Volume II - Annexes

INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE
________________________________________________________
LEGAL CONSEQUENCES ARISING FROM THE POLICIES
AND PRACTICES OF ISRAEL IN THE
OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY,
INCLUDING EAST JERUSALEM
(REQUEST FOR ADVISORY OPINION)
WRITTEN STATEMENT OF THE STATE OF QATAR
VOLUME II
ANNEXES
25 JULY 2023

LIST OF ANNEXES
VOLUME II
EXPERT REPORTS
Annex 1
Annex 2
Prof. Rashid Khalidi, Settler Colonialism in Palestine (1917-
1967) (20 July 2023)
Prof. Avi Shlaim, The Diplomacy of the Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict (1967-2023) (20 July 2023)

Annex 1
Settler Colonialism in Palestine (1917-1967), Expert Report of
Professor Rashid Khalidi (20 July 2023)

Annex 1
INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE
LEGAL CONSEQUENCES ARISING FROM THE POLICIES AND
PRACTICES OF ISRAEL IN THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN
TERRITORY, INCLUDING EAST JERUSALEM
SETTLER COLONIALISM IN PALESTINE (1917-1967)
EXPERT REPORT OF PROFESSOR RASHID KHALIDI
20 JULY 2023
Annex 1
Annex 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. PALESTINE IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY ................................................... 2
II. THE ORIGINS OF ZIONISM AS A COLONIAL SETTLER AND NATIONAL
PROJECT ....................................................................................................... 4
III. THE BALFOUR DECLARATION AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS MANDATE .... 9
IV. THE PALESTINIAN REVOLT OF 1936-39 ..................................................... 18
V. THE 1947 PARTITION AND ITS PRELUDE .................................................... 22
VI. THE NAKBA, 1948 ..................................................................................... 26
VII. THE PALESTINIANS IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE NAKBA ............................ 31
VIII. THE SUEZ WAR OF 1956 ............................................................................ 37
IX. THE 1967 WAR AND SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION 242 ...................... 40
X. THE LEGACY OF THE 1967 WAR ................................................................ 45
BIOGRAPHY OF PROFESSOR RASHID KHALIDI ........................................................ 48
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This overview of the history of Palestine until 1967 offers context for the
legal questions posed to the International Court of Justice by the request of the UN
General Assembly for an Advisory Opinion relating to legal consequences arising
from discriminatory policies and practices of Israel in the occupied Palestinian
territories. It covers relevant background from the early part of the 20th century
through 1967, showing the origins of some of these policies and practices during
that period and their continuity thereafter, notably the enduring nature of the
colonization drive – at the expense of the Palestinian people – that the Zionist
movement undertook since its inception. Launched before and during the British
Mandate over Palestine, this project was continued by the state of Israel within the
territories bounded by the 1949 armistice lines, and was the basis of the colonial
settlement project that began immediately after the 1967 war in the West Bank and
East Jerusalem. This overview also touches on the international legal instruments
that facilitated this project, and the ensuing dispossession of the Palestinians and
the denial of their national rights, from the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the
1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, through the UN resolution to
partition Palestine in 1947, and Security Council resolution 242 adopted in the
wake of the 1967 war.
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I. PALESTINE IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY
Palestine in the early 20th century was not barren, empty, and backward.
Nonetheless, there is a vast body of literature filled with historical
misrepresentations, claiming that at that time the country was sparsely inhabited
by a small population of rootless nomads who had no fixed identity and no
attachment to the land they were passing through, essentially as transients.
The corollary to this fiction is that the arrival of Zionist immigrants “made
the desert bloom,” turning the country into a lush garden, and that only they had an
identification with and love for the land, as well as a (God-given) right to it. This
attitude is summed up in the slogan “a land without a people for a people without
a land,” used by Christian supporters of a Jewish “return” to Palestine and by early
Zionists. To the European Zionists who came to settle it, Palestine was terra
nullius, with the population living there nameless and amorphous. These
falsehoods persist to this day, and obscure the real history of the country in the
modern era.
In fact, by the early twentieth century, there existed in Palestine a vibrant
Arab society made up of Muslims, Christians and Jews, together with Armenian,
Circassian, European Jewish and other communities, undergoing a series of rapid
and accelerating transitions, much like other Middle Eastern societies around it.
Modern education and literacy were expanding, and the integration of the country’s
economy into the global economy was proceeding apace. The telegraph, the
steamship, the railway, gaslight, electricity, and modern ports and roads were
gradually transforming cities, towns, and even some rural villages. Sanitation,
health, and rates of live births were all slowly improving, death rates were in
decline, and the population was increasing quickly. In less than forty years, from
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1878 to 1914, the population of Palestine grew from around 450,000 to over
720,000, of which the Jewish population constituted only 5-7% of the total.1
Palestine in these years was far from barren: it was a major exporter of
oranges to Europe in 1914, with an annual value of over £300,000 (£44 million in
2023 currency), and about 3,500 hectares of orange groves under cultivation, with
over 65% of these oranges produced by modern Arab-owned orchards.2
Nevertheless, the myth of Palestine as a desert before Zionism lives on.3
Before World War I, roughly half of the Jewish population of Palestine
were Orthodox and non-Zionist, either Mizrahi (eastern) or Sephardic (descendants
of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492). Mainly urbanites of Middle Eastern or
Mediterranean origin who often spoke Arabic or Turkish, they were culturally quite
similar to, and lived reasonably comfortably alongside, city-dwelling Muslims and
Christians. They were Ottoman citizens and not foreigners, nor were they
Europeans or settlers: they were, saw themselves, and were seen by others, as
Ottoman Jews who were an integral part of the indigenous Muslim-majority
society.4
1 Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period
and the Mandate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), Table 1.4D, pp. 10, 24.
2 Mustafa Kabha and Nahum Karlinsky, The Lost Orchard: The Palestinian-Arab Citrus Industry
1850-1950 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2021), Table 1.1, p. 17 and Table 1.2, p. 21.
3 Twitter page of EU in Israel (@EUinIsrael), “A special message from President of the European
Commission Ursula von der Leyen” (April 26, 2023) (“Today, we celebrate 75 years of vibrant
democracy in the heart of the Middle East, 75 years of dynamism, ingenuity and groundbreaking
innovations. You have literally made the desert bloom, as I could see during my visit to the Negev
last year.”).
4 There is abundant scholarship on the integration of the Mizrahi and Sephardic communities into
Palestinian society. See Menachem Klein, Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa
and Hebron (London: Hurst, 2015).
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II. THE ORIGINS OF ZIONISM AS A COLONIAL SETTLER AND NATIONAL
PROJECT
The resurgence of virulent anti-Semitism in late nineteenth century Europe,
with recurrent pogroms in the Russian empire, produced several responses among
Jewish intellectuals in Eastern Europe, among which was the rise of political
Zionism. The Zionist movement called for establishment of a new Jewish national
polity in Palestine, where Judaism had begun millennia before, and to which it had
always retained a powerful religious attachment. Zionism thus emerged from both
nationalist and religious impulses, and as a reaction to many centuries of European
Christian persecution.
The founder and first leader of modern political Zionism was the Viennese
journalist Theodor Herzl. He was the author of the seminal work Der Judenstaat
(“The Jewish State”) published in 1896, and the organizer of the first two Zionist
congresses in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897 and 1898. Herzl explicitly called for a
Jewish-majority state in Palestine (in a land that then had an Arab majority of well
over 90%), with the “sovereign right” to control immigration. Understanding that
achieving this end involved replacing this Arab majority with an entirely new
Jewish population, to be drawn mainly from the persecuted populations of the
ghettos of Eastern Europe, Herzl wrote in his diary:
We must expropriate gently the private property on
the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the
penniless population across the border by procuring
employment for it in the transit countries, while
denying it employment in our own country. The
property owners will come over to our side. Both the
process of expropriation and the removal of the poor
must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.5
5 Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. Raphael Patai (New York: Herzl
Press, 1960), pp. 88-89.
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The 1901 charter that Herzl drafted for the Jewish-Ottoman Land Company
he founded, which was intended as a land purchasing agency for the Jewish
colonies he planned to establish, similarly called for the removal of inhabitants of
Palestine to “other provinces and territories of the Ottoman Empire.”6 Herzl’s
desire to “spirit” Palestine’s Arab population “discreetly” across the borders and
replace them with Jewish settlers reveals the essentially colonial nature of Zionism.
So too did his statement that the Jewish state would “form a part of a wall of defense
for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”7
Even early on, many Palestinians had a strong sense of foreboding about
the progress of the Zionist project. A 1914 editorial in a leading Palestinian
newspaper, Filastin, spoke of “a nation threatened with disappearance by the
Zionist tide in this Palestinian land… a nation which is threatened in its very being
with expulsion from its homeland.”8 Indeed, between 1909 and 1914, some forty
thousand Jewish immigrants had arrived (although many left soon afterwards, due
to the harsh and unfamiliar conditions of life in Palestine) and eighteen new
colonies (expanding the total number to 50 in 1914) had been created by the Zionist
movement. These were established on land purchased mainly from absentee
landlords with generous funding from philanthropists like Baron Edmond de
Rothschild and Baron Maurice de Hirsch.
The relatively recent concentration of private land ownership after the
passage of the 1858 Ottoman Land Code (which required registration of ownership
6 The text of the charter can be found in Walid Khalidi, “The Jewish-Ottoman Land Company:
Herzl’s Blueprint for the Colonization of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 22, 2, (Winter
1993), pp. 30-47.
7 Der Judenstaat, translated and excerpted in Arthur Hertzberg, ed., The Zionist Idea: A Historical
Analysis and Reader (New York: Atheneum, 1970), p. 222.
8 Editorial in special issue of Filastin (May 19, 1914), p. 1, cited in Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred
Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (New York:
Metropolitan, 2020), pp. 25-27.
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of land in private hands) greatly facilitated the takeover of fertile lands by large
urban absentee landlords, some of whom sold land to Zionist organizations. The
impact of this process was especially pronounced in Palestinian agricultural
communities in areas with increasing Zionist presence in the coastal plain and the
fertile valleys of the north. Many peasants in villages neighboring the new colonies
had been deprived of their land because of these land purchases, and they often
resisted the expropriation of land to which they had ancestral rights of usufruct,
previously inalienable, but that were ignored under the new land laws. Land issues
rooted in this dynamic persist in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem to
this day.
Starting immediately after World War I, large-scale immigration of
European Jewish settlers was supported by the newly established British Mandate
authorities, who helped build the autonomous structure of a Zionist para-state. A
separate Jewish-controlled sector of the economy was created through the
exclusion of Arab labor from Jewish-owned firms under the slogan of “Avoda ivrit”
(“Hebrew labor”), and the injection of massive amounts of capital from abroad. By
the middle of the 1930s, although Jews were still a minority of the population, this
highly autonomous sector was larger than the Arab-owned part of the economy.
This was essentially a function of the extraordinary capacity of the Zionist
movement to mobilize and invest capital in Palestine: financial inflows to an
increasingly self-segregated Jewish economy during the 1920s were 41.5 percent
larger than its net domestic product.9 While the Jewish population of Palestine
constituted only 5-7% of the total in 1914, and less during World War I, it had
grown to 17-18% by the mid-1920’s and then stagnated at that level until 1932.
9 Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel (David Maisel translation, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999), p. 217. According to Sternhell, the ratio of capital inflow to NDP “did not
fall below 33 percent in any of the pre-World War II years.” Ibid.
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Many early Zionists embraced the settler colonial nature of their project.
Vladimir (later Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, originator of Revisionist Zionism, the political
trend that has dominated Israeli politics since 1977 under the banner of the Likud
party, was especially clear on this score, writing in 1923:
Every native population in the world resists colonists
as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to
rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is
what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they
will persist in doing as long as there remains a
solitary spark of hope that they will be able to
prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the
‘Land of Israel’.10
Those last eight words are an apt summary of the ultimate aim of Zionism.
Jabotinsky affirmed that the constant use of massive force against the Arab
majority would be necessary to implement this program for “transforming”
Palestine into Israel: what he called an “iron wall” of bayonets was an imperative
for its success. As Jabotinsky put it: “Zionist colonisation … can proceed and
develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native
population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.” He
was clear on why force was necessary: “If you wish to colonize a land in which
people are already living, you must find a garrison for the land, or find a benefactor
who will provide a garrison on your behalf … Zionism is a colonizing venture and,
therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces.”11
The King-Crane Commission, a commission of inquiry sent out in 1919 by
President Woodrow Wilson to ascertain the wishes of the peoples of the region
after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, came to similar conclusions. Told by
10 Vladimir Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall: We and the Arabs,” Jewish Herald (November 26, 1937)
(first published in Russian under the title “O Zheleznoi Stene” in Rassvyet (November 4, 1923)).
11 Ibid.
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representatives of the Zionist movement that it “looked forward to a practically
complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine,” it
reported that none of the military experts it consulted “believed that the Zionist
program could be carried out except by force of arms.”12 They considered that a
force of “not less than fifty thousand soldiers would be required” to execute it.13 In
the end, it took the British more than double that number of troops to prevail against
a massive Palestinian revolt in 1936-39.
This dependence on force, combined with radical social engineering at the
expense of the indigenous population is the way of all colonial settler movements.
Since Zionism was a Jewish national movement and a European colonial settler
project at the same time, the modern history of Palestine can best be understood in
these terms: as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population to force
them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will. Over time,
this conflict between colonizer and colonized has also become a national
confrontation between two national entities, two peoples. Thus, what has been
going on in Palestine for over a century has been both a colonial and a national
struggle.
Zionism arose during the high age of colonialism, when the use of violence
against native societies by Westerners was normalized and described as “progress.”
Zionist leaders nonetheless took pains to obscure their goals. Chaim Weizmann,
Herzl’s successor as leader of the Zionist movement, told an Arab audience in
Jerusalem in March 1918 “to beware treacherous insinuations that Zionists were
12 “Report of the American Section of the International Commission on Mandates in Turkey, Paris
(August 28, 1919)”, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, The Paris Peace
Conference, 1919, Vol. XII, available at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1919Par
isv12/d380.
13 Ibid.
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seeking political power.”14 Such assertions were intended to cloak Zionist leaders’
real objectives: to take over the entire country if possible. They understood that
“under no circumstances should they talk as though the Zionist program required
the expulsion of the Arabs, because that would cause the Jews to lose the world’s
sympathy.”15
Unremarkably, once colonialism took on a bad odor in the post-World War
II era of decolonization, the colonial origins and practice of Zionism and Israel
were conveniently forgotten. In fact, after benefitting for decades from the
extensive support of the British colonial authorities, as discussed below, Zionism
rebranded itself as an anti-colonial movement after Britain began to limit its
support for Zionism.
III. THE BALFOUR DECLARATION AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS MANDATE
During World War I, large parts of Palestine became battle zones, and the
country suffered massive human and material losses, as most men were
conscripted, draft animals were seized, and famine, locusts and disease struck.
These profound material shocks heightened the impact of postwar political
changes. By the end of the war, people in Palestine and in much of the Arab world
found themselves under occupation by European armies. It was against this
backdrop that Palestinians learned, in a fragmentary fashion, of the Balfour
Declaration.
The momentous statement made on behalf of Britain’s cabinet on
November 2, 1917, by the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Arthur James
14 Ronald Storrs, Orientations (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1937), p. 341. Storrs reported
the speech, given at a dinner he hosted in honor of Weizmann attended by the mayor, the mufti of
Jerusalem, and other leading Palestinian political and religious figures.
15 Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), p. 404.
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Balfour—what has come to be known as the Balfour Declaration—comprised a
single sentence:
His Majesty’s government view with favour the
establishment in Palestine of a national home for the
Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to
facilitate the achievement of this object, it being
clearly understood that nothing shall be done which
may prejudice the civil and religious rights of
existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the
rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any
other country.
