True,] I [once] wanted all of Palestine all at once. But I was a fool. Yes, I am interested in the liberation of Palestine, but the question is how. And the answer is: Step by step.” 168

To the West, the PLO presented the Declaration of Independence as a radical moderation of its positions. The declaration referred to UN General Assembly Resolution 181, “which partitioned Palestine into two states, one Arab, one Jewish,” viewing the resolution as the international warrant and grant of legitimacy for “the right of the Palestinian Arab people to sovereignty” (whereas previous PNC and PLO statements had always dismissed the resolution as “null and void,” because it also underpinned Israel’s right to exist). The declaration referred to the Palestinian “patrimony,” “rights,” including to self-determination, and “territory.” It nowhere asserted the Palestinian claim to all of Palestine. But at the same time, the declaration refrained from defining geographically “The State of Palestine,” whose independence was now being proclaimed; even more tellingly, no- where was the State of Israel mentioned or described. The document rejected the use of violence against Palestinian “territorial integrity and independence” much as it rejected the use of violence “against [the] territorial integrity of other states” (Israel was not specified). The declaration rededicated the Palestinian people to the struggle that “shall continue until the occupation ends”—but whether the reference was to the West Bank and Gaza Strip (occupied since 1967) alone or to all of Jewish-occupied Palestine, the normal usage of the word “occupation” in Pales tinian discourse since 1949, was left unclear. "

"Many Westerners and some Israelis saw the document as implying acceptance of Israel’s existence—and Palestinian spokesmen in the West, bent on winning over hearts and minds, described it thus: “This was the first official Palestinian recognition of the legitimacy of the existence of a Jewish state, and the first unequivocal, explicit PLO endorsement of a two-state solution to the conflict.”170 But of course, it was no such thing.

Nevertheless, during the following decade, the PLO appeared to inch significantly toward a two-state solution and acceptance of Israel’s legitimacy. On 13 December 1988, speaking before the UN General Assembly convened in Geneva, Arafat spoke of making “peace based on justice.” But he failed to address Israel’s right to exist or to dispel the ambiguities relating to UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which provided the accepted international basis for a negotiated peace. Two days later, at a press conference, Arafat declared that the PNC had accepted Resolutions 242 and 338 as a basis for negotiations—in truth, it had not—and he renounced “all types of terrorism.” "

"But then things began, or seemingly began, to change. In October 1991, under American pressure, representatives of Israel and the Arab states convoked in a peace conference in Madrid.

...By May 1993 the main lines of an agreement had gelled, and in September, Israel and the PLO exchanged letters of mutual recognition. Arafat wrote Rabin on 9 September that the PLO “recognize[s] the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security,” “accepts UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338,” commits itself “to a peaceful resolution of the conflict,” “renounces the use of terrorism” and affirms that the articles in the charter that denied Israel’s right to exist “are now inoperative and no longer valid.” Arafat undertook “to submit to the Palestinian National Council . . . the necessary changes in regard to the Palestinian Charter.” In response, Rabin sent a brief letter stating that “the Government of Israel has decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people” and to negotiate peace with it.171 The secret negotiations and the exchange of letters in which they culminated marked the start of the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo peace process, which was to dominate Middle Eastern politics until 2000.

...More powers were awarded the newly created Palestine National Authority, and the traditional old guard leadership of the PLO was allowed to return from exile in Tunis to the territories. Most major West Bank towns (Ramallah, Tulkarm, Nablus, Jenin, Bethlehem) were transferred to the control of the newly established PNA security forces.

But Arafat kept dropping hints, in speeches in Arabic to Muslim audiences, that he was still wedded to the phased policy of liberating all of Palestine and had no intention of honoring a two-state settlement. He turned a blind eye to continued Palestinian terrorism and occasionally encouraged it. On 10 May 1994 he delivered a sermon (in broken English) in a mosque in Johannesburg, South Africa, in which he promised that “the jihad will continue.” Not “the permanent State of Israel” but “the permanent State of Palestine” is what is under discussion with the Israelis, he assured his listeners. In any event, he added, for him the Oslo Accord was no more binding than the accord signed by Muhammad with the Quraish tribe in 628 in Hijaz, “Hudnat Hudeibiya (the Hudeibiya truce),” which provided for a ten-year ceasefire between the faithful and the infidel tribe, which Muhammad proceeded to violate less than two years later, once his forces were ready.172

"After 1993, once the PLO was firmly ensconced in the territories, Israel was subjected to continuous terrorist attack by Islamic
fundamentalists and PLO-linked forces—in violation of the agreements signed by Arafat and his aides. These resulted in Israeli foot-dragging in implementing its side of the Oslo commitments. Ultimately, Palestinian terrorism strengthened Israel’s right and assured the election of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud leader, rather than Labor’s Shimon Peres, as prime minister in the 1996 general elections, which followed the November 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Israeli law student."

**Did the PLO subsequently accept a two state solution?: Oslo years under Netanyahu

"The Netanyahu years, 1996–1999, were a period of paralysis in the peace process—curiously marred by far fewer Arab terrorist attacks than the previous years of peace-minded Labor administration (probably due to the close and effective anti-Hamas cooperation between Israel’s and the PNA’s security forces)— though Israel grudgingly added most of the city of Hebron to the territory controlled by the PNA. The PNA, for its part, after protracted foot-dragging and American and Israeli pressures, made good, or appeared to make good, on its commitment of 1993 regarding the charter. On 24 April 1996 the PNC met in Gaza and, by a vote of 504 to 54, with 14 abstentions, decided to amend the charter in line with Arafat’s commitments to excise the articles calling for Israel’s destruction. The resolution also authorized the PLO’s legal committee to redraft the charter and present the new version to the PLO Central Committee. But two problems have obtruded. The first is simple: the PNA/PLO failed during the following thirteen years to “redraft and ratify an amended charter or adopt a new, alternative charter, which omits the articles endorsing Israel’s destruction. The second is more complicated and bears directly on Palestinian mendacity, which has accompanied the shifts and turns in Palestinian politics and diplomacy vis-à-vis Israel since the 1970s. The official Palestinian translation into English of the first part of the 24 April resolution read: “The Palestinian National Charter is hereby amended by canceling the articles that are contrary to the letters exchanged between the PLO and the Government of Israel 9–10 September 1993.” But the earlier Palestinian version of the translation, posted on the official PNA web site stated that the PNC had “decided to change/amend” the charter, meaning that the PNC intended at some point in the future to amend the charter, not that it had “hereby amended” the charter. And neither version specified what exactly was to be amended or had been amended.