If before World War I many prescient Palestinians had begun to regard the
Zionist movement as a threat, the Balfour Declaration introduced a fearsome new
element. With its ambiguous phrase approving “the establishment in Palestine of a
national home for the Jewish people,” Britain effectively pledged the support of
the greatest empire of its day for Herzl’s aims of Jewish statehood, sovereignty,
and control of immigration in the whole of Palestine. Maximal Zionist goals
suddenly became realizable.
While Balfour described the tiny Jewish minority in Palestine as a “people”
who were promised a “national home,” the Arab majority (well over 90% of the
total at that time) went unmentioned, except in a backhanded way as the “existing
non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” The terms “Palestinian” and “Arab” do not
appear in the sixty-seven words of the declaration, which promised the
overwhelming majority of the population only “civil and religious rights,” not
political or national rights.
Some leading British politicians extended backing to Zionism that went
well beyond the carefully phrased text of the Balfour Declaration. At a dinner at
Balfour’s home in 1922, three of the most prominent British statesmen of the era—
former Prime Minister Lloyd George, Balfour, and Secretary of State for the
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Colonies Winston Churchill—explained to Weizmann that by the term “Jewish
national home” they “always meant an eventual Jewish state.” Lloyd George
assured the Zionist leader that for this reason Britain would never allow
representative government in Palestine.16
After British troops occupied Jerusalem in December 1917, the British
authorities banned publication of news of the declaration, and did not allow
newspapers to reappear in Palestine for nearly two years.17 When reports of the
Balfour Declaration finally reached Palestine, this news struck a society prostrate
and exhausted, as survivors of the chaos and displacement of the First World War
were slowly returning to their homes. In December 1918, thirty-three leading
Palestinians sent a letter of protest to the peace conference in Versailles and to the
British Foreign Office. They stressed that “this country is our country” and
expressed their horror at the Zionist claim that “Palestine would be turned into a
national home for them.”18
World War I and its aftermath accelerated the change in Palestinian national
sentiment from love of country and loyalties to family and locale to a modern form
of nationalism. Palestinian identity is often seen as no more than an expression of
an unreasoning opposition to Jewish national self-determination. But Palestinian
identity emerged in response to many stimuli, much like Zionism, and at almost
the same time. The threat of Zionism was only one of these stimuli, just as anti-
Semitism was only one factor fueling Zionism. This national identity included love
16 Reported in Yehuda Reinharz, Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993), pp. 356-357.
17 Ronald Storrs, Orientations (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1937), p. 327. Storrs, the first
British Military Governor of Jerusalem, mentions that Britain exercised strict control over the press
and all forms of Arab political activity in Palestine.
18 ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Kayyali, Watha’iq al-muqawama al-filistiniyya al-’arabiyya did al-ihtilal albritani
wal-sihyuniyya 1918-1939 [Documents of the Palestinian Arab resistance to the British
occupation and to Zionism, 1918-1939] (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1968), pp. 1-3.
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of country, a desire to improve society, religious attachment to Palestine, and
opposition to European control.
Indeed, all the neighboring Arab peoples developed modern national
identities analogous to that of the Palestinians at about the same time, and did so
without the impact of the emergence of Zionism in their midst. While they drew on
pre-existing elements of identity, Palestinian and other Arab national identities, just
like Zionism, were modern and contingent, a product of late nineteenth- and
twentieth-century circumstances, and not eternal and immutable phenomena.19
In the wake of World War I, Palestinians began to organize in opposition
both to British rule, and to its imposition of the Zionist movement on them.
Palestinian efforts included petitions to the British government, to the Paris Peace
Conference, and to the newly formed League of Nations. Their most notable effort
was a series of seven Palestine Arab congresses planned by a countrywide network
of Muslim-Christian societies held from 1919 until 1928. These congresses put
forward demands grounded in Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations,
which stated of Arab territories about to be subjected to a Mandate that their
“existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized.”20 They thus
focused on independence for Palestine, rejection of the Balfour Declaration,
support for majority rule, and ending unlimited Jewish immigration and land
purchases. The congresses established an Arab executive that met repeatedly with
British officials, to no avail. The British refused to recognize the representative
authority of the congresses or their leaders, and insisted on Arab acceptance of the
19 See Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), Chapter 2, pp. 9-34.
20 The Covenant of the League of Nations (1924), Art. 22, available at
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp#:~:text=ARTICLE%2022.&text=Certain%2
0communities% 20formerly%20belonging%20to,are%20able%20to%20stand%20alone.
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Balfour Declaration, which negated the very existence of the Palestinians, as a
precondition for discussion.
In 1922, a League of Nations Mandate for Palestine formalized Britain’s
governance of the country. At Britain’s insistence, the Mandate incorporated the
text of the Balfour Declaration verbatim as part of its preamble, and substantially
amplified the declaration’s commitments to Zionism. Although the document
began with a reference to Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, it
continued by giving an international pledge to uphold the provisions of the Balfour
Declaration. This was in contradistinction to every other Middle Eastern mandated
territory, where Article 22 of the Covenant applied to the entire population and was
ultimately meant to allow for the independence of these countries. Thus, the
Mandate for Syria and Lebanon, published in August 1922, stated that “The
Mandatory shall further enact measures to facilitate the progressive development
of Syria and Lebanon as independent states.”21
The second paragraph of the preamble states that: “the Principal Allied
Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into
effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government
of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favor of the
establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The third
paragraph then states: “recognition has thereby been given to the historical
connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting
their national home in that country”. Only the Jewish people are described as
having a historic connection to Palestine.
21 “French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon,” The American Journal of International Law, 17, 3,
Supplement: Official Documents (July 1923), pp. 177-182.
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Nowhere in the subsequent twenty-eight articles of the Mandate is there any
reference to the Palestinians as a people with national or political rights. As in the
Balfour Declaration, the words “Arab” and “Palestinian” do not appear in the text
of the Mandate. The only protections envisaged for the great majority of Palestine’s
population involved personal and religious rights and preservation of the status quo
at sacred sites. On the other hand, the Mandate laid out the key means for
establishing and expanding the national home for the Jewish people, which,
according to its drafters, the Zionist movement was not creating, but
“reconstituting.”
Seven of the Mandate’s twenty-eight articles are devoted to the privileges
and facilities to be extended to a “Jewish Agency” as representative of the Zionist
movement to implement the national home policy (the others deal with
administrative and diplomatic matters, and the longest article treats the question of
antiquities). This was so although before the mass immigration of mainly European
Zionists in the 1920’s, Palestine’s Jewish community comprised largely either
religious or mizrahi Jews who in the main were not Zionist or who even opposed
Zionism. No such official representative was designated for the unnamed Arab
majority.
Article 2 of the Mandate provided for self-governing institutions; however,
the context makes clear that this applied only to the yishuv, as the Jewish population
of Palestine was called, while the Palestinian majority was consistently denied
access to such institutions. (Later concessions offered on matters of representation
were conditional on equal representation for the Jewish minority and the large Arab
majority, and on Palestinian acceptance of the terms of the Mandate, which
explicitly nullified their existence.) Representative institutions for the entire
country on a democratic basis and with real power were never on offer (in keeping
with Lloyd George’s private assurance to Weizmann), for the Palestinian majority
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would naturally have voted to end the privileged position of the Zionist movement
in their country.
Article 4 called for the creation of a Jewish Agency with quasigovernmental
status as a “public body” enjoying wide-ranging powers in economic
and social spheres and the ability “to assist and take part in the development of the
country” as a whole. Beyond making the Jewish Agency a partner to the mandatory
government, this provision allowed it to acquire a form of international diplomatic
status and thereby formally and officially to represent Zionist interests before the
League of Nations and in world capitals. Such representation was normally an
attribute of sovereignty, and the Zionist movement took great advantage of it to
bolster its international standing and act as a para-state. Again, no such powers
were allowed to the Palestinian majority over the thirty years of the Mandate, in
spite of their repeated demands.
Equally important was Article 6, which enjoined the mandatory power to
facilitate Jewish immigration and encouraged “close settlement by Jews on the
land”—a most crucial provision, given the importance of demography and control
of land throughout the subsequent century and more. This provision was the
foundation for significant growth in the Jewish population and the acquisition of
strategically located lands that allowed for control of the country’s territorial
backbone along the coast, in eastern Galilee, and in the great fertile valley
connecting them.
Article 7 provided for a nationality law to facilitate the acquisition of
Palestinian citizenship by Jews. This same law was used to deny nationality to
Palestinians who had emigrated to the Americas during the Ottoman era and now
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desired to return to their homeland.22 Thus Jewish immigrants, irrespective of their
origins, could acquire Palestinian nationality, while native Palestinian Arabs who
happened to be abroad when the British took over were denied it.
Finally, other articles allowed the Jewish Agency to take over or establish
public works, allowed each community to have schools in its own language—
which in practice meant Jewish Agency control over much of the yishuv’s school
system, while the British kept control of Arab state schools—and made Hebrew an
official language of the country.
In sum, the Mandate essentially furthered the creation of a Zionist
administration parallel to that of the British mandatory government, which was
tasked with fostering and supporting it. This parallel body was meant to exercise
for one part of the population many of the functions of a sovereign state, including
democratic representation and control of education, health, public works, and
international diplomacy. To enjoy all the attributes of sovereignty, this entity
lacked only military force. That too would come, in time.
To appreciate the destructive force of the Mandate for Palestinians, it is
worth looking at a confidential 1919 memo by Lord Balfour. As stated, for areas
formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of
Nations “provisionally” recognized their “existence as independent nations.” As
had been promised by the British during World War I, all the peoples of the other
mandated territories in the Middle East ultimately won independence. Only the
Palestinians did not. In his memo, Balfour frankly recognized the contradiction
between the Covenant and the Mandate:
22 Lauren Banko, “Claiming Identities in Palestine: Migration and Nationality under the Mandate,”
Journal of Palestine Studies, 46, 2 (Winter 2017) pp. 26-43; Nadim Bawalsa, “Legislating
Exclusion: Palestinian Migrants and Interwar Citizenship,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 46, 2
(Winter 2017), pp. 44-59.
Annex 1
17
The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant
and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in
the case of the “independent nation” of Palestine ….
For in Palestine we do not propose even to go
through the form of consulting the wishes of the
present inhabitants of the country. . . . The four
Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And
Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted
in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future
hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and
prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit
that ancient land. In my opinion that is right. What I
have never been able to understand is how it can be
harmonised with the declaration, the Covenant, or
the instructions to the Commission of Enquiry.
I do not think that Zionism will hurt the Arabs; but
they will never say they want it. Whatever be the
future of Palestine it is not now an “independent
nation,” nor is it yet on the way to become one.
Whatever deference should be paid to the views of
those who live there, the Powers in their selection of
a mandatory do not propose, as I understand the
matter, to consult them. In short, so far as Palestine
is concerned, the Powers have made no statement of
fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no
declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they
have not always intended to violate.23
23 Ernest Llewellyn Woodward and Rohan Butler, eds, Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919-
1939, First Series, 1919-1929, vol. IV (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1952), p. 345.
Annex 1
18
IV. THE PALESTINIAN REVOLT OF 1936-39
Between 1926 and 1932, the Jewish population of Palestine had ceased to
grow as a proportion of the total, stagnating at between 17 and 18.5%.24 These
years coincided with the global depression, when Jews leaving Palestine outpaced
those arriving, and capital inflows decreased markedly. Thus, in the early 1930’s
the Zionist project looked as if it might never attain the critical demographic mass
that would make Palestine “as Jewish as England is English,” in Weizmann’s
words.25 This changed dramatically in 1933 with the rise to power of the Nazis in
Germany and the launch of their systematic persecution of Jews. Discriminatory
immigration laws in place in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere
left many German Jews fleeing the Nazis with nowhere to go but Palestine. This
led to a massive wave of immigration that raised the Jewish proportion of the total
population of Palestine to over 31% by 1939.
In 1935 alone, more than sixty thousand Jewish immigrants, most of them
fleeing Nazi maltreatment, came to Palestine, a number greater than the entire
Jewish population of the country in 1917. Most of these refugees were skilled and
educated, and were allowed to bring with them assets worth a total of $100 million,
pursuant to the Transfer Agreement reached between the Nazi government and the
Zionist movement, concluded in exchange for lifting a Jewish boycott of Germany.
Thus, the launching of Hitler’s genocide provided the demographic critical mass
that enabled the Zionist movement to dominate most of Palestine in the wake of
24 Population figures can be found in Walid Khalidi, ed., From Haven to Conquest: Readings in
Zionism and the Palestine Problem until 1948 (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2005),
Appendix 1, pp. 842-43.
25 Speech to the English Zionist Federation (September 19, 1919), cited in Nur Masalha, Expulsion
of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948
(Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), p. 41.
Annex 1
19
World War II, and proved to be one of the most important events in the modern
histories of both Palestine and Zionism.
During the 1930s, the Jewish economy in Palestine overtook the Arab
sector. In light of the growth of the Jewish sector of the economy and the
accompanying population shift, combined with considerable expansion of the
Zionist movement’s military capacities with British aid (discussed below), it
became clear to its leaders that the demographic, economic, territorial, and military
nucleus necessary for achieving domination over Palestine would soon be in place.
As Ben-Gurion put it at the time, “immigration at the rate of 60,000 a year means
a Jewish state in all Palestine.”26
Many Palestinians came to similar conclusions, and now saw themselves
inexorably turning into strangers in their own land. The frustration of the
Palestinian population at their leadership’s ineffective response to British support
for Zionism finally led to a massive grassroots uprising. This started with a sixmonth
general strike, perhaps the longest in colonial history, launched
spontaneously by groups of young, urban middle-class militants all over the
country. The strike eventually developed into the great 1936-39 revolt, which was
the crucial event of the interwar period in Palestine.
In July 1937, a Royal Commission under Lord Peel charged with
investigating the unrest proposed to partition Palestine, creating a small Jewish
state in 17% of the territory, from which over two hundred thousand Arabs would
be “transferred,” a euphemism for expulsion. Under this scheme, the rest of the
country was to remain under British control or be handed over to Amir ’Abdullah
26 This passage in his diaries is cited in Shabtai Teveth, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs: From
Peace to War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 166-68.
Annex 1
20
of Transjordan, which from a Palestinian perspective amounted to much the same
thing.
The Peel Commission’s satisfaction of the Zionist aims of statehood and
expulsion of the Arabs in part of Palestine, combined with its denial of the
Palestinians’ goal of self-determination, sparked a far more militant stage of their
uprising. An armed revolt broke out in October 1937 and quickly swept the country.
In response, the British authorities deported virtually the entire Palestinian
nationalist leadership.
Extinguishing the Palestinian uprising took the full might of the British
Empire, which could only be unleashed when additional forces became available
after the September 1938 Munich Agreement. The British Empire brought in two
additional divisions of soldiers and squadrons of Royal Air Force bombers. In all,
Britain employed a hundred thousand troops, police, and Zionist auxiliaries to
overcome Palestinian resistance.
Although the revolt achieved temporary successes against the British, in
spite of the enormous sacrifices made, it ultimately produced debilitating results
for the Palestinians, with 14-17% of the adult male population killed, wounded,
imprisoned, or exiled, and the confiscation of large numbers of arms. By the time
the revolt was put down in the summer of 1939, the death and exile of so many
leaders and militants, and conflict within their ranks left the Palestinians divided,
without direction, and with their economy debilitated. This put them in a weak
position to confront the newly invigorated Zionist movement, which had grown
much stronger during the revolt, having obtained significant amounts of weapons
and extensive training for thousands of men from the British to help them suppress
the uprising.
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21
As war clouds loomed in Europe in 1939, and the Middle East appeared to
be a likely arena of conflict, London shifted away from ardent support of Zionism.
Strategic interests now dictated that it was imperative to improve Britain’s image
and defuse the fury in the Arab countries and the Islamic world at the brutal British
repression of the revolt in Palestine. A January 1939 report to the cabinet
recommending a change of course in Palestine stressed the importance of “winning
the confidence of Egypt and the neighbouring Arab states.”27
After the failure of a conference held in London in the spring of 1939
involving representatives of the Palestinians, the Zionists, and the Arab states,
Neville Chamberlain’s government issued a White Paper in an attempt to appease
outraged Palestinians, Arabs, and opinion in other British colonies. This document
called for a curtailment of Britain’s commitments to the Zionist movement,
proposed limits on Jewish immigration and on land sales, and promised
representative institutions in five years, and self-determination within ten.
Although immigration was in fact restricted, none of the other provisions was ever
fully implemented. Moreover, the granting of representative institutions and selfdetermination
were made contingent on approval of the Jewish Agency, which it
would never give.
There is a consensus among objective historians that the Jewish Agency’s
collaboration with the British mandatory authorities, supported by the League of
Nations, severely undermined any possibility of success for the Palestinians’
struggle for the representative institutions, self-determination, and independence
they believed were their right.28 When the British left Palestine in 1948, with a
27 British National Archives, Cabinet Papers, CAB 24/283, “Committee on Palestine: Report”
(January 30, 1939), p. 24.
28 The myth that the British were pro-Arab throughout the Mandate period, one cherished by Zionist
historiography, is debunked in Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete (New York: Metropolitan
Books, 2000).
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22
Zionist para-state already in place and the Palestinians having been crushed by
British might, there was no need to create the apparatus of a Jewish state ab novo.
That apparatus had in fact been functioning under the British aegis for decades.
V. THE 1947 PARTITION AND ITS PRELUDE
After World War II, Palestine was affected by a seismic upheaval, as Britain
abandoned control, the country was partitioned, and war broke out. In its wake, the
state of Israel was established in 78% of the territory of former Mandatory
Palestine, from which 750,000 Palestinians were driven or fled, losing their lands
and property and denied the right to return, in what Palestinians have since then
called “the Nakba” or catastrophe. These events were among the consequences of
the decline of the British Empire and the rise of the American and Soviet
superpowers during World War II.
Zionist leaders, alienated by Britain’s 1939 White Paper, presciently
foresaw this shift in the global balance of power. At a conference in New York in
1942, the Zionist movement issued the Biltmore Program, which for the first time
openly called for turning all of Palestine into a Jewish state, demanding that
“Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth.”29 In light of widespread
horror at the revelation of the destruction of most of European Jewry by the Nazis
in the Holocaust, the Zionist movement succeeded in mobilizing much of Western
public opinion around this objective.30
29 For the text of the Biltmore Program, see “Zionist Congresses: The Biltmore Conference (May 6
– 11, 1942),” Jewish Virtual Library, available at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-biltmoreconference-
1942.
30 Amy Kaplan, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2018) and Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1999).
Annex 1
23
One indication of the growing post-World War II global dominance of the
United States was the outcome of the deliberations of the Anglo-American
Committee of Inquiry. The British and U.S. governments established this body in
1946 to consider the urgent, tragic situation of a hundred thousand Jewish
Holocaust survivors, who were confined to displaced-persons’ camps in Europe.
The American and Zionist preference was for them to be granted immediate entry
to Palestine, while Britain preferred to continue to limit Jewish immigration to
avoid antagonizing the country’s Arab majority and the newly independent Arab
states.
Albert Hourani, in later life an eminent historian at Oxford and Harvard,
presented the Palestinian case to the committee. He described the devastation that
the creation of a Jewish state would wreak on Palestinian society. Hourani warned
that “responsible Zionists have talked seriously about the evacuation of the Arab
population, or part of it, to other parts of the Arab world.”31 The implementation of
the Zionist program, he said, “would involve a terrible injustice and could only be
carried out at the expense of dreadful repressions and disorders, with the risk of
bringing down in ruins the whole political structure of the Middle East.”32
Reflecting the new balance of power between Britain and the United States,
the Committee ignored the case made by the Arabs and the preference of the British
government. Its conclusions mirrored the desires of the Zionists and the Truman
administration, including the recommendation to admit a hundred thousand Jewish
refugees to Palestine.
31 “The Case against a Jewish State in Palestine: Albert Hourani’s Statement to the Anglo-American
Committee of Enquiry of 1946,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 35, 1 (Autumn 2005), p. 86. See also
ibid., pp. 80-90.
32 Ibid, p. 81.
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24
While the Zionist movement was relatively unified and benefited from
broad external support, especially in the capitals of the two new super-powers, the
US and the USSR, the Palestinian national movement was weak and fragmented,
and relied unsteadily on the newly independent Arab states—Iraq, Transjordan,
Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon—which were frail and fraught with rancorous disunity
and dueling ambitions.
Although it had been dependent on Britain since 1917, the Zionist
movement became alienated from it after the passage of the 1939 White Paper.
There followed a sustained campaign of violence against British installations and
personnel in Palestine, culminating in the 1946 blowing up of the British HQ in
Jerusalem, the King David Hotel, with the loss of 91 lives. The British soon found
themselves unable to master the opposition of the Zionist movement, whose
military capabilities and intelligence networks they had themselves reinforced
during the 1936-39 Arab Revolt and World War II. Reeling from deep postwar
economic and financial problems, and with its empire shrinking, Great Britain
finally capitulated in Palestine.
In consequence, in 1947 the British government passed the Palestine
problem off to the new United Nations, which formed a UN Special Commission
on Palestine (UNSCOP) to make recommendations for the future of the country.33
UNSCOP was divided as to what to do, but a majority produced a report calling
for partitioning Palestine in a manner that was exceedingly favorable to the Jewish
minority of 650,000, at the time only 33% of the total population of 2 million,
which included 1,350,000 Arabs. The UNSCOP majority report gave this minority
over 56% of the country, as against the much smaller Jewish state envisioned by
33 Official Records of the Second Session of the General Assembly, Supplement No. 11, United
Nations Special Committee on Palestine – Report to the General Assembly, Volume 1 (1947),
available at https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-179435/.
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25
the 1937 Peel partition plan.34 (The minority report proposed the formation of a
single binational state made up of autonomous Jewish and Palestinian areas.35)
The UNSCOP majority report was the basis for General Assembly
Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947, which called for dividing Palestine into a
larger Jewish state and a smaller Arab one, with an international corpus separatum
encompassing Jerusalem.36 Resolution 181 passed with 33 votes in favor, 13
against, and 10 abstentions, and provided the international birth certificate for a
Jewish state in most of what was still an Arab-majority land. Ignored by this
resolution were both the desire of the Palestinian majority to control the fate of
their country, and the warning of the authors of the UNSCOP minority report:
“Partition both in principle and in substance can only be regarded as an anti-Arab
solution.”37 Together with other factors, partition precipitated the Nakba, the
devastation of most of Palestinian Arab society.
34 Official Records of the Second Session of the General Assembly, Supplement No. 11, United
Nations Special Committee on Palestine – Report to the General Assembly, Volume 1 (1947),
available at https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-179435/.
35 Ibid., Chapter VII (Recommendations (III)).
36 UN General Assembly, Resolution Adopted on the Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on the
Palestinian Question, No. 181 (November 29, 1947), available at https://documents-ddsny.
un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/038/88/PDF/NR003888.pdf?OpenElement.
37 Official Records of the Second Session of the General Assembly, Supplement No. 11, United
Nations Special Committee on Palestine – Report to the General Assembly, Volume 1 (1947),
available at https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-179435/, Chapter VII
Recommendations (III), “Plan for a Federal State”, para. 12.
Annex 1
26
VI. THE NAKBA, 1948
The Nakba unfolded over two phases. Its first stage, from November 30,
1947 until the withdrawal of British forces and the establishment of the state of
Israel on May 15, 1948, saw intense fighting in many parts of Palestine resulting
in the expulsion and flight of 350,000 Palestinian civilians. This phase witnessed
successive defeats of the poorly-armed and -organized Palestinians and the small
number of Arab volunteers who had come to help them by well-organized, Zionist
paramilitary formations including the Haganah, the Palmach and the Irgun,38 some
of which had previously been armed and trained by the British.
This first stage of the Nakba culminated in a countrywide offensive by these
Zionist paramilitary groups dubbed Plan Dalet, that was designed to take over and
de-Arabize as much of the country as possible before the British withdrew.
Launched in early April of 1948, and concluded by May 14 with the fall of Jaffa,
Plan Dalet involved the conquest and depopulation of the two largest Arab urban
centers, Haifa and Jaffa, of the Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, and of other
cities, as well as of scores of Arab towns and villages.39
As this offensive unfolded, there was a panicked mass flight of Palestinians
all across the country. People fled as news spread of massacres like that on April
38 The Haganah and the Palmach, the main fighting forces created by the Zionist movement, had
benefited from extensive support from Britain to enable them to help to suppress the 1936-39 Arab
revolt. In 1948, they became the backbone of the Israeli army, under commanders like Moshe
Dayan, and Yigal Allon, later senior Israeli ministers, and Yitzhak Rabin, later Prime Minister. The
Irgun, headed by Menachem Begin, later Israeli prime minister, was the paramilitary arm of the
Zionist Revisionist movement.
39 The basic reference is the work of Walid Khalidi, notably “Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the
Conquest of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 18, 1 (Autumn 1988), pp. 4-33. Others have
since confirmed his findings: Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited
(2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis (2nd
ed. N.Y.: Henry Holt, 1998); Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, (2nd ed., London:
Oneworld, 2007).
Annex 1
27
9, 1948 in the village of Dayr Yasin near Jerusalem. One hundred residents, sixtyseven
of them women, children, and old people, were slaughtered when the village
was stormed by Irgun and Haganah assailants. The survivors were paraded in trucks
through the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem before being taken back to the
village to be killed.40 This was only one of numerous massacres. One Israeli
historian has recorded “twenty-odd cases.”41 A Palestinian historian refers to over
23, most of them in the Galilee,42 and not including the at least 250 killed in July
in Lydda, among them the murder of as many as 100 civilians confined to the city’s
main mosque.43 There were other massacres large and small, details of some of
which are still being uncovered today.
A day before the Dayr Yasin massacre, the strategic nearby village of al-
Qastal had fallen to Zionist forces during a battle in which the Palestinian
commander of the Jerusalem area, ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, died.44 ‘Abd al-Qadir
was the most respected Palestinian military leader (many had been killed, executed
or exiled by the British during the Great Revolt). His death was a crushing blow to
the Palestinian effort to retain control of the approaches to Jerusalem, areas that
were supposed to become part of the Arab state under the UN partition plan.
Subjected to ceaseless mortar bombardments, sniping and attacks by wellarmed
Zionist fighters on poorly defended civilian neighborhoods, one Arab city
40 Walid Khalidi, Dayr Yasin: al-Jum’a, 9/4/1948 [Dayr Yasin: Friday 9/4/1948] (Beirut: Institute
for Palestine Studies, 1999), table, p. 127.
41 Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), p. 592.
42 Adel Manna, Nakba and Survival: The Story of the Palestinians who Remained in Haifa and the
Galilee, 1948-1956 (Washington DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2022).
43 Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), p. 429.
44 Nir Hasson, “A Fight to the Death and Betrayal by the Arab World,” Haaretz (January 5, 2018),
available at https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium.MAGAZINE-themost-
disastrous-24-hours-in-palestinian-history-1.5729436.
Annex 1
28
after another was overrun and emptied of its inhabitants, including 70,000
Palestinian inhabitants of Haifa, 25,000 in West Jerusalem, 10,000 in Safad, and
about 6,000 each in Tiberias and Beisan. Dozens of villages, especially in the
coastal plain and central Galilee, suffered the same fate.
Jaffa was the last Arab city to go, besieged and bombarded with mortars
and harassed by snipers over the first two weeks of May. After being overrun by
Zionist forces on May 14, it was systematically emptied of nearly all of its 70,000
Arab residents. Although Jaffa was meant to be part of the stillborn Arab state
designated by the 1947 Partition Plan, there was no international effort to stop this
and other similar violations of the UN resolution. In this first phase of the Nakba,
a premeditated pattern of systematic ethnic cleansing, often at gunpoint, resulted in
the expulsion and panicked departure of 350,000 Palestinians and the occupation
of many of the Arab majority’s key urban economic, political, civic, and cultural
centers. Given the crumbling of Palestinian resistance, only the entry of four Arab
armies into Palestine on May 15, 1948 prevented the conquest of Jerusalem and
many other areas of the country in this offensive.45
The second phase of the Nakba followed, when the newly-formed Israeli
army, which absorbed the pre-existing Zionist militias, defeated the four Arab
armies (Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq and Syria) that had joined the ongoing war in
Palestine. In belatedly deciding to intervene militarily, the Arab governments were
acting under intense pressure from their domestic public opinion, which was deeply
45 John Bagot Glubb, Soldier with the Arabs (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1957). Glubb was
commander of Jordan’s Arab Legion, whose entry into Jerusalem in mid-May 1948 prevented the
fall of the city to Israeli forces.
Annex 1
29
distressed by the fall of Palestine’s cities and villages one after another and the
arrival of waves of tens of thousands of destitute refugees in neighboring capitals.46
After intense fighting, interrupted by UN imposed truces, Israel’s superior
military succeeded in decisively overcoming the Arab armies, which suffered from
the absence of unity of command, and political differences between the Arab
leaders. Thereafter, in the wake of intense international pressure to halt Israel’s
advances, four separate UN mediated armistices were negotiated in 1949.47 They
established the so-called Green Line, that marked the limits of Israel’s expansion
from the 56% of Palestine allotted to the Jewish State under the partition plan to
78% of the total area of Mandatory Palestine.
In the course of their victorious offensives, Israeli forces carried out further
massacres of civilians, driving another 400,000 Palestinians from their homes,
bringing the total number of those expelled to over 750,000. From 1947 to 1949,
most of Palestine’s Arab urban population (which totaled just over 400,000 in
46 On the Arab states’ decision to enter Palestine, see Walid Khalidi, “The Arab Perspective,” in
W.R. Louis and Robert Stookey, eds., The End of the Palestine Mandate (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1986), pp. 104-136.
47 Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan-Israel: General Armistice Agreement (1949), available at
https://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacemaker.un.org/files/IL%20JO_490403_Hashemite%20Jordan
%20Kingdom-Israel%20General%20Armistice%20Agreement.pdf; Egyptian-Israeli General
Armistice Agreement (1949), available at https://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacemaker.un.org/files
/EG%20IL_490224_Egyptian-Israeli%20General%20Armistice%20Agreement.pdf; Lebanese-
Israeli General Armistice Agreement (1949), available at https://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacema
ker.un.org/files/IL%20LB_490323_IsraeliLebaneseGeneralArmisticeAgreement.pdf; Israeli-
Syrian General Armistice Agreement (1949), available at https://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacem
aker.un.org/files/IL%20SY_490720_Israeli-Syrian%20General%20Armistice%20Agreement.pdf.
Annex 1
30
194448) became refugees and lost their homes and livelihoods, forever altering the
demographic and cultural landscape of several of Palestine’s historic cities.49
The survivors of this ethnic cleansing escaped to neighboring Jordan, Syria,
Lebanon, or to the West Bank and Gaza. These two areas, which at the end of the
war in 1949 were controlled by the Jordanian and Egyptian armies respectively,
constituted the remaining 22% of mandatory Palestine that was not conquered by
Israel in 1948. None of these refugees were allowed to return, and most of their
homes and villages were destroyed to prevent them from doing so.50 Still more
were expelled from the new state of Israel after the armistice agreements of 1949
were signed, over 250,000 were expelled after the 1967 war, and many others have
been forced out by tortuous administrative and legal procedures designed to
decrease the Palestinian population under Israel’s control. In this sense, the Nakba
is understood by Palestinians as an ongoing process.