So, quite naturally, many PLO stalwarts insisted that the charter had not, in fact, been changed. Farouk Kaddoumi, the PLO’s long-time rejectionist “foreign minister” who lives in Tunis, in an interview with a Jordanian newspaper in 2004 put it this way: “The Palestinian National Charter has not been amended . . . It was said that some articles are no longer effective, but they were not changed.”173

So, quite naturally, the Netanyahu government continued to complain and press Arafat, directly and via Washington, regarding the necessary emendation of the charter. The upshot was Arafat’s letters of January 1998 to President Clinton and British prime minister Tony Blair. Arafat wrote Clinton that the PNC in April 1996 had decided that the charter “is hereby amended by canceling the articles that are contrary” to the Rabin-Arafat letters of September 1993 and went on to list the articles that had been nullified or partly nullified, which were “inconsistent with the PLO commitment to recognize and live in peace side by side with Israel.”174 But neither Netanyahu nor the Americans were mollified. Arafat needed to take one further step.

The matter was (apparently) resolved during Clinton’s brief visit to Gaza on 14 December 1998, when by a show of hands the gathered members of the PNC, the PLO Central Council, PNA ministers, and Arafat voted overwhelmingly to endorse the PNC resolution of 1996, after which Clinton declared: “I thank you for your rejection—fully, finally and forever—of the passages in the Palestinian Charter calling for the destruction of Israel. For they were the ideological underpinning of a struggle renounced at Oslo.”175

Still, the six years of Palestinian foot-dragging and squiggling over the charter—important both as symbol and as substance— had left many Israelis skeptical. After all, the PNA and PLO, under Arafat (and then under his successor as Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas) had failed to produce a new, appropriately modified charter, as they originally had promised. Did their obvious reluctance to carry out these commitments not hint at the basic untrustworthiness of Israel’s “partners” in peace? Did Arafat and the PNC really accept a two-state solution, and even if so, did they really represent the will of the Palestinian national movement? What were the Palestinians really after?"

**2000 and After

"In rejecting the two-state solution offered, in two versions, in 2000, they were also—so it seemed—reneging on a process and on a commitment they had made, and repeated, in the course of the 1990s. And whereas in 1937 and 1947 they had rejected merely a two-state vision, a possibility, as it were, in 2000 they were also rejecting a reality, denying the legitimacy and right to life of an existing state, subverting a principle on which the inter- national order rests. Hence the surprise and shock of peacemongering Israelis and well-meaning Westerners—a surprise and shock that had been completely absent in 1937 and 1947 among Arab, Zionist, and British observers."

"The Palestinians were somewhat wary, saying that they were “unprepared”; and they feared that the Israelis and Americans, who were allies, would “gang up” on them. And Barak was hobbled by a disintegrating government: three of his right-wing and religious coalition partners (Shas, the National Religious Party, and Yisrael Ba‘aliya), opposed to his expected concessions on territory and Jerusalem, bolted the government in the days before he departed for the United States. (This fact would later enable Palestinians and their supporters to argue that whatever Barak had offered had been meaningless because he would never have been able to deliver on it. But the Israelis countered with a precedent: had Barak and Arafat reached a deal, the Israeli public would have given Barak a wholesome mandate, overruling the recalcitrant political party leaderships—much as had occurred in 1978–1979, when the public, and in its wake, the great majority of its parliamentary representatives, had supported Begin after he had concluded the deal with Sadat, in which Israel gave up the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for peace with Egypt.)"

"The parties convened in Camp David on 11 July. Clinton, in advance, assured Arafat—as the Palestinians demanded—that he would not publicly blame anyone if the summit collapsed. In the nonstop cycle of bilateral one-on-one and trilateral discussions that followed, between Arafat and Barak, with Clinton mediating and bridging gaps, and between teams of aides, the major issues were tackled and some gaps were narrowed. At base, Barak put on the table an offer of a Palestinian state in exchange for peace. Israel made a series of proposals, each better than the last, on territory, Jerusalem, the nature of the Palestinian state. Arafat consistently said “no” and demanded more. He made no proposals or offers of his own and, after occasionally hinting (through aides) at a willingness to concede a point on this or that issue, quickly withdrew the concession, saying he had been misunderstood. (Arafat’s English was poor—and he exploited this to parry, obfuscate, and bamboozle.) Barak, for his part, offered nothing in writing and presented no maps, later arguing that he had not wanted to leave the Palestinians with a series of concrete Israeli concessions in hand—which would then have served as the starting point in a future round of negotiations—if the Palestinians offered no concessions of their own and Camp David collapsed. But, as a result, the Palestinians could—and would—later argue that Barak had not really offered them anything, or anything concrete."