The Nakba represented a watershed in the history of Palestine, transforming
most of it from a majority Arab country into a new state that had a substantial
Jewish majority. This transformation was the result of three processes: the
systematic ethnic cleansing of the areas seized during the war; Israel’s refusal to
allow those whom it had forced to flee to return; and the expropriation under the
1950 Absentee Property Law (discussed below) of these refugees’ land and
property, as well as much of that owned by Palestinians who remained in Israel.
48 Figure extrapolated from Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine (Columbia University
Press, 1990), Tables A8-10, p. 163.
49 A meticulous study of the depopulation of Palestine concluded that over a quarter million of
Palestine’s Arab city dwellers were driven from their homes during the entire course of the Nakba,
a figure that “is probably an undercount.” Walid Khalidi, ed., All that Remains: The Palestinian
Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington DC: Institute for Palestine
Studies, 1992), Appendix III, p. 581. For those expelled from these cities, see ibid., Map 13, p. 581.
50 The fate of these villages is described in detail in Walid Khalidi, ed., All that Remains: The
Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington DC: Institute for
Palestine Studies, 1992).
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31
Without these three processes, it would have been impossible to create a state with
a Jewish majority in Palestine, the explicit aim of political Zionism from its
inception. Nor would it have been possible for the new state to take over most of
Palestine’s land: Jewish land ownership in 1948 amounted to no more than 7% of
the total land area of Mandatory Palestine.
VII. THE PALESTINIANS IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE NAKBA
In the bleak new reality after the Nakba, Palestinians faced a world turned
upside down. Whether inside Palestine or outside it, they experienced profound
social disruption. For the majority, this meant destitution—the loss of homes, jobs,
and deeply rooted communities. Villagers lost their homes, land and livelihoods
and urbanites their homes, properties and capital, while the Nakba shattered the
power of the country’s notables together with their economic base. The entire elite
pre-war Palestinian leadership was discredited and never regained its power and
authority. In their place, younger leaders drawn from more diverse social strata
emerged.
Even those who were able to avoid impoverishment had been severed from
their place in the world. For all Palestinians, no matter their different
circumstances, the Nakba formed an enduring touchstone of identity, one that has
lasted through several generations. It marked an abrupt collective disruption, a
trauma that every Palestinian shares in one way or another, personally or through
their parents or grandparents.
At the same time as the Nakba provided a new focus for their collective
identity, it broke up families and communities, dividing and dispersing Palestinian
refugees among multiple countries and distinct sovereignties, notably Jordan,
Lebanon, and Syria. Even those still inside Palestine, whether refugees or not, were
subject to three different political regimes: Israel, Egypt (for those in the Gaza
Annex 1
32
Strip), and Jordan (for those on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem). This
condition of dispersal, shitat in Arabic, has afflicted the Palestinian people ever
since. Members of each of these separate Palestinians collectives still face a range
of restrictions on movement, hold a variety of identity documents or none at all,
and are obliged to operate under different conditions, laws, and languages.
The about 160,000 Palestinians who had managed to avoid expulsion and
remained in the part of Palestine that had become Israel were now citizens of that
state. Israel’s government, dedicated primarily to serving the country’s new Jewish
majority, discriminated harshly against this population, viewing it with deep
suspicion as a potential fifth column. Until 1966, most Palestinian citizens of Israel
lived under martial law, which gave the military and intelligence services unlimited
authority to control the minutiae of their lives.
Meanwhile, much of their land was confiscated under a variety of pretexts
(closed military zones, forest preserves, and simple expropriation for the benefit of
nearby segregated Jewish communities), as was that of those who had been forced
from the country and were now refugees. Anyone not present in the country at the
time of the first Israeli census in November 1948, was deemed an “absentee.” If
they were not in their village or city of origin at the time of the census, they were
“present absentees.” The state confiscated the property of all absentees, even if they
were only a few kilometers away. This land, expropriated under a procedure
deemed legal by the Israeli state under the 1950 Absentee Property Law, included
the bulk of the country’s arable areas. These lands were given to the Israel Lands
Authority, or placed under the control of the Jewish National Fund, whose
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33
discriminatory charter prescribed that such property could only be used for the
benefit of the Jewish people.51
This provision meant that dispossessed Arab owners could neither buy back
nor lease what had once been their property. Such moves were crucial to the
transformation of Palestine from an Arab country to a Jewish state, since only about
7% of the land in Mandatory Palestine had been Jewish-owned prior to 1948. The
Arab population inside Israel, isolated by military travel restrictions, was also cut
off from other Palestinians and from the rest of the Arab world. Accustomed to
being a substantial majority in their own country, they suddenly became an
unwelcome minority in a hostile environment as subjects of a Jewish polity. In the
words of one scholar, “by virtue of Israel’s definition of itself as a Jewish state and
the state’s exclusionary policies and laws, what was conferred on Palestinians was
in effect second-class citizenship.”52
Displaced Palestinians who lived outside the borders of the state of Israel—
the vast majority of the Palestinian people—were refugees (as were some who
remained inside Israel). Those who had fled to Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan sorely
taxed those countries’ limited relief capacities. Initially, most of them found
themselves in refugee camps managed by the United Nations Relief and Works
Agency (UNRWA). Refugees with means, employable skills, or relatives in Arab
countries did not register with UNRWA or found other housing, and many campdwellers
were eventually able to move out of the camps and integrate in cities like
Damascus, Beirut, and Amman. Nevertheless, 5.5 million Palestinian refugees and
their descendants are still registered with UNRWA, and receive educational, health
51 In the words of the JNF website, “land which had been purchased for Jewish settlement belonged
to the Jewish people as a whole.” See “Our History - 1901: It All Started With A Dream,” JNF,
available at https://www.jnf.org/menu-3/our-history#.
52 Leena Dallasheh, “Persevering through Colonial Transition: Nazareth’s Palestinian Residents
after 1948,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 178, 45, 2 (Winter 2016), p. 10.
Annex 1
34
and other benefits, of whom over 1.5 million still live in refugee camps today.
Uniquely among Arab host countries, in Jordan, home to almost half of those
registered with UNRWA, Palestinian refugees were granted citizenship and formed
a majority of the country’s population.
In the aftermath of the 1948 war, the Palestinians were virtually invisible
internationally, hardly covered in the Western media and rarely allowed to
represent themselves. They and their cause were invoked by Arab governments,
but they themselves played almost no independent role. The Arab states presumed
to speak for the Palestinians in inter-Arab forums, but they did not do so with a
unified voice. At the United Nations and elsewhere, the Palestine question was
generally subsumed under the rubric of the “Arab-Israeli conflict”. The question of
Palestine seemed fated to gradually disappear.
Immediately after the Nakba, several leading Palestinian figures attempted
to establish a government-in-exile for the Arab state that was specified in the 1947
UN partition resolution. They set up a Government of All Palestine in Gaza, which
was under Egyptian military occupation at the time, but it failed to win the support
of key Arab states, notably Jordan, and it garnered no international recognition.
Meanwhile, in 1950, King ‘Abdullah enlarged his kingdom, now called Jordan
rather than Transjordan, by annexing the West Bank, an annexation recognized
only by his closest allies, the UK and Pakistan.
Spurred by the unwillingness or inability of the Arab states and the
international community to reverse the disastrous consequences for their people of
the Nakba, Palestinian activism revived in the bleak post-Nakba environment. This
effort was hindered by the dispersal of the Palestinians throughout the region as a
fragmented collectivity under the sovereignty of Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and
Lebanon. Nevertheless, nationalist groups coalesced and some engaged in militant
activity aimed at mobilizing Palestinians to recover primary responsibility for their
Annex 1
35
own cause by taking up arms against Israel. This activity started spontaneously and
consisted mainly of uncoordinated raids on Israeli border communities. It took
several years before this clandestine armed action coalesced into a visible trend and
emerged from obscurity with the formation of organizations like Fatah in 1959, and
their public emergence in the mid-1960’s.
Beyond dealing with Israel’s opposition to any Palestinian attempt to
redress the status quo, Palestinians had to confront the Arab host governments,
notably those of Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt. These states were strongly opposed
to attacks on their neighbor, given their military weakness vis-à-vis Israel. Even
when the new Palestinian movements did manage to establish themselves, they had
to fend off attempts by some Arab states to bend them to their purposes. The
formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) by the Arab League in
1964 at the behest of Egypt was a response to this burgeoning independent
Palestinian activism and constituted the most significant attempt by Arab states to
control it.
After the revolution of 1952 in Egypt, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel
Nasser sought in particular to avoid provoking Israel. This effort was undermined
by the hawkish policies of Israeli leaders, especially Prime Minister David Ben-
Gurion,53 and by growing Palestinian militancy within the Gaza Strip. The large,
concentrated refugee population there provided an ideal environment for the
growth of this militancy, as confirmed in accounts by founders of the Fatah
movement who were based in Gaza, among them Yasser ‘Arafat (Abu ‘Ammar),
Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad) and Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad). Years afterward, they
talked about the obstacles—including arrest, torture, and harassment—that post-
53 This was first shown by Avi Shlaim in a pioneering article, “Conflicting Approaches to Israel’s
Relations with the Arabs: Ben-Gurion and Sharett, 1953-1956,” Middle East Journal, 37, 2 (Spring
1983), pp. 180-201.
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36
coup Egyptian intelligence placed in the way of their efforts to organize against
Israel.
Thus a Palestinian campaign of sporadic attacks on Israel was launched
despite heavy-handed repression by the Egyptian military and its intelligence
services, which tightly controlled the Gaza Strip. Israel’s retaliation for the
casualties inflicted by Palestinian cross-border infiltrators, known as feda’iyin
(meaning “those who sacrifice themselves”), was massive and disproportionate,
and the Gaza Strip bore the brunt of these attacks. No neighboring country was
immune to them, however. In October 1953, Israeli forces carried out a massacre
in the West Bank village of Qibya following an attack by feda’iyin that killed three
Israeli civilians, a woman and her two children, in the town of Yehud. Israeli
special forces Unit 101, under the command of Ariel Sharon, blew up forty-five
homes with their inhabitants inside, killing sixty-nine Palestinian civilians.54 The
raid, which was condemned by the UN Security Council,55 was launched despite
the unceasing efforts of Jordan (then in control of the West Bank) to prevent armed
Palestinian activity, which included imprisoning and even killing would-be
infiltrators. Jordanian troops were often deployed in ambushes against Palestinian
militants, and were under orders to fire on anyone attempting to enter Israel.
54 On the investigation of the attack by the head of the United Nations Mixed Armistice
Commission, see Commander E.H. Hutchinson, Violent Truce: A Military Observer Looks at the
Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1951-55 (New York: Devin-Adair, 1956).
55 UN Security Council Resolution 101 (November 24, 1953), available at
https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/112073?ln=en#:~:text=TitleResolution%20101%20(1953)%20
%2F,%5D%2C%20of%2024%20November%201953.&text=%5B2%5D%20p.,of%20the%20Sec
urity%20Council%2C%201953.
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37
VIII. THE SUEZ WAR OF 1956
Committed to a policy of using overwhelming force against the Palestinians
and the neighboring Arab states, the Israeli leadership was nevertheless divided in
1954 and 1955, with then-Defense Minister Ben-Gurion taking a bellicose position
against the more pragmatic stance of Prime Minister Moshe Sharett. Ben-Gurion
believed that only the unremitting application of force would oblige the Arab states
to make peace on Israel’s terms. In Sharett’s view, this aggressive approach
needlessly provoked the Arabs and foreclosed opportunities for compromise.56
(Like Ben-Gurion, though, Sharett was reluctant to give up any of the territory
Israel had gained in 1948 or to allow any significant return of Palestinian refugees
to their homes.) In March 1955, Ben-Gurion proposed a major attack on Egypt and
occupation of the Gaza Strip.57 The Israeli cabinet rejected the proposal, only to
acquiesce in October 1956 after Ben-Gurion replaced Sharett as prime minister and
his militant ethos won out. The Suez War of that year was the result.
In the build-up to this 1956 attack, Israel carried out a series of large-scale
military operations against Egyptian army and police posts and Palestinian refugees
in the Gaza Strip, which inflicted heavy civilian and military casualties.58 The
manifest weakness of its army as compared to Israel’s forced Egypt to abandon its
policy of non-alignment and try to purchase arms first from the UK and the US.
When that effort failed, Egypt in September 1955 concluded a massive arms deal
with Czechoslovakia. Unable to respond to Israeli attacks, and embarrassed before
Egyptian and Arab public opinion, the government meanwhile ordered its military
56 This is clear from the extracts from Sharett’s diaries in Livia Rokach, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism:
A Study based on Moshe Sharett’s Personal Diary and other Documents (Belmont, MA: Arab
American University Graduates, 1985).
57 This is attested by Mordechai Bar On, a member of the Israeli General Staff at the time: The
Gates of Gaza: Israel’s Road to Suez and Back, 1955-57 (New York: St. Martin’s 1994), pp. 72-
75.
58 Avi Shlaim, “Conflicting Approaches,” Middle East Journal, 37, 2 (Spring, 1983), pp. 180-201.
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38
intelligence services to help the Palestinian militants they had previously
suppressed to launch operations against Israel.
The Israeli response to this new development was to launch the Suez War
of October 1956. It did not do so alone, however. It was joined by both Britain and
France. The two former colonial powers were angered by Egypt’s nationalization
of the Franco-British Suez Canal Company, as well as its support for nationalist
movements in other parts of the Arab world. They therefore joined Israel in its fullscale
invasion of Egypt in October 1956.
This second major Arab-Israeli war had a number of peculiarities. Unlike
Israel’s other conventional wars, in 1948, 1967, 1973, and 1982, which had
multiple Arab protagonists, the Suez war was fought against only Egypt. It was
preceded by the Protocol of Sèvres, a secret agreement drawn up a few days before
the war began between Israel and France and Britain. Sèvres marked the end of the
estrangement between Britain and the Zionist movement that went back to the
White Paper of 1939. The war involved a further reversal of alliances: Israel’s
supporters in 1947-48, the United States and Soviet Union, ultimately sided with
Egypt.
The tripartite offensive was launched under the pretext that Anglo-French
forces were intervening only to separate the combatants. The Egyptian army was
decisively and rapidly defeated, and Israeli forces occupied the Gaza Strip and the
Sinai Peninsula up to the banks of the Suez Canal. Even so, the political results
were not favorable to the winners. Operating in tandem notwithstanding their
intense Cold War rivalry and for different reasons, the United States and the Soviet
Union took a harsh stand against this tripartite act of aggression. The Soviets
threatened to use nuclear weapons, the United States warned that it would cut off
economic aid to its allies, and both swiftly pushed through a UN General Assembly
resolution demanding immediate withdrawal. (A resolution in the Security Council
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39
was impossible because of the certainty of an Anglo-French veto). This intense
pressure forced Israel, France, and Britain to end the occupation of Egyptian
territory and of the Gaza Strip. Nasser became a pan-Arab hero but the Palestinian
residents of the Gaza Strip, most of them refugees, had suffered greatly.
As the occupying Israeli troops swept through the towns and refugee camps
of the Gaza Strip in November 1956, more than 450 civilians were killed, most of
them summarily executed. According to a Special Report by the Director-General
of UNRWA, in the first massacre, which took place in Khan Yunis and the
neighboring refugee camp on November 3, Israeli soldiers shot 275 men.59 One
week later on November 12 in the Rafah camp, Israeli troops killed 111, and
another 66 between November 1 and 21.60 Israel’s claim, that these deaths were the
result of clashes with troops searching for feda’iyin, was decisively debunked by
the aforementioned UNRWA Special Report, which showed that these civilians
were killed after all resistance had ceased in the Gaza Strip, apparently as revenge
for raids into Israel before the Suez War.
The events of 1956 were only part of the heavy price that the people of Gaza
paid (and still pay) in Israel’s continuing war on the Palestinians. One historian has
chronicled a total of twelve major Israeli military campaigns against Gaza, between
1948 and 2014, some being full-fledged occupations and some constituting all-out
warfare.61 There have been several more such attacks since then. It is not surprising
that the Gaza Strip should have been the target in this way, whether under Egyptian
control from 1948 until 1967, or thereafter: it was the crucible of the resistance of
59 Special Report of the Director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine
Refugees in the Near East A/3212/Add.1 (December 15, 1956), available at
https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/710955?ln=fr.
60 These massacres were the subject of a debate in the Knesset in November 1956 in which the
phrase “mass murder” was used. For an account by an Israeli soldier who was a witness, see Marek
Gefen, “The Strip is Taken,” Al-Hamishmar (April 27, 1982).
61 Jean-Pierre Filiu, Gaza: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
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40
Palestinians to their dispossession after 1948. Most of the founding leaders of Fatah
and the PLO emerged from there; the militant Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine drew its most fervent support there; and it was the birthplace and
stronghold of Islamic Jihad and Hamas, the most strenuous advocates of armed
struggle against Israel.
IX. THE 1967 WAR AND SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION 242
In the run-up to the June 1967 war, there was general consensus in the U.S.
and Israeli military and intelligence communities that Israel’s military was vastly
superior to those of all the Arab states combined.62 On 5 June 1967, its air force
launched a long planned lightning first strike that destroyed most Egyptian, Syrian,
and Jordanian warplanes on the ground. This gave Israel complete air superiority,
which, in a desert region, in summer, provided an even greater advantage to its
ground forces than it already had. Israeli armored columns were then able to
conquer the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, including East
Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights in just six days.
If the reasons for Israel’s decisive victory are clear, the factors that led to
the war are less so. One cause was the rise of armed Palestinian militancy. The
Israeli government had recently begun to divert the waters of the Jordan River to
the center of the country. In the face of the impotence of the Arab regimes, on
January 1, 1965 Fatah launched a sabotage attack on a water-pumping station in
central Israel. This was a symbolic strike, designed to show that the Palestinians
could act effectively when the Arab governments could not, and to embarrass those
governments and force them to act. Egyptian officials regarded Fateh with
suspicion, seeing it as recklessly provoking Israel at a time when Egypt was heavily
62 See Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and
Resistance, 1917-2017 (New York: Metropolitan, 2020), p. 97.
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41
engaged in military intervention in a civil war in Yemen and in building up its
economy.
Given Israel’s overwhelming military ascendancy, and the fact that over
sixty thousand Egyptian troops and much of its air force were tied down in the
Yemeni civil war, Egyptian actions in May 1967—moving troops into the Sinai
Peninsula and requesting the removal of UN peacekeeping forces—appear
illogical. But Egypt was responding to an upsurge of Palestinian guerrilla raids on
Israel from bases provided by a radical Syrian regime that came to power in 1966,
to which Israel reacted by attacking and threatening Syria. Egypt’s leadership felt
obliged to answer this challenge to maintain its prestige in the Arab world.
Nevertheless, Egypt’s moves in Sinai provided a pretextual casus belli that allowed
the Israeli military to launch a well-prepared first strike that changed the face of
the Middle East. Conscious of the tremendous superiority of their forces, Israeli
planners set in motion their long-standing and meticulous plans for overwhelming
the Jordanian, Syrian and Egyptian armies and occupying the West Bank and East
Jerusalem, the Syrian Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip.63
Events in the UN Security Council were one indication of a geopolitical
environment that had thoroughly changed since 1956. During the six days of the
1967 war, the UN Security Council held eleven sessions, many running into the
early hours of the morning. Throughout, the US acted to protect Israeli interests.
The shift in the stance of the US as compared to 1956 was mainly due to global
factors, notably the impact of the Cold War and the Vietnam War on the region and
on US policy. Evolving in parallel were Israel’s external alliances, whereby it
moved away from its supporters of the 1950s and early 1960s, France and Britain
63 Michael Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 202, 153-155.
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42
(with whose weapons it fought the 1956 and 1967 wars), to full alignment with the
United States.
A consequent transformation since 1956 of the US stance on Israeli control
of conquered Arab territory was disastrous for the Palestinians and the Arabs. The
result was Security Council Resolution 242, approved on November 22, 1967.
Drafted by the British permanent representative, Lord Caradon, its text distilled the
views of the US and Israel. Although UNSC 242 stressed the “inadmissibility of
the acquisition of territory by war,” it linked any Israeli withdrawal to peace treaties
with the Arab states and the establishment of secure frontiers. The resolution called
for “Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and
acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political
independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure
and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”64 In practice, this
meant that any withdrawals would be both conditional and delayed, given the Arab
states’ reluctance to engage in direct negotiations with Israel. In the case of the
West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, withdrawals have not taken
place for over 56 years, in spite of decades of negotiations.
Moreover, by linking Israel’s withdrawal from the territories it had just
occupied to the creation of secure and recognized boundaries, UNSC 242
effectively allowed for the possibility of enlarged Israeli borders to meet the
criterion of security, as determined by Israel itself. Israel has since deployed an
extraordinarily expansive and flexible interpretation of the term “security.” Finally,
the ambiguous language of UNSC 242 left open another loophole for Israel to retain
the territories it had occupied: the resolution’s English text specifies “Withdrawal
of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” rather than
64 UN Security Council Resolution 242 (November 22, 1967), available at
https://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacemaker.un.org/files/SCRes242%281967%29.pdf, para. 1(ii).
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43
“from the territories occupied.” Then Foreign Minister Abba Eban pointedly
stressed to the Security Council that his government would regard the original
English-language text as binding, rather than the equally official French version,
whose wording (“des territoires occupés”) does not permit this ambiguity.65 In the
56 years since, Israel has exploited this linguistic gap, which has permitted it to
colonize the occupied Palestinian and Syrian territories, some of which—East
Jerusalem and the Golan Heights—it has formally annexed, and to maintain
unending military control over them. Repeated UN condemnations of these moves
have not altered Israel’s behavior.
In the eyes of the Palestinians, UNSC 242 gave a renewed international
imprimatur to a further stage in their dispossession. As in 1947, an international
legal formula harmful to them came via the medium of a UN resolution, and as
with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, this key document contains not a single
mention of the Palestinians. UNSC 242 instead treated the entire issue as a stateto-
state matter between the Arab countries and Israel, eliminating the presence of
Palestinians. The text does not refer to most elements of the original Palestine
question, or to previous seminal UN resolutions on Palestine like UNGA 181 and
UNGA 194 of November 1947 and December 1948 respectively. Instead, it
contains a bland reference to “achieving a just solution of the refugee problem.” If
the Palestinians were not mentioned and were not a recognized party to the conflict,
they could be treated as at best a humanitarian issue.
By its omissions, Resolution 242 lent support to a crucial element of Israel’s
narrative: since there were no Palestinians, the only genuine issue was the Arab
states’ refusal to recognize Israel and their wielding of a phantom “Palestine
65 United Nations Security Council Official Records, 1382nd Meeting (November 22, 1967),
S/PV.1382, available at https://documents-ddsny.
un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/NL6/700/05/pdf/NL670005.pdf?OpenElement, paras. 93-94, 202.
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44
problem” as a pretext for this refusal. In the discursive battle over Palestine, UNSC
242 delivered a powerful blow to the displaced and occupied Palestinians. Only
two years later, in 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir proclaimed that “there
were no such thing as Palestinians… they did not exist,” and that they never had
existed.66 She thereby took the negation characteristic of a settler-colonial project
to the highest possible level: the indigenous people were nothing but a lie.
Equally important from the Palestinian perspective, UNSC 242 effectively
legitimated the 1949 armistice lines (since known as the 1967 borders or the Green
Line) as Israel’s de facto boundaries, giving retroactive endorsement to its conquest
of most of Palestine in the 1948 war. The failure to refer to core issues dating back
to 1948 extended to ignoring the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their
homes and obtain compensation laid down in UNGA 194. Once again, the
Palestinians were being dealt with in a cavalier fashion, their rights ignored,
deemed not worthy of mention by name in the crucial international decision meant
to resolve the entire conflict and determine their fate. This slight further motivated
the Palestinians’ reviving national movement to put its case before the international
community.
Thanks largely to UNSC 242, a whole new layer of forgetting was added to
the induced amnesia that obscured the colonial origins of the struggle between
Palestinians and the Zionist settlers. The resolution’s exclusive focus on the results
of the 1967 war ignored the fact that none of the underlying issues resulting from
the 1948 war had been resolved in the intervening nineteen years. Along with the
expulsion of the Palestinian refugees, the refusal to allow them to return, the theft
of their property, and the denial of Palestinian self-determination, these included
the legal status of Jerusalem, and Israel’s expansion beyond the 1947 partition
66 Frank Giles, “Golda Meir: ‘Who can blame Israel’,” Sunday Times (June 15, 1969).
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45
frontiers. UNSC 242 nevertheless became the benchmark for resolving the entire
conflict, nominally accepted by all parties, even as it passed in silence over many
of its most basic aspects. Not surprisingly in view of its flawed genesis, more than
half a century after its adoption, UNSC 242 remains largely unimplemented, and
the essence of the struggle over Palestine remains unaddressed.
X. THE LEGACY OF THE 1967 WAR
While the 1967 war, the occupation of the rest of Palestine, and UNSC 242
did great harm to the Palestinians, they also served as a spark to their national
movement. The events of 1967 marked an extraordinary resurgence of Palestinian
national consciousness and resistance to Israel’s negation of Palestinian identity.
In the words of one observer: “A central paradox of 1967 is that by defeating the
Arabs, Israel resurrected the Palestinians.”67
At the same time, these events marked the beginning of Israel’s occupation
of, and total control over, the remainder of Palestine. They gave Israel the
opportunity to realize the original vision of its Zionist forefathers like Herzl and
Jabotinsky: a Jewish state achieved via the transformation of all of Palestine into
“the Land of Israel.” The expulsion of 250,000-300,000 Palestinians immediately
after the 1967 war, the large-scale expropriation of land in Jerusalem and the West
Bank, and the settlement of Israelis in these territories in fulfilment of this vision
involved the methods and practices that are necessary for the implementation of
any settler colonial project. These included arbitrary military rule, brutal legal
regimes derived from British colonial practice like the Defence Emergency
Regulations of 1945 allowing for torture and detention without trial, and the
deprival of the basic rights of the conquered population.
67 Ahmad Khalidi, “Ripples of the 1967 War,” Cairo Review of Global Affairs, 25 (Spring 2017),
p. 28.
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46
In the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war, Israel employed all of these
tools in what was ostensibly a temporary military occupation. The clue to what was
to become its permanent nature was the annexation of East Jerusalem and
surrounding areas, and the establishment of settlements in Jerusalem and the West
Bank by the government of Prime Minister (1963-69) Eshkol in the form of the
“Allon Plan,” which openly called for annexing large portions of the occupied West
Bank. These actions revealed this government’s annexationist and expansionist
intentions from the outset of the occupation.68
***
Israeli governments and their specific policies have changed repeatedly
since 1967. However, the unceasing expansion of illegal settlements in the
occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, involving unending expropriation of
Palestinian land, the unimpeded growth of the illegal settler population from zero
in 1967 to nearly 750,000, and what has become a permanent military occupation
today attest to the unchanging nature of the basic settler colonial dynamic of
Zionism. This dynamic has been constant since the beginning of the colonization
of Palestine, expanding dramatically under the aegis of Great Britain during the
Mandate period. A constant corollary of this colonial dynamic was the deprivation
of the basic rights of the Palestinian people, whether by the British Mandatory
power, by Israel, or by an international community that has consistently failed to
uphold these rights. As Professor Avi Shlaim’s report demonstrates, events since
1967 have only evinced the ongoing nature of these injustices, and demonstrates
that a fatally flawed and cruelly misnamed “peace process” has not only failed to
remedy these injustices, but has exacerbated them.
68 See Avi Raz, The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of
the 1967 War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Gershom Gorenberg, The Accidental
Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (New York: Holt, 2006).
Annex 1
Professor Rashid Khalidi
July 20, 2023
Annex 1
48
BIOGRAPHY OF PROFESSOR RASHID KHALIDI
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said
Professor of Modern Arab Studies in the
Department of History of Columbia
University in New York. Born in New
York in 1948, Khalidi received his B.A.
from Yale University in 1970, and his
D.Phil. from Oxford University in 1974.
He has taught at the Lebanese
University, the American University of
Beirut, Georgetown University, and at
the University of Chicago. He is past
President of the Middle East Studies
Association, and the co-editor of the
Journal of Palestine Studies.
Khalidi is the author and co-editor of eleven books and over 120 scholarly articles and
chapters in edited volumes on the history of the Middle East and related topics. His
monographs include The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler
Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017, 2020, winner of the 2020 MEMO Book Award;
Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. has Undermined Peace in the Middle East, 2013, winner
of the Lionel Trilling Book Award and the MEMO Book Award; Sowing Crisis: American
Dominance and the Cold War in the Middle East, 2009; The Iron Cage: The Story of the
Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, 2006, winner of the 2007 Arab American National
Museum Book Award; Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous
Path in the Middle East, 2004; Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National
Consciousness, 1997, winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani
Prize, new edition, 2010; Under Siege: PLO Decision-making during the 1982 War, 1986,
new edition, 2014; and British Policy towards Syria and Palestine, 1906-1914, 1980. He
is the co-editor of Palestine and the Gulf, 1982, The Origins of Arab Nationalism, 1991,
and The Other Jerusalem: Rethinking the History of the Sacred City, 2020.
Annex 2
The Diplomacy of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (1967-2023),
Expert Report of Professor Avi Shlaim (20 July 2023)

Annex 2
INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE
LEGAL CONSEQUENCES ARISING FROM THE POLICIES AND
PRACTICES OF ISRAEL IN THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN
TERRITORY, INCLUDING EAST JERUSALEM
THE DIPLOMACY OF THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT (1967-2023)
EXPERT REPORT OF PROFESSOR AVI SHLAIM
20 JULY 2023
Annex 2
Annex 2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. THE AFTERMATH OF THE SIX-DAY WAR ..................................................... 2
II. SETTLEMENTS IN THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES ............................................ 8
III. THE DIPLOMACY OF ATTRITION................................................................. 10
IV. THE OCTOBER 1973 WAR .......................................................................... 12
V. THE CAMP DAVID ACCORDS ...................................................................... 16
VI. THE LONDON AGREEMENT ........................................................................ 19
VII. THE FIRST INTIFADA .................................................................................. 21
VIII. THE PNC RESOLUTIONS AND THE MADRID PEACE CONFERENCE .............. 23
IX. THE OSLO ACCORD .................................................................................... 26
X. THE BREAKDOWN OF THE OSLO PEACE PROCESS ...................................... 29
XI. CAMP DAVID II .......................................................................................... 31
XII. THE CHAMPION OF VIOLENT SOLUTIONS ................................................... 34
XIII. THE BARRIER IN THE WEST BANK AND DISENGAGEMENT FROM GAZA ..... 36
XIV. EHUD OLMERT’S PEACE PLAN ................................................................... 38
XV. PALESTINIAN ELECTIONS AND HAMAS VICTORY ....................................... 40
XVI. BLOCKING THE PATH TO A PALESTINIAN STATE ........................................ 43
Annex 2
XVII. THE KERRY ROUND OF PEACE TALKS........................................................ 45
XVIII. PALESTINIAN UNITY AND ISRAEL’S MILITARY ESCALATIONS IN GAZA ..... 47
XIX. THE ‘UNITY INTIFADA’ .............................................................................. 50
XX. THE ABRAHAM ACCORDS .......................................................................... 51
XXI. CONCLUSION .............................................................................................. 53
BIOGRAPHY OF PROFESSOR AVI SHLAIM ............................................................... 56
Annex 2
1
This report offers context for the legal questions posed to the International
Court of Justice by the request of the UN General Assembly for an Advisory
Opinion relating to legal consequences arising from discriminatory policies and
practices of Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories. It reviews some of the
international attempts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the June 1967
War to the present and analyses the reasons for their failure. Three major themes
emerge from the survey of the diplomatic history of this 56-year period. First is the
gradual moderation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s programme,
culminating in the 1993 Oslo Accord in which it gave up its claim to 78% of
Mandate Palestine. The second is Israel's illegal activities, increasing diplomatic
intransigence, and creeping annexation of the occupied Palestinian territories. The
third is the failure of the international community to propose and pursue a
resolution of the conflict that would address Palestinian rights and needs, above
all the right to national self-determination.