"Barak offered Arafat the establishment of an independent, but essentially demilitarized, Palestinian Arab state in the Gaza Strip and the bulk of the West Bank, with its capital in East Jerusalem. Barak said that Israel would withdraw its troops and settlers from the whole of the Gaza Strip. At the start of the summit, he said that about 80 percent of the West Bank would revert to Palestinian sovereignty; by its end, 90–91 percent was offered (and the equivalent of 1 percent compensation to the Palestinians from Israeli territory proper). Barak said that Israel would retain the remaining 9–10 percent of the territory along the Green Line, with the thick clusters of Jewish settlements (the ‘Etzion Bloc, Ariel, and so on), and the settlers inhabiting the core areas of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would be pulled back and resettled in these blocs. Israel would retain, at least temporarily, a thin strip of the southern Jordan Valley along the river as a security zone. It is not clear whether, at the end of the summit, Israel still insisted on retaining another thin strip of territory running from Jerusalem through Ma‘ale Adumim to the Jordan River, which, Barak at one point explained, the Palestinians could traverse with tunnels or bridges to maintain contiguity between the northern (Ramallah-Nablus-Jenin) and southern (Bethlehem-Hebron-Dhahiriya) sections of the West Bank.177

As to Jerusalem, Barak—breaking a long-held Israeli taboo regarding the redivision of the (“unified”) city—offered the Palestinians sovereignty over the outlying Arab neighborhoods and some form of functional control in the core Arab neighborhoods. The Palestinians were also to get control of part of the Old City, with some characteristics of sovereignty, and control though not sovereignty over the Temple Mount (al-haram al-sharif, the noble sanctuary), containing al-Aksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. There was to be a Palestinian “right of return” to the territory of the future Palestinian state but not to Israel (though Barak agreed to full compensation of the refugees for their lost property and hinted at a readiness to absorb in Israel a token number of elderly refugees within a “family reunion” scheme).

Arafat rejected the offered two-state solution. Ross recorded that Clinton blew up and yelled at the PLO leader that he had “been here fourteen days and said no to everything.” 178 Or as Clinton put it in his memoirs: on Day 8 of the summit Arafat “turned the offer down”; on Day 9, “I gave Arafat my best shot again” and “again he said no”; on Day 13, “Again Arafat said no. I shut down the talks. It was frustrating and profoundly sad.” 179 Arafat had demanded all 100 percent of the Gaza Strip and West Bank (though at one point one of his aides spoke of a readiness to cede 2–3 percent of the West Bank, with equivalent Israeli cession of territory to the Palestinians elsewhere); sovereignty over all of East Jerusalem and its Old City, except the Wailing Wall (or, in a variant, the Wailing Wall and the Jewish Quarter), and full, sole Palestinian Arab sovereignty over the Temple Mount. Indeed, at one point Arafat denied that there had ever been a Temple Mount in Jerusalem. He rejected Clinton’s last-minute proposal that sovereignty in the Old City be divided, with the Arabs sovereign over the Muslim and Christian quarters and the Jews sovereign in the rest (the Jewish and Armenian quarters), and that the Palestinians receive “custodianship” over the Temple Mount, but without full, formal sovereignty. 180 Arafat also demanded Israeli acceptance of the principle of the “right of return” and agreement to the return of the refugees to their pre-1948 homes and lands in Israel proper.

The summit broke up in failure on 26 July. Recriminations followed. Clinton, contrary to his presummit assurances, and
Barak both blamed Arafat and his inflexibility for the failure and expressed astonishment that the Arabs had rejected the most far- reaching Israeli concessions ever made. For years, the Palestinians had been demanding a two-state solution; for years, Israel had stalled—even Rabin had not formally endorsed two “states.” Now, at last, when Israel (and the United States) offered it, the Palestinians turned it down. Arafat and his aides lambasted Israel for making inadequate proposals, which amounted to giving the Palestinians a cluster of “bantustans” rather than a full-fledged independent state—and this on less than 20 percent of the territory of Mandate Palestine (the Palestinians argued that, in effect, they had already made a major “concession” in accepting the loss of the 78–79 percent of Palestine on which Israel was established in 1948–1949). There were frustration and disappointment in the Palestinian public—which was misinformed by its leaders and media about what exactly the Israelis had offered—and among left-wing Israelis, most of whom felt that they had reached the limit of concession and had been rebuffed."

"It is unclear whether the PNA and Arafat had deliberately ignited the violence or had, in a more general way, prepared the hearts and minds of the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip for its commencement (without actually ordering its start on the day and hour it began), or whether it had broken out completely spontaneously but had then been inflamed by specific, local Israeli overreactions (or underreactions) to the violence and by deliberate PNA incitement, with Arafat, as it were, riding and, in various ways, guiding the tiger. What is clear is that Arafat and his aides did nothing to douse the flames while occasionally pretending, vis-à-vis Washington, that they were trying to."

**2000 and After: Clinton Parameters

"The Clinton proposals, offering a two-state settlement, stipulated that Israel must withdraw from between 94 and 96 percent of the West Bank and, implicitly, 100 percent of the Gaza Strip, in which the Palestinian Arab state would then be established. Israel would compensate the Palestinians for the loss of the 4–6 percent of the West Bank that they would be “ceding” with a patch of Israeli territory amounting to “1 to 3 percent” of the West Bank as well as allowing the Palestinians a “safe passage” corridor between Gaza and the West Bank through Israeli territory. The 4–6 percent of the West Bank retained by Israel would include the large settlement concentrations, such as the ‘Etzion Bloc, which held some 80 percent of the territory’s settlers.

The Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian territories should be phased over thirty-six months, with an “international presence” overseeing the process. Israel would retain a “small military presence” in the Jordan Valley for “another 36 months.” Israel would also retain three early warning facilities in the West Bank, subject to review after ten years. A possible “emergency deployment” of Israeli forces in the Jordan Valley (in case of a threat developing from the east) and their routes of passage through the West Bank would need to be negotiated, as would the Israelis’ use of Palestinian air space for training and operations.

The Palestinian state that would be established should be “non-militarised,” but with a “strong Palestinian security force.” An international force would secure the future Palestine-Israel border.

Jerusalem should be divided along ethnic lines. Arab-populated districts should be under Arab sovereignty and Jewish districts under Israeli sovereignty: “This would apply to the Old City as well.”"

"As to the refugees, Clinton proposed that Israel “acknowledge the moral and material suffering caused to the Palestinian people as a result of the 1948 war” and that “compensation, resettlement [and] rehabilitation” of the refugees enjoy massive international assistance. Regarding the question of the “Right of Return,” Clinton said he understood both “how hard it is for the Palestinian leadership to appear to be abandoning this principle” and, for the Israelis, the impossibility of accepting the “right [of Arabs] to immigrate to Israel . . . that would [demographically] threaten the Jewish character of the state.” Hence, the solution lay in “the two-state approach” of having a “State of Palestine as the home- land for the Palestinian [Arab] people and the State of Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people.” What this meant, in practice, was that the Palestinian refugees would have the right of return to the Palestinian state “without ruling out that Israel would accept some of these refugees”—though not a sizable number such as would threaten the Jewish character of Israel. Clinton suggested that the two sides “recognize the right of the Palestinian refugees to return” either to “their historic homeland” or “to their homeland” and that the refugees either resettle in their host countries, resettle in the Palestinian state or in third countries, or move to Israel but that any return to Israel “would depend upon” Israeli agreement. The two parties would have to agree that this formula represented implementation of UN General Assembly Resolution 194, of December 1948, the resolution to which the Palestinians anchored their insistence on “the right of return.”

Clinton said that an agreement based on these parameters would mark “the end of the conflict and its implementation [would] put an end to all claims.” He expressed readiness to continue negotiations with the leaders “based on these ideas” and stated that if they were not accepted, they would be “not just off the table” when his presidency ended the following month ( January 2001) but gone completely.181 On the night of 27–28 December 2000 the Israeli cabinet voted to accept the Clinton parameters. The statement issued after the meeting and transmitted to Washington on 28 December said: “Israel sees these ideas as a basis for discussion provided that they remain unchanged as a basis for discussion also by the Palestinian side.”182"

"The Israeli response was embodied in a three-page letter from Gilead Sher, Barak’s chef de bureau, to Samuel Berger, the American national security adviser, with an appended three-page note entitled “Points of Clarification.” The letter and note (un- like the Arab response to the parameters) were never published. In the letter, Israel expressed unhappiness with the “numerical territorial values”—that is, the 4–6 percent to be ceded to Israel from the West Bank—and deemed them “insufficient”; but it did not explicitly demand more or suggest an alternative figure. The Israelis also requested “further elaboration” regarding the “sovereign and functional arrangements in and around Har Habayit""

"In Clinton’s (and Ross’s) view, the Israelis, whatever their misgivings, had said “yes.” In his memoirs, Clinton explicitly defined “all [the Israeli] reservations [as falling] within the parameters.”184 But the Palestinians again said “no.” After delaying their response to the proposals beyond the four days allotted by Clinton, the Palestinians presented a set of reservations that together amounted to a flat rejection of the package. The PNA response, dated 1 January 2001, entitled “Remarks and Questions,” was accompanied by a letter by Yasser Abed Rabbo, “head of the Palestinian negotiating team,” effectively saying “no” to almost each and every parameter. In some instances, the “no” was explicit; in others, it was framed as a “question” or misgivings. But taken in toto, the Palestinian document amounted to a resounding “no.”"

"After cursory expressions of gratitude to Clinton, the Palestinian note stated: “We wish to explain why the latest United States proposals, taken together and as presented without clarification, fail to satisfy the conditions required for a permanent peace.” The parameters, it stated, “divide a Palestinian state into three separate cantons connected and divided by Jewish only and Arab-only roads . . . [d]ivide Palestinian Jerusalem into a number of unconnected islands . . . [and ask] Palestinians to surrender the right of return of Palestinian refugees. [The proposal] also fails to provide workable security arrangements between Palestine and Israel . . . Recognition of the right of return and the provision of choice to refugees [meaning the choice to return to Israeli territory] is a pre-requisite for the closure of the conflict . . . The United States proposal seems to respond to Israeli demands while neglecting the basic Palestinian need: a viable state.”

Moving into specifics, the Palestinians charged that the territory of the West Bank dealt with in the parameters excluded the Dead Sea, “no-man’s land,” and Jerusalem from “the total area from which the percentages are calculated.” Moreover, the implication of the “Parameters” was that the Palestinians would not be given Israeli compensation for the ceded West Bank land in a ratio of one to one, and the area Israel proposed to give the Palestinians was “currently being used by Israel to dump toxic waste,” in no way comparable to the quality of the West Bank land Israel was being given.185

As to the Temple Mount, the Palestinians said that the “formulations” regarding the Haram were “problematic.” The Clinton proposals implied recognition of “Israeli sovereignty under the Haram”—which the Palestinians found unacceptable. The implication was that they insisted on full and sole sovereignty over the mount, above and below ground. On this point, the Palestinians, speaking for Islam, refused all compromise or equity.

The Palestinians also implied nonacceptance of an Israeli military presence along the Jordan, even for a limited time, and of “emergency deployment rights”; for both, stated the Palestinians, the Israelis had not made “a persuasive case.” Moreover, Israel needed no more than one early warning station “to satisfy its strategic needs.” Nor was the idea of Israel having aerial training and operational rights in Palestinian air space acceptable.

Last, of the points specified by Clinton, the Palestinians objected to the “end-of-conflict” clause. “We believe that this can only be achieved once the issues that have caused and perpetrated [sic] the conflict are resolved in full.” This seemed to mean, for example, that so long as there were refugees who remained dissatisfied with their lot, or, perhaps, so long as Israel existed, the PNA would not agree to the “end of conflict.”"