In origins and in essence the Arab-Israeli conflict is a clash between two
national movements, Jewish nationalism (or Zionism) and Palestinian nationalism.
There were two peoples and one land, hence the conflict. There are two main
dimensions to Arab-Israeli relations, the inter-communal and the inter-state: the
inter-communal is the conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine; the inter-state
conflict is between the State of Israel and the neighbouring Arab states. The latter
intervened in the inter-communal conflict on the side of the Palestinians during the
Arab Revolt in the late 1930s. President Anwar Sadat of Egypt led the trend
towards Arab disengagement from the conflict by signing a peace treaty with Israel
in 1979. Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994. Four Arab states signed
the Abraham Accords with Israel in 2020. All Arab states remain involved in this
conflict, in varying degrees, to this day. But the clash between Israeli and
Palestinian nationalism remains the heart and the core of this conflict. It is this
aspect that makes it one of the most prolonged, bitter, and intractable conflicts of
modern times.
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I. THE AFTERMATH OF THE SIX-DAY WAR
The June 1967 War, popularly known as the Six-Day War, was a major
turning-point in the history of the Middle East. Israel claimed that it was a defensive
war, a war of ‘no choice’. Before the war, Egypt’s President Gamal Abdul Nasser
removed the UN Emergency Force in Sinai and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli
shipping. These were certainly provocative acts. But the fact remains that Israel
fired the first shot and that a diplomatic route out of the crisis was available, but
Israel chose not to take it. In the course of the war Israel conquered the Golan
Heights from Syria, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) from Jordan, and
the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, thereby trebling its territory. After
the June 1967 war, Israel was in control of 100% of mandatory Palestine.
As a result of the war, the situation in the Middle East changed
fundamentally: the Arab states now had a direct stake in the conflict with Israel
while Israel, for the first time in its history, had something concrete to offer the
Arab states in return for peace, and it could do so without compromising its
security. A majority in the cabinet were willing to trade land for peace with Egypt
and Syria subject to provisions to safeguard Israeli security. No such flexibility,
however, was evident in relation to the West Bank. A wave of secular nationalism
converged with an upsurge of religious messianism to preclude any compromise
on the eastern front. The great majority in the country and the cabinet wanted to
hold on to the West Bank either for security reasons or for ideological reasons,
viewing it as an integral part of ‘Eretz Israel’ or the Land of Israel.
With regard to the West Bank, Israel had two diplomatic options on the
morrow of victory: a Jordanian option and a Palestinian option. Israel and Jordan
had always been ‘the best of enemies’. King Hussein continued the policy of
moderation and accommodation with Israel which his grandfather, Abdullah I, had
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put in place. And like his grandfather, King Hussein had a common interest with
Israel in suppressing Palestinian nationalism.
In 1964 the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) had been formed by a
resolution of the Arab League. Its mission, as its name indicated, was to liberate
Palestine. While directed against Israel, the radical factions within the PLO aspired
to replace the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan with the Republic of Palestine. It was
a complex triangle involving Israel, Jordan, and the PLO. The situation was akin
to a room with three men but only two chairs. Israel firmly occupied one chair and
the PLO had no realistic chance of dislodging it. Replacing the Hashemite
monarchy in Amman was a distant but more realistic prospect. Hence the mistrust
between the Hashemite rulers of Jordan and the PLO.
Back in 1963, King Hussein had initiated secret talks with Israeli officials.
This remarkable dialogue across the battle-lines broke down on the eve of the Six-
Day War. Mistrust of Israel led Hussein to sign a defence pact with President
Nasser and to commit his army to the war with Israel. After only three days of
fighting, he lost half his kingdom, including the Old City of Jerusalem, the jewel
in the Hashemite crown.
Immediately after the end of the war, on 2 July 1967, Hussein renewed his
secret contacts with the Israelis. He offered them total peace for total withdrawal.
But the mood in Israel had hardened against compromise in the aftermath of
victory. The Israeli cabinet offered Hussein the Allon Plan, named after deputy
prime minister Igal Allon. Under the Allon Plan, Jordan stood to recover roughly
70% of West Bank but Israel would have kept the Jordan Valley, most of the Judean
desert along the Dead Sea, and a substantial area around Greater Jerusalem.
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4
Hussein rejected the offer out of hand. The secret talks resumed but the political
deadlock persisted.1
In addition to the Jordanian option, Israel had a Palestinian option. For a
brief period after the war, when it became clear that a deal with King Hussein on
Israel’s terms was not in the cards, Israel’s policymakers considered a Palestinian
alternative. A group of West Bank notables, led by the lawyer Aziz Shehadeh,
approached Israeli officials to say that they did not want to return to Hashemite rule
and that their preference was to reach an agreement with Israel on an autonomous
Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. At the request of the Israelis,
Shehadeh produced a written plan for a Palestinian state that would sign a peace
agreement with Israel. He received no response.2
The debate between the proponents of the Jordanian option and the
Palestinian option turned out to be largely academic because Israel was not
prepared to withdraw from all the West Bank. There were significant divisons of
opinion within the National Unity Government that had been formed on the eve of
the war. Menachem Begin, the leader of the right-wing Gahal (later Likud) party,
advocated the immediate annexation of the whole of the West Bank. Defence
Minister Moshe Dayan led the hawkish wing of the Labour Party. On 7 June 1967,
standing by the Wailing Wall, Dayan declared, ‘The IDF liberated Jerusalem this
morning. We reunited divided Jerusalem, the bisected capital of Israel. We have
returned to our holiest places, we have returned in order not to part from them ever
again.’3 The dovish wing of the Labour Party was represented by Foreign Minister
1 Avi Shlaim, Lion of Jordan: King Hussein’s Life in War and Peace (London: Penguin Books,
2007).
2 Raja Shehadeh, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir (London:
Profile, 2022).
3 Quoted in Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (London: Penguin Books, 2014),
p. 261.
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5
Abba Eban who was willing to restore most of the West Bank, but not the Old City
of Jerusalem, to Jordan in return for peace. No one had a clear idea on what to do
with the million Arabs who lived on the West Bank. As then prime minister Levi
Eshkol never tired of reminding his colleagues: ‘You like the dowry, but you don’t
like the bride!’
To perpetuate the territorial status quo, Eshkol and his cabinet started to
create facts on the ground in the form of Jewish settlements in the occupied
territories. To conceal this reality, they adopted a diplomacy of deception.4 While
publicly proclaiming that Israel wanted peace, they took concrete measures to
render the occupation permanent. To reduce the number of Arabs in their extended
domain, they decided to prevent the quarter of a million Palestinian refugees, some
of them second time refugees, from returning to their homes on the West Bank.
Israel had blocked the return of 750,000 Palestinian refugees after the 1948 war.
After the June 1967 war, it repeated the pattern of not allowing civilians to return
to their homes. Moshe Dayan was dubbed ‘the emperor of the occupied territories’.
He orchestrated the policy of demographic engineering, and entrenching the
occupation. This policy was in line with the original Zionist project of building a
Jewish state over as much of the land of Palestine as possible with as few Arabs as
possible within its borders.
An Arab summit conference was held in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital,
between 29 August and 1 September 1967. It was the first meeting of the Arab
leaders since their defeat in the June War. The conference ended with the adoption
of the famous three noes of Khartoum: ‘no recognition, no negotiation, and no
peace’ with Israel. On the face of it these declarations showed no sign of readiness
for compromise. In fact, the conference was a victory for the Arab moderates who
4 Avi Raz, The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the
June 1967 War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
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6
argued for trying to obtain the withdrawal of Israel’s forces by political rather than
military means. Arab spokesmen interpreted the Khartoum declarations to mean no
formal peace treaty, but not a rejection of a state of peace; no direct negotiations,
but not a refusal to talk through third parties; and no de jure recognition of Israel,
but de facto acceptance of its existence as a state. President Nasser and King
Hussein set the tone at the summit and made it clear subsequently that they were
prepared to go much further than ever before toward a settlement with Israel.5
The Khartoum summit marked a real change in the Arab approach to Israel,
a change from confrontation to negotiation. At Khartoum, Nasser advised King
Hussein to explore the possibility of a peaceful settlement with Israel. Israel’s
intelligence services obtained the verbatim text of the Khartoum deliberations and
apprised the cabinet of the sea change they heralded in the Arab attitude. Major
General Aharon Yariv, the director of military intelligence, informed the Knesset
Foreign Affairs and Security Committee that the summit decided to go for a
political, not military solution. But Israel’s leaders feared the new manifestation of
Arab moderation: it posed a threat to their expansionist plans. They therefore chose
to portray the conclusions of the summit as the climax of Arab intransigence in
order to justify the toughening of their own posture. Foreign Minister Abba Eban
advised that since the world press was inclined to characterize the Khartoum
resolutions as moderate, the government of Israel had to expose them as extreme.
The new line Isreal adopted was that the Khartoum summit closed every door and
every window that might lead to a peace settlement. Abba Eban famously quipped:
‘The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace’.
The most significant international pronouncement on the Arab-Israeli
dispute after the Six-Day War was UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 22
5 Avi Shlaim’s interview with King Hussein: ‘His Royal Shyness: King Hussein and Israel’, The
New York Review of Books, 15 July 1999.
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7
November 1967. The preamble to the resolution emphasized the inadmissibility of
the acquisition of territory by force and the need to work for a just and lasting
peace. Basically, the resolution proposed a package deal, the trading of land for
peace between Israel and its neighbours.
As Professor Rashid Khalidi explains in his report, Resolution 242 caused
deep anger among Palestinians because it ignored their political rights and merely
referred to them as a ‘refugee problem’. By ignoring the right to national selfdetermination
of the Palestinian people, Resolution 242 reinforced the view, widely
held in the Global South, that the UN was not a genuinely international body, but
the instrument of the Global North, and especially of the five permanent members
of the Security Council.
Resolution 242 was accepted by Egypt and Jordan but not by Syria. Israel’s
position was ambiguous but widely regarded as amounting to a rejection. Israel
declared that before it would withdraw from any part of the territories, there must
be direct negotiations leading to a contractual peace agreement that incorporated
secure and recognized boundaries. The problem was that Israel refused to spell out
what it meant by ‘secure and recognised boundaries’ then and it still refuses to do
so today. Israel insisted that the peace agreements must be in place before
beginning any withdrawal from the territories. But by pursuing its expansionist
policy, it undermined the prospect of a negotiated agreement.
Resolution 242 has been the basis of most international plans for peace in
the region since 1967. History shows that at the inter-state level this formula is
sound. In 1979, Israel agreed to return to the international border, to give back to
Egypt every inch of the Sinai Peninsula, and it received in return a peace treaty
which is still standing today. In 1994, Israel signed a peace treaty with the
Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and returned some land it had occupied along their
common border in the south. This was a bilateral treaty between the two states
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8
which left Israel in occupation of the rest of the West Bank of the Jordan River.
This treaty, too, survived all the turmoil in the region and is still effective today.
Had Israel wanted a peace agreement with Syria, it would most probably have been
within its reach through negotiations. But there was a price tag: complete Israeli
withdrawal from the Golan Heights and a return to the international border. The
problem was that on the northern front, as on the eastern front, Israel preferred land
to peace. This was due to the strategic importance of the Golan Heights as well as
the fertile agricultural land and water resources it contained.
II. SETTLEMENTS IN THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES
As mentioned, soon after the ending of hostilities, Israel started building
civilian settlements in the newly occupied Arab territories. The new spaces were
not called occupied territories but officially named as the Administered Territories.
This clearly implied that the administration of these territories would be temporary,
pending a final political settlement. However, pressure on the government to
authorise the establishment of civilian settlements on these territories began to
build up from below, from both secular nationalists and religious extremists.
The government asked the Legal Counsel of the Foreign Ministry for an
opinion on whether civilian settlements in the administered territories were
permitted under international law. The Counsel was Theodor Meron, a 37 yearsold
Holocaust survivor who went to win many honours for services to criminal
justice and international humanitarian law. On 18 September 1967, Meron
submitted a memorandum to prime minister Levi Eshkol. ‘My conclusion’, he
wrote, ‘is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the
explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention’. The memo was top secret
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9
but it was later discovered and published by the American-Israeli author Gershon
Gorenberg.6
Meron accepted that there were conflicting claims regarding the status of
the West Bank, but he warned that the international community would not accept
settlement in any of the territories. He noted that during the Six-Day War a military
order had instructed that Israel’s military courts should apply the Geneva
Conventions in the West Bank. The Fourth Geneva Convention says that ‘An
Occupying Power should not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population
into territory it occupies’. The memo went on to stress that ‘The prohibition
therefore is categorical and not conditional upon the motives for the transfer or its
objectives. Its purpose is to prevent settlement in occupied territory of citizens of
the occupying state’. If it was decided to go ahead with Jewish settlement in the
administered territories, it seemed to Meron vital that settlement be carried out by
military and not civilian entities. It was also important in his opinion that such
settlement was ‘in the framework of camps and is, on the face of it, of a temporary
rather than permanent nature’.
The legal opinion was clear-cut: establishing civilian settlements on
occupied territory would violate the Fourth Geneva Convention. The government
nevertheless chose to ignore the advice of its Legal Counsel and to go ahead with
the building of settlements in all the occupied territories.
What began as private enterprise quickly turned into a governmentsponsored
project. The government used the map of the Allon Plan as a guide to
authorising settlements. In other words, it only authorised the building of civilian
settlements in areas it intended to keep permanently. Some religious-Zionist zealots
6 Gershon Gorenberg, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977
(New York: Times Books, 2006), pp. 99-101.
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from the settler movement Gush Emunim defied the government and proceeded
without authority to establish small settlements in locations of religious
significance. Rather than face them down, the government usually reached a
compromise that enabled them to stay.
III. THE DIPLOMACY OF ATTRITION
The UN Secretary-General appointed Dr Gunnar Jarring, a Swedish
diplomat, as a mediator with the task of promoting an Arab-Israeli settlement on
the basis of Resolution 242. Having rejected 242, Syria declined to participate in
his mission. The other Arab states had high expectations of his mission, whereas
Israel had none at all. Israel had no trust in the impartiality of the UN or in its
capacity to mediate. The deeper reason, however, was that Jarring’s task was to
implement Resolution 242 and this meant trading land for peace at a time when
Israel was becoming increasingly wedded to the territorial status quo. The Israeli
tactic was to give Jarring proposals and documents to which he was to obtain Arab
reactions. The aim was to keep his mission alive and prevent the matter from going
back to the UN, where Israel thought it would be blamed for the failure.