"Abed Rabbo’s letter defined itself as “remarks and requests for clarification.”186 Ross described them as “deal-killers.”187 In fact, they were a comprehensive rejection of the Clinton parameters.188 Abed Rabbo was quoted at the time as saying that “Clinton’s proposals are one of the biggest frauds in history, like the Sykes-Picot Agreement.”189

Arafat arrived in Washington and met with Clinton on 2 January 2001. He reiterated the points made in the letter (which apparently was handed to the Americans only after the Arafat- Clinton meeting) and added new ones. As an example, Clinton recorded that Arafat demanded that several “blocks of the Armenian Quarter” be added to the Old City’s Muslim and Christian quarters, earmarked in the parameters for Palestinian sovereignty. Clinton reportedly exploded. “I couldn’t believe he was talking to me about this,” he understatedly remarked in his memoirs.190

The implication of the Palestinian responses to the parameters, as to Barak’s proposals from July—and of the way they were later explained by Palestinian spokesmen—was that the PNA-PLO was open to and ready for a two-state settlement, in principle, but that the successive offered packages were inadequate and that Arafat’s and Abed Rabbo’s “nos” were geared to obtaining better terms rather than expressions of one-state principles. But a close examination of the substance of the “nos” allows for a darker interpretation. The Palestinian insistence on Israel’s acceptance of the “right of return” and its implementation, given the demographic realities, would seem to mean that the PNA- PLO strove and is striving for the conversion of Israel from a Jewish to an Arab-majority state as well as a West Bank–Gaza state that is Arab. Presumably these two Arab-majority states would then merge or unify into one Palestinian Arab-majority state. Similarly, Arafat’s nonacceptance of shared sovereignty over the Temple Mount implied a basic dismissal of the Jewish claim and right to the mount and, by extension, to Palestine as a whole: the Jews have no recognized historical connection to the Land of Israel and their territorial-political demands are illegitimate. This was Arafat’s message at Camp David and has been a constant refrain of Palestinian leaders, from Husseini through Abbas, throughout the history of the Palestinian Arab national movement.

Three weeks later, Israeli and Palestinian teams met for one further bout of negotiation, in Taba, on the Sinai Gulf of ‘Aqaba coast. But the talks, held over 21–27 January 2001, were meaningless. Clinton was no longer president, his successor, George W. Bush, had withdrawn support for the parameters, and Barak was facing general elections, on 6 February, that all knew he would lose by a landslide to Ariel Sharon, as in fact occurred. Barak’s aides were, politically, in no position to negotiate any- thing and nothing, in fact, was concluded. Taba was an abortive academic exercise by despondent Israeli doves and powerless Palestinians (Arafat did not attend), no more."

**The Second Intifada and the rise of the Hamas

"The Israelis initially responded with air attacks on empty PNA office buildings and police stations, in an effort to prod the PNA into curbing the terrorists, and initiated pinpoint “targeted assassinations,” in which individual terrorists and their controllers were killed, usually from the air.

The Israeli strategy failed. Arafat and his aides continued to incite their people to violence. Indeed, the Hamas suicide bombers were soon aped by a growing number of Fatah suicide bombers. The Fatah members were as religious as their Hamas counter- parts, and the Fatah leadership feared that the Palestinian masses, enamored with the fundamentalists’ “successes,” would cross into the Hamas camp. An atmosphere of terror engulfed Israel. In spring 2002 Israel, now under Prime Minister Sharon, struck back. The IDF launched a series of “invasions” or reoccupations of the West Bank’s towns, where the bombers made their bombs and from which they ventured forth. Lengthy curfews and economic sanctions were imposed, and there were mass arrests. The Israelis, contrary to Arab and Western press reports, took care, often great care, not to kill civilians. But there were substantial civilian casualties. By 2004, altogether some four thousand Palestinians—about two-thirds of them armed men—and thirteen hundred Israelis—about two-thirds civilians—had died."

"Under pressure by the international Quartet—the United States, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations— to moderate its positions, the Central Committee of the PLO delegated a committee, headed by PNA foreign minister Nabil Sha‘at, to draft a Palestinian constitution. On 4 May 2003, the committee issued the so-called 3rd Draft Constitution of the emergent Palestinian state. Its opening Article 1 stated: “Palestine is an independent sovereign state with a republican system. Its territory is an indivisible unit within its borders on the eve of June 4, 1967 and its territorial waters, without prejudice to the rights guaranteed by the international resolutions related to Palestine.”191

The territorial definition of the Palestinian state is convoluted to the point of obscurity, and it is contradictory. It seems to be saying that the state will be restricted to the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip—but it avoids saying so clearly and explicitly.

...Taken together, these articles to my mind explicitly, and at very least implicitly, provide a firm anchor for anyone asserting that the constitution does not renege on the Palestinians’ traditional claim to the whole of Palestine and, in fact, posits a one-state solution. And when capped by Article 7—which states: “The principles of the Islamic Shari‘a are the main sources for legislation”—there can be little doubt what sort of state the drafters were envisaging: certainly not a “secular, democratic Palestine.”192"

"Though Hamas’s operations over the years have focused on Israel and the occupied territories, the movement’s ideology has potential universal reach or, as the covenant puts it, “its extent in place is anywhere that there are Muslims who embrace Islam as their way of life everywhere in the globe. This being so, it extends to the depth of the earth and reaches out to the heaven . . . the movement is a universal one”—so Americans and Europeans should not be overly surprised if, at some point, Hamas suicide bombers arrive on their doorstep.

But for the present, Hamas’s focus is on Israel. “In the name of the Most Merciful Allah,” the covenant kicks off, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it”—a reference to the Crusader kingdoms of the Middle Ages.

The covenant defines the ongoing struggle as directed against “the Jews,” “they who have received the scriptures,” and defines them, in the Qur’an’s terminology, as “smitten with vileness wheresoever they are found . . . because they . . . slew the prophets,” a reference to the killing of Jesus Christ. The Hamas is deeply, essentially anti-Semitic. “Our struggle against the Jews,” states the covenant, “is very great and very serious . . . The Prophet . . . has said: ‘The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’” Citing at one point “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the covenant charges that the Jews, “with their money . . . took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations . . . With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world . . . They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about . . . With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions . . . for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests . . . They were behind World War I . . . They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains . . . [It was] they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world . . . The Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates . . . [Later] they will aspire to further expansion.”"

"(The covenant concludes by proclaiming that Hamas “is a humanistic movement. It takes care of human rights and is guided by Islamic tolerance when dealing with the followers of other religions . . . Under the wing of Islam, it is possible for the fol-owers of the three religions—Islam, Christianity and Judaism— to coexist in peace and quiet with each other . . . [But] it is the duty of the followers of other religions to stop disputing the sovereignty of Islam in this region.”)"

Chapter 3: Where to?

"Israel began to build a barrier— mostly fence, in small parts wall—separating Israel proper from about 93 percent of the West Bank in order to lay the ground- work for a two-state denouement, either through an agreement or, in its absence, unilaterally. This, the demographic imperative, as well as the desire to keep out Arab suicide bombers, was the logic behind the barrier, not discrimination or the desire to steal Arab land (though in delineating the barrier, the planners incorporated in Israel slightly more territory than the Clinton proposals had earmarked for Israel as a cession from the West Bank)

But the possibility of a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank was subsequently complicated by the fact that, following the withdrawal from Gaza, the Muslim fundamentalists who dominated the area went on to use it as a launching pad for constant, terroristic rocketing of Israel’s border settlements, including the towns of Sderot and Ashqelon (population 120,000). Israel’s leaders quite naturally feared that a similar unilateral pull- back from the West Bank would be followed by a far more dangerous rocketing of the state’s main population centers, Jerusalem and the greater Tel Aviv area"

"Although such polls have often concluded that most Palestinians, at least in the West Bank and Gaza, support a two-state settlement, they have also shown that there is almost complete unanimity among Palestinians in support of the “right of return,” the implementation of which would necessarily subvert any two-state settlement. And Palestinian Arabs are equally unanimous in denying the legitimacy of Zionism and Israel—which, again, would raise a vast question mark over the durability of any two-state arrangement.)

Such has been Zionism’s political evolution. The evolution of the Palestinian Arab national movement has been radically different. In effect, there has been no evolution in terms of attitudes toward Zionism and Israel. The years 1937, 1947, 1978—when Arafat rejected the Sadat-Begin Camp David Agreements, which provided for Palestinian self-rule in the Gaza Strip and West Bank—and 2000 were all of a piece, with no real movement or change in final objectives. Haj Amin al-Husseini and Arafat were as one in seeking a one-state solution "

"Secular democratic Palestine"

"Al-Husseini and the PLO explicitly declared the aim of limiting Palestinian citizenship to those Jews who had lived in Palestine permanently before 1917 (or, in an- other version, to limit it to those fifty thousand-odd Jews and their descendants). This goal was spelled out clearly in the Palestinian National Charter and in other documents. Hamas has been publicly more reserved on this issue, but its intentions are clear.

The Palestinian vision was never, as described by various Palestinian spokesmen in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to Western journalists, of a “secular, democratic Palestine” (it certainly sounded more palatable than, say, the “destruction of Israel,” which was the goal it was meant to paper over or camouflage). Indeed, “a secular democratic Palestine” had never been the goal of Fatah or the so- called moderate groups that dominated the PLO between the 1960s and the 2006 elections that brought Hamas to power.

Rashid Khalidi has written that “in 1969 [the PLO] amended [its previous goal and henceforward advocated] the establishment of a secular democratic state in Palestine for Muslims,
Christians and Jews, replacing Israel.”1 And Ali Abunimah has written, in his recent book, One Country: “The PLO did ultimately adopt [in the late 1960s or 1970s] the goal of a secular, democratic state in all Palestine as its official stance.”2

This is hogwash. The Palestine National Council never amended the Palestine National Charter to the effect that the goal of the PLO was “a secular democratic state in Palestine.” The words and notion never figured in the charter or in any PNC or PLO Central Committee or Fatah Executive Committee resolutions, at any time. It is a spin invented for gullible Westerners and was never part of Palestinian mainstream ideology. The Palestinian leadership has never, at any time, endorsed a “secular, democratic Palestine.”

The PNC did amend the charter, in 1968 (not 1969). But the thrust of the emendation was to limit non-Arab citizenship in a future Arab-liberated Palestine to “Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion”— that is, 1917."

"True, the amended charter also guaranteed, in the future State of Palestine, “freedom of worship and of visit” to holy sites to all, “without discrimination of race, color, language, or religion.” And, no doubt, this was music to liberal Western ears. But it had no connection to the reality or history of contemporary Muslim Arab societies. It was, like all hypocrisy, “a tribute that vice pays to virtue.” What Muslim Arab society in the modern age has treated Christians, Jews, pagans, Buddhists, and Hindus with tolerance and as equals? Why should anyone believe that Palestinian Muslim Arabs would behave any differently (vide the departure from Palestinian areas of most Christian Arabs; vide the recent killing of a Christian Arab bookshop owner in Gaza and the torching of the library of Gaza’s YMCA)? Western liberals like or pretend to view Palestinian Arabs, indeed all Arabs, as Scandinavians, and refuse to recognize that peoples, for good historical, cultural, and social reasons, are different and behave differently in similar or identical sets of circumstances. (Why, for example, have black Africans, who over the centuries have suffered infinitely more at Western—and, indeed, Muslim Arab— hands than the Arabs ever did, never resort to international terrorism and suicide bombings against Western—or Arab—targets?)