On 8 February 1971, to try to jump-start the process, Jarring addressed
Egypt and Israel with identical memoranda outlining his own proposals for
resolving the dispute between them. Of Egypt he requested an undertaking to enter
into a peace agreement with Israel; of Israel, to withdraw to the former Egypt-
Palestine international border. Egypt gave Jarring all the undertakings he asked for.
The reply marked a breakthrough: it was the first time that an Egyptian government
declared publicly its readiness to sign a peace treaty with Israel. But by this time
the Israeli position had hardened against territorial compromise. Moshe Dayan’s
mantra had taken hold: ‘Better Sharm el-Sheikh without peace than peace without
Sharm el-Sheikh’. The Israeli reply to Jarring, reflecting this attitude, was a
categorical refusal to restore the previous boundary. It ended with a short but highly
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11
significant sentence: ‘Israel will not withdraw to the pre–5 June 1967 lines’. The
reply sealed the fate of Jarring’s mission. All other international efforts to promote
a settlement of the conflict similarly came to naught in the face of Israel’s
inflexibility.
When Golda Meir succeeded Levi Eshkol as prime minister in 1969,
Israel’s diplomatic posture hardened further. As she writes in her autobiography,
‘Intransigent’ was her middle name.7 Mrs Meir did not want to go down in Israel’s
history as a leader who retreated from territory. But she also reflected the political
consensus which held that the post-1967 status quo was greatly to Israel’s
advantage and that Israel’s military supremacy ensured that it could be perpetuated
indefinitely. More than all other Israeli leaders, however, she had a propensity for
self-righteousness. ‘All the wars against us’, she once said, ‘have nothing to do
with us’. Mrs Meir’s overriding foreign policy aim was to preserve the post-war
territorial status quo and to refuse to make any concessions for the sake of peace.
In March 1969, a month after she succeeded Eshkol as prime minister, President
Nasser launched the War of Attrition against Israel. Failure to bring about Israeli
withdrawal from the occupied territories by diplomatic means led the Egyptian
leader to resort to military means.
War in Egypt was justified by the slogan ‘That which was taken by force
can only be recovered by force’. Nasser’s immediate goal was to prevent the
conversion of the Suez Canal into a de facto border while his ultimate aim was to
force Israel to withdraw to the pre-war border. The strategy consisted of artillery
bombardment of Israel's positions on the canal front, occasional air attacks, and hitand-
run commando raids. The War of Attrition was ended by a ceasefire in August
1970. Unlike the June 1967 war, it ended in a draw rather than a clear-cut Israeli
7 Golda Meir, My Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1975), p. 312.
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victory. Like all the Arab-Israeli wars since 1967, the War of Attrition was fought
by Israel not to safeguard its security but in order to protect its territorial conquests.
Anwar Sadat, who succeeded Nasser as president in September 1970,
reverted to the diplomatic track. In February 1971, Sadat presented his proposal for
an interim settlement based on a partial Israeli withdrawal to the Sinai Passes and
the reopening of the Suez Canal to international shipping. Mrs Meir’s reply was a
polite rejection.
In March 1972, Jordan’s King Hussein unveiled his federal plan for a
United Arab Kingdom. The federation was to consist of two regions: the region of
Jordan, comprising the East Bank, and the region of Palestine, comprising the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip. Each region was to have its own government and its
separate judicial system. Mrs Meir’s rejection of this plan was swift and
categorical.
As stated, Mrs Meir firmly held the opinion that the territorial status quo
was stable and it could be sustained easily and at low cost. After the War of
Attrition, she conducted what can be best described as the diplomacy of attrition.
Her policy, in a nutshell, was to let Sadat sweat it out, with his range of options
constantly narrowing, until he had no choice but to sue for peace on Israel’s term.
Mrs Meir succeeded in persuading Dr Henry Kissinger, the American Secretary of
State, of the realism of her chosen course of action.
IV. THE OCTOBER 1973 WAR
In the end, the diplomacy of attrition backfired with disastrous
consequences. Its aim was to compel the Arabs to accept the post-1967 territorial
status quo. But to President Sadat of Egypt and President Hafiz al-Asad of Syria
the status quo was humiliating and intolerable. On 6 October 1973, the Day of
Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish Calendar, Egypt and Syria launched a
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13
surprise attack on Israel. The aim of the offensive was to capture some of the
territory they had lost in 1967, to force the US and Soviet Union to intervene, and
to initiate a diplomatic process that would force Israel to withdraw from further
parts of occupied Arab lands.
Israel and the United States were taken by complete surprise. The entire
rationale for their previous policy was shattered overnight. In the initial phase of
the war Israel suffered significant setbacks on both the Egyptian and the Syrian
fronts but, with the help of a massive American airlift of arms, it launched a
successful counter-offensive. In the aftermath of the war, Kissinger had to move
fast to construct a new foreign policy that had an Arab as well as an Israeli
dimension. He embarked on his step-by-step diplomacy which resulted in Israeli-
Egyptian and Israeli-Syrian military disengagement agreements. Kissinger did not
broker a military disengagement agreement on the eastern front because Jordan had
not participated in the October War. But there was a deeper reason: any
negotiations were bound to bring forth Jordanian as well as Palestinian claims to
sovereignty over the West Bank. Kissinger knew that any concessions on the West
Bank would trigger the collapse of Golda Meir’s coalition government. He
therefore chose to keep the Palestinian issue on the back burner.
Although the Palestine Liberation Organisation had not participated in the
October War, its political standing improved as a result of the war. It also took a
major step to moderate its political programme. The Palestinian National Charter
called for an armed struggle to liberate the whole of mandatory Palestine. The
Palestinian National Council (PNC), the parliament of the worldwide Palestinian
community, which convened in Cairo in June 1974, shifted the emphasis from the
armed struggle to a political solution by means of a phased programme. As a first
stage, it approved the establishment of ‘a patriotic, independent fighting peoples
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14
regime in any part of the Palestinine territory which will be liberated’.8 This was
an ambiguous formula, but it conveyed a willingness to consider the possibility of
a Palestinian state alongside Israel rather than in place of it.
On the Israeli side, however, the PNC resolution was interpreted as the
result of a change of tactics rather than a genuine change of aims. Frequent
references were made to the PLO’s ‘theory of stages’ to make the point that a
Palestinian state in part of Palestine would only serve as a base for continuing the
armed struggle to liberate the whole of Palestine. Itzhak Rabin, who replaced Golda
Meir as prime minister after the October War, adhered to the orthodox line of
refusing to recognize or to negotiate with the PLO. His aim was to keep the
Palestinian question ‘in the refrigerator’. He took the view that Israel must refuse
to talk to what he considered a terrorist organization that was committed to its
destruction. Nor was he prepared to consider a Palestinian state alongside Israel;
this, he said, ‘would be the beginning of the end of the State of Israel’. For all
practical purposes, his position was essentialy the same as that of Golda Meir. He
remained firm and inflexible: Israel would never recognize the PLO, enter into any
negotiations with the PLO, or agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
The Arab position towards the PLO did change in the aftermath of the war.
Previously, the position had been that Jordan should represent itself and the
Palestinians in diplomatic negotiations with Israel. At the end of October 1974, an
Arab League summit meeting was held in Rabat, Morocco. King Hussein suffered
a major diplomatic defeat because the summit endorsed the claim of the PLO to be
‘the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people’. The summit also
reaffirmed the right of the Palestinian people to set up an independent national
8 Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin, eds., The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the
Middle East Conflict, seventh edition (London: Penguin Books, 2008), pp. 162-63.
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authority, led by the PLO, on any part of Palestine that was liberated. The
implication of these resolutions was that the territories captured in 1967 should not
revert to Jordan but go to the Palestinians to establish an independent state. A
month later Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the PLO, was invited to address the UN
General Assembly, which proceeded to pass Resolution 3236 (XXIX) affirming
the right of the Palestinian people to, among other things, national selfdetermination
and national independence and sovereignty.
Rabin’s principal departure from the foreign policy of his predecessor was
the Interim Agreement with Egypt, signed on 1 September 1975. The agreement
was also known as ‘Sinai II’ because it followed on from the 1974 separation-offorces
agreement that Kissinger had brokered. The agreement provided for Israeli
withdrawal in Sinai to the eastern ends of the Mitla and Gidi Passes, creation of a
UN-monitored buffer zone in the evacuated area, and Israeli withdrawal from the
oil fields at Abu Rudeis and Ras Sudar. It also stipulated the opening of the Suez
Canal to Israeli non-military cargo ships, and the establishment of American earlywarning
stations in the area of the passes. The basic terms of the agreement were
not dissimilar to those offered by President Sadat in his interim settlement proposal
of February 1971.
Sinai II contained one novel feature: direct American involvement and
underwriting. Israel always preferred to negotiate with the pre-eminent western
power of the day rather than with the Arabs. On this occasion, Rabin made it clear
to Henry Kissinger that the cabinet would not ratify the Sinai II agreement unless
it was accompanied by an American-Israeli agreement. This ‘memorandum of
agreement’ detailed U.S. commitments to Israel following from the interim
agreement. The memorandum pledged American support ‘on an on-going and
long-term basis to Israel’s military equipment and other defense requirements, to
its energy requirements and to its economic needs’. More specifically, it promised
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16
a positive response to Israel’s request for F-16 fighter planes and Pershing missiles
with conventional warheads. In a separate ‘memorandum of agreement’, which was
kept secret, the United States confirmed that it would not negotiate with or
recognize the PLO or initiate any moves in the Middle East without prior
consultation with Israel.
V. THE CAMP DAVID ACCORDS
Whereas Henry Kissinger’s focus was on bringing about Egypt’s
disengagement from the Arab-Israeli conflict, President Jimmy Carter’s aim was a
comprehensive resolution of the conflict. Carter did not shy away from addressing
the core of the conflict—the Palestinian problem. He was the first American
president to speak about the need for establishing ‘a Palestinian homeland’. His
initial idea was to convene an international conference with the Soviet Union and
all the parties to the conflict. An Israeli veto of the Soviet Union led him to switch
to a trilateral summit between himself, President Sadat, and Prime Minister
Menachem Begin at the presidential retreat in Camp David, Maryland.
Menachem Begin was the leader of the Likud, a right-wing nationalistic
party that came to power in 1977, ending three decades of Labour Party hegemony.
The Labour Party was a pragmatic centre-left party which advocated territorial
compromise with Jordan over the West Bank. The Likud was an ideological party
dedicated to what it called ‘the Whole Land of Israel’. It believed that the borders
of the State of Israel should correspond to the borders of the Land of Israel. For the
Likud the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were an integral part of the Land of Israel.
By claiming that the Jewish people have an exclusive right to sovereignty over their
ancestral homeland, Likud rejected any rival claims from either Jordan or the
Palestinians. To underline their rejection of rival claims over the West Bank, Likud
leaders usually referred to it by its Biblical names—Judea and Samaria.
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The initial positions of the principals at Camp David were poles apart.
Sadat’s position was that a Palestinian state should be established in the West Bank
and the Gaza Strip. Begin’s position was that ‘the Palestinian Arabs residing in
Judea, Samaria and the Gaza District should enjoy self-rule’. Under American
pressure, Begin did produce a Palestinian autonomy plan but Begin’s autonomy
applied only to people and not to the land they inhabited. In other words, he was
prepared to keep Israel’s claim to sovereighty over the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip in abeyance while negotiations were in progess but not to give it up. He ruled
out in advance any notion of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state. The PLO
dismissed Begin’s plan as autonomy to collect their own garbage and to swat their
own mosquitos.
Thirteen days of assiduous negotiations led to the conclusion, on 17
September 1978, of the Camp David Accords. The eventual outcome of these talks,
the ‘Framework for Peace in the Middle East’, had two parts: (1) a process for
achieving Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza, and (2) a
framework for the conclusion of a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. The
subsequent negotiations on Palestinian autonomy were protracted but unsuccessful.
The main obstacle to an agreement was Israel’s refusal to give up its claim to
sovereignty over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and its rigidly narrow
parameters for Palestinian autonomy.
The talks between Israel and Egypt led to the signature of a peace treaty, on
26 March 1979, at the White House. It was the first peace agreement between Israel
and an Arab state. Israel agreed to withdraw from the whole of the Sinai Peninsula,
and Egypt promised to establish normal diplomatic relations between the two
countries and open the Suez Canal to Israeli ships. UN forces were to be stationed
in the area to supervise the demilitarisation of Sinai and to ensure the freedom of
navigation. All these provisions were duly carried out over three years, in
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accordance with a detailed timetable. In most Arab countries, however, the peace
with Israel was seen as an act of betrayal and Egypt was expelled from the Arab
League. The PLO also denounced the accords.
Carter’s hope for a national home for the Palestinian people did not
materialise. Begin got what he wanted: a peace agreement with Egypt that stood
on its own. Moreover, he believed that giving back Sinai would enable his country
to consolidate its control over the West Bank, over Judea and Samaria, as he
preferred to call it. Begin strongly objected to the term ‘occupied territories’. For
him Judea and Samaria were ‘liberated territories’. This sense of entitlement goes
a long way to explain Begin’s refusal to revert to the pre-war status quo on the
West Bank. For him the peace treaty with Egypt was not a step on the road to an
overall settlement but the final destination.
The Camp David summit was not simply a missed opportunity to begin the
groundwork for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It seriously
diminished the possibility of progress towards Palestinian statehood in the long
run. As Seth Anziska argues in Preventing Palestine, the breakthrough peace
agreement between Egypt and Israel created a roadblock to peace between Israel
and the Palestinians.9 In Israel the Camp David Accords are universally acclaimed
while the Oslo Accords (discussed below) are controversial. Anziska shows the
strong connections between the two sets of accords and the extent to which Oslo
drew on the Camp David autonomy plan. Palestinian autonomy became the
template for future would-be peacemakers. But there was never any realistic
possibility that mere autonomy would satisfy the national aspirations of the
Palestinians.
9 Seth Anziska, Preventing Palestine: A Political history from Camp David to Oslo (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2018).
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19
VI. THE LONDON AGREEMENT
The next major attempt to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict was undertaken
by King Hussein of Jordan in 1987. His Israeli interlocutor was Shimon Peres who
served as Foreign Minister in a national unity government headed by Itzhak
Shamir, Menachem Begin’s successor as leader of the Likud and Prime Minister.
Following the inconclusive result of the 1984 elections, Labour and Likud formed
a coalition government with Peres and Shamir rotating as Prime Minister and
Foreign Minister after the first two years. The two principal parties of the coalition
cancelled each other’s foreign policy. Labour believed in territorial compromise
over the West Bank and its preferred partner was Jordanian monarchy not the PLO.
Shamir believed that the whole of the West Bank belonged to Israel and this ruled
out partnership for partition with either Hashemites or Palestinians. He was a
proponent of the doctrine of permanent conflict and the unilateralist par excellence.
To the extent that he engaged in diplomatic activity at all, it was only to gain time,
to increase the number of Jewish settlers, and to entrench Israel’s occupation the
West Bank.
King Hussein’s basic idea was to convene an international conference in
order to provide cover for subsequent bilateral negotiations between Jordan and
Israel. Shamir, however, was adamantly opposed to the whole idea of an
international conference, even a purely ceremonial one. The Americans, too,
remained cool to the idea of convening an international conference because they
did not want the Soviet Union to be involved in Middle Eastern diplomacy. Hussein
met Peres in London, on 17 April 1987, at the home of the King’s Jewish friend,
Lord Mischon. At the end of a long day of negotiations and drafting, they initialled
a document that came to be known as the London Agreement. It containd three
parts.