So where did the slogan of “a secular, democratic Palestine” originate? That goal was first explicitly proposed in 1969 by the small Marxist splinter group the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.3 According to Khalidi, “It was [then] discreetly but effectively backed by the leaders of the mainstream, dominant Fatah movement . . . The democratic secular state model eventually became the official position of the PLO.”4 As I have said, this is pure invention. The PNC, PLO, and Fatah turned down the DFLP proposal, and it was never adopted or enunciated by any important Palestinian leader or body—though the Western media during the 1970s were forever attributing it to the Palestinians.5 As a result, however, the myth has taken hold that this was the PLO’s official goal through the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

And today, again, and for the same reasons—the phrase retains its good, multicultural, liberal ring—“a secular, democratic Palestine” is bandied about by Palestinian one-state supporters. And a few one-statists, indeed, may sincerely believe in and desire such a denouement. But given the realities of Palestinian politics and behavior, the phrase objectively serves merely as camouflage for the goal of a Muslim Arab–dominated polity to replace Israel. And, as in the past, the goal of “a secular democratic Palestine” is not the platform or policy of any major Palestinian political institution or party.

Indeed, the idea of a “secular democratic Palestine” is as much a nonstarter today as it was three decades ago. It is a nonstarter primarily because the Palestinian Arabs, like the world’s other Muslim Arab communities, are deeply religious and have no respect for democratic values and no tradition of democratic governance"

Rejection of two states

"Various Palestinian bodies and leaders continued through the 1990s to explicitly enunciate the one-state goal. Only under continuous Israeli and American pressure, the PLO very reluctantly appeared to inch away from it. Throughout the period, Arafat, in his speeches in Arabic, persisted in employing terminology—such as “we shall plant the Arab flag on the walls of Jerusalem,” “with blood and fire we shall redeem Palestine,” and “the sanctity of the Return”—that, for Palestinians, was code for the elimination of Israel and the conquest of all of Palestine. In all, as many Israelis saw it, the Palestinians’ prevarication, stonewalling and semantic manipulations in the course of the Oslo process were not so much tactical means to garner the support of a radical public as candid expressions of a will to avoid abandoning the traditional, one-state ideology. Arafat’s Johannesburg sermon was both symbol and reality."

"But given his past beliefs and behavior, a more logical interpretation of his behavior in 2000—and, it should be noted, none of his aides (Abu Mazen, Abu Alaa, Nabil Sha‘at, Sa‘ib Erikat) stood up at the time and dissented from Arafat’s “nos”—is that he was still wedded to the one-state solution and wanted all of Palestine. His responses on the Temple Mount issue—“no” to every proposed compromise and his denial of Jewish history and rights—was indicative of his wider mindset: there was no legitimacy to Zionism and Israel or their claims. Arafat rejected the terms offered in July and December 2000 not because of their detail but because of their underlying principle: two states for two peoples."

"Arafat and his aides consistently declined to recognize Israel as a “Jewish State,” a refusal still characteristic of the PNA leadership. In November 2007, Sa‘ib Erikat, the chief Palestinian peace negotiator (and a Palestinian “moderate”), said: “The Palestinians won’t accept Israel as a Jewish state.”6 Mahmoud Abbas, the PNA president, put the same idea succinctly a few days later, in Cairo, on his way home from the Annapolis peace summit: “The Palestinians do not accept the formula that the State of Israel is a Jewish State . . . We say that Israel exists and in Israel there are Jews and there are those who are not Jews.”7 So much for two states for two peoples."

"Nothing has changed since 1937. Or, more accurately, things have changed mainly in directions that make the establishment of a viable binational state even less likely than seventy years ago. During the intervening decades, the fear and hatred of the “other” in each community have grown considerably—as a result, on the Jewish side, of the bouts of Arab terrorism, which have progressively increased in viciousness and scope, and the growing Islamization and political radicalization of the Palestinian Arabs; and, on the Arab side, as a result of their violent defeat, displacement, and dispossession in 1948, the subsequent bouts of Israeli counterterrorist operations that have often resulted in substantial civilian death, and the grinding, stifling Israeli occupation of the territories that has contributed substantially to the psychological, political, and economic misery of the inhabitants since 1967. If Arab expressions in the early years of the twentieth century of fear of eventual displacement and expulsion by the Zionists were largely propagandistic, today—in view of what has happened—they are very real. And if Jewish fears in the 1930s of Arab intentions to push them “into the sea”—to destroy the Zionist enterprise and perhaps slaughter the Yishuv—were, if heartfelt, unrealistic (as it turned out), today they are very real, as are Jewish fears of a nuclear Holocaust at Islamic hands. These fears and hatreds make a shared binational state, in which each community inevitably would seek to dominate the other, if only to prevent the other’s domination of itself, inconceivable."

Tilley

"Tilley argues, on the contrary, that “although Arabs are certainly not immune from anti-Semitism, Arab language against ‘the Jews’” is a response primarily to the explicit Zionist “privileging of ‘the Jews’ and to the Palestinians’ expulsion and dis- possession.” No, Arabs do not really hate the Jews, she writes. For example, take the suicide bombers, who for more than a decade now have haunted Israel’s buses and restaurants: “Relative to the scope of the military occupation and the size of the Palestinian population under occupation, suicide bombings and other attacks—despite their broadly terrifying impact—have remained a tiny fringe phenomenon,” she writes.14 But Tilley ignores the broad popularity that these suicide bombings enjoyed—and still enjoy—in the Palestinian cities, ignores the crowds that swamped the streets of Ramallah and Gaza and Nablus when news arrived of a “success” in Tel Aviv or Haifa; ignores the Fatah/Hamas custom of handing out sweets to passersby with each “successful” bombing; and ignores the veneration the bombers are accorded in all West Bank and Gaza schools, their postered faces looking down from the walls in every classroom. Second, the relatively small number of successful suicide bombings during the years 1993–2008 was a function more of Shin Bet and IDF prevention and interdiction (and the security fence) than of Palestinian inhibitions or restraint. The suicide bombings, as every poll among Palestinians has shown were, and remain, immensely popular.

...She compares Palestine/Israel to what happened in Algeria in the 1960s and says that the Arab societies in both deemed settler colonization “illegitimate”—but she fails to note that in the Algerian case, the Arabs ended up driving out the country’s million-odd white settlers, lock, stock, and barrel."

Demography

"But to return to demography. Regarding the potential for a binational solution, matters have changed for the worse since the 1930s in other ways. As the Muslim proportion of the Palestine Arab population has grown, and grown more devout, so the proportion of Christians—the more Westernized and “liberal” sector among the Arabs—has steadily diminished (it now stands at less than 5 percent); Christian Arab families have tended to have fewer children and, proportionately, have emigrated in far greater numbers to the West and out of the conflict.

At the same time, the massive immigration of Jews from Islamic lands to Israel in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s has increased the Sephardi proportion of the Jewish population. This has had a double effect. On one hand, the country’s Jewish community to a degree has been orientalized, for example, in cuisine and various aspects of public behavior. This might have helped pave the way to binationalism (via some shared values—the centrality of family and clan, for example—among Israeli Sephardis, at least of the first, immigrating generation, with the Palestine Arabs). But these “orientalizing” factors have been offset by the psychological and ideological baggage these immigrants brought with them and which they passed down to their children and grandchildren—which contained an essential hatred for the Arabs, stemming from the discrimination and occasional violence they had suffered in the Muslim-majority countries from whence they came, and commensurate hard-line, anti-Arab politics and voting patterns once in Israel. At the same time, the second, third, and fourth generations of Sephardi descent have gradually been Westernized, distancing them, in terms of values, from the Arab societies of their familial origin. Today, most Israeli Jews, both Ashkenazi and Sephardi, look to the West for their values, ideas, markets, holidays, books, movies, music, and television shows.

A second demographic change on the Jewish side, speeded up by the events of 1967, was the vast increase in the proportion of ultra-Orthodox and Orthodox Jews in the overall population and the decline in the proportion of secular Jews, who are generally more liberal and open-minded than their religious compatriots. This change has been reflected in the steady growth of ultra- Orthodox and Orthodox political representation and power in both Labor- and Likud-led coalition governments. (For example, in Jerusalem, Israel’s most populous city at 650,000 inhabitants, the demographic changes have resulted in the election for the first time, in 2003, of an ultra-Orthodox mayor with an ultra- Orthodox–Orthodox majority in the municipal council.) The Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox are generally hard-liners on Arab- related issues and prone to expansionist and racist thinking.

The large, one-million-strong wave of immigrants who arrived in Israel from the Soviet Union and its former component republics in the late 1980s and 1990s, with the collapse of communism, injected a large, secular population into the Jewish demographic tableau. But this has not appreciably aided the cause of binationalism. The Soviet olim tended to bring with them hard-line, right-wing political instincts. Among the Russian Jews in Israel there will be few takers for the binational paradigm; they and their parents endured anti-Semitism and saw quite enough of life among, alongside, and under the Gentiles. For them, the Arabs are just a new version of Gentiles—and ones for whom they generally have contempt."

"Despite some of the foregoing, Israeli Jewish society remains largely secular, with Western, democratic values predominating. These can hardly dovetail with the authoritarian and religious values of Palestine Arab society, which is moving steadily toward greater religiosity. Forty years ago few Arab women in the territories and inside Israel wore scarves or veils; today they are the norm. Decades ago, there were functioning cinema houses in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (and East Jerusalem); to- day there are none. The second-class status of women and the ostracism, indeed vilification, of homosexuals are norms in West Bank and Gaza society (as in most of the Arab world), and honor killings, both in Israeli Arab society and in the Palestinian territories—of wives, sisters, daughters—for infringing traditional behavioral or dress codes or for flirting with the wrong males, let alone for sleeping with them, are common. These are not the norms of Israeli Jewish society."

"The mindset and basic values of Israeli Jewish society and Palestinian Muslim society are so different and mutually exclusive as to render a vision of binational statehood tenable only in the most disconnected and unrealistic of minds. The value placed on human life and the rule of (secular) law is completely different—as exhibited, in Israel itself, in the vast hiatus between Jewish and Arab perpetration of crimes18 and lethal road traffic violations.19 Arabs, to put it simply, proportionally commit far more crimes (and not only ones connected to property) and commit far more lethal traffic violations than do Jews."

Peel Commission

"The Peel Commission had no historical precedent to go by in looking at the nature of a possible one-state solution with a Jewish majority and an Arab minority. There had never been such a polity. But, to be sure, the commissioners understood that the Arabs of Palestine, and perhaps those of the surrounding states, would never acquiesce in such an arrangement and that it would be a recipe for perpetual violence and warfare, whether or not the Jews treated the Arab minority fairly.

But the commission certainly had plenty of historical precedents for the opposite arrangement, of states with Arab Muslim majorities and Jewish minorities. And the history of such states gave no grounds for optimism about the possible fair treatment of the minority by the majority. Indeed, Islamic history was replete with empires and states controlled by Arab Muslim majorities with Jewish (and other) minorities—and the minorities had always been discriminated against, often oppressed and persecuted, expelled and repeatedly slaughtered, or subjected to forced conversions (contrary to what Arab propagandists, eager for a one-state, Muslim majority–Jewish minority solution in Palestine, are wont to tell gullible audiences in the West). That is why the Arab Middle East and North Africa, which were Christian- majority areas before the Islamic conquests, now have almost no Christian or Jewish populations (the sole exceptions being Egypt, with its cowed Coptic Christian minority, and Sudan, with its em- battled Christian communities in the south, which over the decades have suffered more than a million deaths at Muslim hands)."