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The first part proposed that the UN Secretary-General should invite the five
permanent members of the Security Council and the parties to the Arab-Israeli
conflict to negotiate a peaceful settlement based on Security Council Resolutions
242 and 338. (Resolution 338, passed during the 1973 October War, called on the
parties to cease fire and proceed immediately to implement Resolution 242). The
second part of the London Agreement proposed that the conference should invite
the parties to form bilateral committees to negotiate on issues of mutual interests.
The third part noted the agreement that the Palestinian issue would be discussed by
a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, which would not include members of the
PLO.
Shamir was irreconcilably opposed to the London Agreement and used his
authority as Prime Minister to thwart it. Although the London Agreement dealt
only with procedure and did not commit Israel to anything of substance, he feared
that it would open the door to a territorial compromise on the West Bank which
was favoured by the Labour Party. King Hussein suspected that Shamir would
oppose the London Agreement and he said so to Shimon Peres. Peres replied that
in that case he would break up the national unity government and make the London
Agreement the centrepiece of Labour’s manifesto at the subsequent election. But
when it came to a head, Peres lacked the courage of his convictions. He fixed his
colours firmly to the fence.
Shamir himself, by his own account, grew weary of the incessant
manoeuvres to find a peaceful solution to the Arab-Israeli dispute. ‘The presenting
and rejecting of peace plans’, he wrote in his autobiography, ‘went on throughout
the duration of my Prime Ministership; not a year passed without some official
proposal being made by the United States, or Israel, or even Mubarak, each one
bringing in its wake new internal crises, expectations and disappointments—
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though I had become more or less immune to the latter’.10 These plans rarely
contained new elements, Shamir complained; what they amounted to was ‘peace
in exchange for territory; recognition in exchange for territory; never “just” peace’.
VII. THE FIRST INTIFADA
Shamir was committed to maintaining the status quo in the occupied
territories, and it was maintained, at least on the surface. Settlement activity was
strongly encouraged by Likud-led governments to reinforce their claim to
sovereignty over the whole of the West Bank. Below the surface, Palestinian
frustration and despondency were increasing all the time. A feeling of hopelessness
took hold as the Palestinians watched more and more of their land being swallowed
up by Israeli settlements. Economic conditions remained miserable, while Israel’s
military government was becoming more intrusive and heavy-handed. The spark
that ignited the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, was a traffic accident on 9
December 1987, in which an Israeli truck driver killed four residents of Jabaliya,
the largest of the eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian response
took the form of protests, civil disobedience, the throwing of stones and Molotov
cocktails. From Gaza the disturbances spread to the West Bank. Within days the
occupied territories were engulfed in a wave of popular street demonstrations and
commercial strikes on an unprecedented scale.
The outbreak of the intifada was completely spontaneous. There was no
preparation or planning by the local Palestinian elite or the PLO, but the PLO was
quick to jump on the bandwagon of popular discontent against Israeli rule and to
play a leadership role alongside a newly formed body, the Unified National
Command. In origin the intifada was not a nationalist revolt. It had its roots in
10 Yitzhak Shamir, Summing Up: An Autobiography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994), pp.
174-75.
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poverty, in the miserable living conditions of the refugee camps, in hatred of the
occupation, and, above all, in the humiliation that the Palestinians had to endure
over the preceding twenty years. But it developed into a statement of major political
import. The aims of the intifada were not stated at the outset; they emerged in the
course of the struggle. The ultimate aim was self-determination and the
establishment of an independent Palestinian state. In this respect the intifada may
be seen as the Palestinian war of independence.
The IDF resorted to draconian measures to suppress the intifada but to no
avail. Events in the occupied territories received intense media coverage. The
world saw pictures of Israeli troops firing on stone-throwing demonstrators, or
beating those they caught, among them women and children. Israel’s image
suffered serious damage as a result of this media coverage. During the 1988 session
of the General Assembly, several resolutions were passed condemning Israel and
calling on it to abide by the Geneva Convention for the protection of civilians in
times of war.
King Hussein viewed with mounting concern the events unfolding on the
West Bank of the Jordan River. He was worried that the intifada would spread from
the West Bank to the east bank of the river and destabilise his regime. To forestall
this possibility, he made a decision of historic significance. On 31 July 1988, he
announced that Jordan was cutting its legal and administrative ties with the West
Bank. (Jordan had continued to pay the salary of about a third of the civil servants
on the West Bank during the preceding two decades of Israeli occupation.) Many
East Bankers felt they got nothing but ingratitude for their efforts to help the
Palestinians and that the time had come to cut their losses. The King himself felt
that Jordan was fighting a losing battle in defending positions that had already
fallen to the PLO. After two decades of trying to blur the distinction between the
East Bank and the West Bank, he concluded that the time had come to assert that
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the East Bank was not Palestine and that it was up to the Palestinians to decide
what they wanted to do with the West Bank and to deal with the Israelis directly
over its future. Israel now found itself alone in the arena with the PLO.
VIII. THE PNC RESOLUTIONS AND THE MADRID PEACE CONFERENCE
The PLO rose up to the challenge. Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the PLO,
took the lead in moderating its political programme. At the meeting of the PNC, in
Algiers in mid-November 1988, Arafat won a majority for the historic decision to
recognise Israel’s right to exist, to accept all the relevant UN resolutions going back
to 29 November 1947, and to adopt the principle of a two-state solution. The claim
to the whole of Palestine, enshrined in the Palestinian National Charter, was finally
laid to rest and a declaration of independence was issued for a mini state in the
West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. This revolution in
Palestinian political thinking coincided with the rise to power in Israel of a hardline
Likud government headed by Itzhak Shamir. Just as the Palestinians were
moving towards territorial compromise, Israel was moving away from it. Its
rejection of the PNC declaration was absolute and unconditional. In Israeli eyes the
PLO was a terrorist organisation and talking to it was therefore out of the question.
Yasser Arafat supported Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990; this did
not help the Palestinian cause, to use an understatement. In one of his smarter
moves, Saddam Hussein said Iraq would withdraw from Kuwait if Israel withdrew
from all occupied Arab territories. Having threatened ‘the mother of all battles’ if
the US intervened, he now proposed what amounted to the mother of all linkages.
The US insisted on sequential rather than simultaneous withdrawal: first Iraq would
have to withdraw its forces from Kuwait, only then would the US address the Israeli
occupation. The Gulf war ejected Iraq out of Kuwait. In the aftermath of the war,
towards the end of October 1991, the Americans and the Soviets convened an
international peace conference in Madrid to which they invited a large number of
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delegations, including a non-PLO Palestinian delegation.11 Although the PLO itself
was not invited, the official Palestinian delegation coordinated its moves with the
PLO office in Tunis.
This was the first time the Palestinians represented themselves at a major
international conference. A joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation with non-PLO
Palestinian members provided an umbrella for Palestinian participation. The
Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza were there on a footing of equality with
the Israelis: the heads of the Jordanian and Palestinian delegations were allowed as
much time as the head of the Israeli delegation for their opening speech to the
plenary. In his opening speech, Itzhak Shamir came close to rejecting the whole
basis of the conference ̶ UN resolutions 242 and 338 and the principle of land for
peace.
The Palestinians adopted the olive branch strategy. Dr Haidar Abdel-Shafi,
an elderly physician from Gaza who headed the Palestinian delegation, was the
epitome of moderation, of Palestinian nationalism with a human face. The contrast
between his speech and Mr Shamir’s speech could have hardly been more striking
in tone, spirit or substance. It was, by any standards, a remarkable speech and its
impact was only heightened by the quiet, dignified quality of the delivery.12
Dr Abdel-Shafi reminded the audience that it was time for the Palestinians to
narrate their own story. While touching on the past, his speech was not backwardlooking
but forward-looking. He sought neither an admission of guilt nor
vengeance for past iniquities but rather a just peace.
11 During the Cold War, American policymakers did their best to exclude the Soviet Union from
the diplomacy surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict. But Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power in
Moscow opened the door to cooperation in many fields, including the Middle East.
12 For the text of the speech see Laqueur and Rubin, The Arab-Israeli Reader, pp. 394-400.
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Dr Abdel-Shafi’s basic message was that the Palestinians were genuinely
committed to peaceful co-existence, that the Israeli occupation had to end, that the
Palestinians had a right to self-determination, and that they were determined to
pursue this right relentlessly until they achieved statehood. The intifada, he
suggested, had already begun to embody the Palestinian state and to build its
institutions and infrastructure. But while staking a claim to Palestinian statehood,
Dr Abdel-Shafi qualified it in two significant ways. First, he accepted the need for
a transitional stage, provided interim arrangements were not transformed into
permanent status. Secondly, he envisaged a confederation between an ultimately
independent Palestine and Jordan.
Dr Abdel-Shafi’s speech in Madrid was both the most eloquent and the
most moderate presentation of the Palestinian case ever made by an official
Palestinian spokesman since the beginning of the conflict at the end of the
nineteenth century. The PLO, for all its growing moderation, had never been able
to articulate such a clear-cut peace overture to Israel because of its internal
divisions and the constraints of inter-Arab politics. No PLO official had ever been
able to declare so unambiguously that a Palestinian state would be ready for a
confederation with Jordan. The whole tenor of the speech was more conciliatory
and constructive than even the most moderate statements of the PLO. In the words
of Afif Safieh, a senior PLO official, the the entire stance of the Palestinian
delegation at Madrid was ‘unreasonably reasonable’.13
Two tracks for further negotiations were established at the end of the
Madrid conference: an Israeli-Arab track and an Israeli-Palestinian track. The
official negotiations between the two sets of delegations took place under
American auspices in Washington DC. So long as the Likud remained in power,
13 Afif Safieh, The Peace Process: From Breakthrough to Breakdown (London: Saqi, 2010), p. 158.
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however, no progress could be achieved on either track. The centrepiece of Likud’s
ideology was ‘the Whole Land of Israel’ or Greater Israel, and on this there could
be no compromise. The aim was to achieve a Jewish majority on the West Bank
and to prevent the birth of a Palestinian state. In an interview with the Ma’ariv daily
newspaper, after losing the election of 23 June 1992, Shamir admitted that his tactic
in the peace talks was stonewalling. ‘I would have carried on autonomy talks for
ten years’, he said, ‘and meanwhile we would have reached half a million people
in Judea and Samaria’. ‘Moderation’, Shamir explained, ‘should relate to the tactics
but not to the goal…the integrity of the Land of Israel’.14
In the final sentence of his book, Summing Up: An Autobiography, Shamir
wrote: ‘If history remembers me at all, in any way, I hope it will be as a man who
loved the Land of Israel and watched over it in every way he could, all his life’.15
IX. THE OSLO ACCORD
The Labour Party’s victory in the 1992 election did not bring about an
abrupt change of policy. Itzhak Rabin, the leader of the party, was not a dove. The
traditional foreign policies of the rival parties led by the two Itzhaks displayed some
striking similarities. Both Labour and the Likud preferred to treat the Arab-Israeli
conflict as an interstate conflict. Both parties denied that the Palestinians had a right
to national self-determination. Both always refused to negotiate with the PLO, and
this refusal was absolute rather than conditional. Both were also unconditionally
opposed to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Although Labour
was open to territorial compromise in the West Bank, it envisioned returning that
territory to Jordan. Suspicion of the Arabs and a deep sense of personal
responsibility for Israel’s security were the twin hallmarks of Rabin’s worldview.
14 Interview with Yosef Harif, Ma’ariv, 26 June 1992.
15 Shamir, Summing Up, p. 257.
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For Rabin the Arabs represented first and foremost a military threat, and he
consequently tended to view all developments in the region from the narrow
perspective of Israel’s security needs. What changed was not the priorities of the
Labour government, but a dramatic drop in the price for peace offered by the PLO,
with which Israel had been negotiating indirectly since the Madrid conference.
Yasser Arafat, who was still out in the cold because of his support for Iraq’s
invasion of Kuwait, was threatened by the growing prestige of the Palestinian
leaders from the West Bank and Gaza. He therefore urged them to be
uncompromising in the official talks in Washington DC while opening a secret
channel to the Israeli government in Oslo. The PLO delegation in Oslo had no map
experts and no lawyers. In the secret talks in the Norwegian capital, it made one
concession after another to the Israelis. The result was the Oslo Accord, signed in
the White House, on 13 September 1993, with President Bill Clinton acting as
Master of Ceremonies.
The official name of the accord was ‘The Declaration of Principles on
Interim Self-Government Arrangements’. It applied only to Gaza and to the West
Bank city of Jericho. The signing of the accord was preceded by an exchange of
letters of recognition. Mutual rejection was replaced by mutual recognition.
However, while the PLO recognised Israel’s right to live in peace and security,
Israel only recognised the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and
as a partner in bilateral negotiations. There was no recognition of any Palestinian
national rights. It was only agreed that a Palestinian Authority (PA) would be
established and assume governing responsibilities in Gaza Strip and part of the
West Bank over a five-year period.
The accord was silent on all the key issues in the conflict: Jerusalem, the
right of return of the 1948 Palestinian refugees, the status of the Israeli settlements
on occupied Palestinian territory, and the borders of the Palestinian entity. All these
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issues were left to negotiations in the fourth year of the transition period. There
was no mention, let alone a promise, of an independent Palestinian state at the end
of the road. All the so-called ‘final status’ issues were left for future negotiations
and these were bound to reflect the power relations between the parties. The most
fatal flaw in the accord was that it did not require Israel to have a freeze on
settlement expansion during the transition period. The PLO leadership thought that
in return for giving up their claim to 78% of mandatory Palestine they would
eventually get an independent state over the remaining 22% with a capital city in
East Jerusalem. But it was not to be.
The Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip (‘Oslo II’), signed
in Washington on 28 September 1995, represented some progress in extending
Palestinian self-government. It provided for elections to a Palestinian council, the
transfer of legislative authority to this council, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from
the Palestinian centers of population, and the division of the West Bank into three
areas—A, B, and C. Area A consisted of Palestinian towns and urban areas; Area
B consisted of Palestinian villages and less densely populated parts; and Area C
consisted of the lands confiscated by Israel for the Jewish settlements. Area A was
placed under exclusive Palestinian control and in Area B the Palestinians exercised
civilian authority. Area C, which encompasses 60% of the West Bank, was placed
under exclusive Israeli control.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the opposition at the time, denounced
Oslo II as a surrender to terrorists and a national humiliation, and he vowed to bring
down the government. He gave an inflammatory speech from the grandstand of a
mass rally in Jerusalem in which demonstrators displayed an effigy of Rabin in SS
uniform. And he continued to play an active part in a campaign of incitement
against the democratically elected Labour government. The campaign hit its lethal
climax when Itzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic on 4 November
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1995. Unlike most political assassinations, this one achieved its primary aim—
derailing the peace process.
X. THE BREAKDOWN OF THE OSLO PEACE PROCESS
Shimon Peres succeeded Itzhak Rabin as party leader and Prime Minister.
During his short-lived premiership he made some serious mistakes, most notably
the green light he gave to the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, to
assassinate Yahya Ayash, a Hamas bomb maker.16 This ended a tacit ceasfire with
Hamas and resulted in a series of horrific suicide bombs that seriously damaged
the credibility of the government.
Peres’s second major mistake was the invasion of Lebanon in April 1996.
‘Operation Grapes of Wrath’ was meant to bring security to Galilee by bombing
the Hizbullah guerrilla bases in southern Lebanon. But Israel’s massive use of air
and ground forces was ill-conceived and ill-fated. An Israeli shell that killed 102
refugees sheltering in the UN base in Qana provoked an international outrcry and
forced Peres to retreat. The operation ended in a military, political, and moral
failure. From a seemingly unassailable 20-point lead, Peres kept losing ground to
Netanyahu: Jewish terror helped Labour; Palestinian terror helped the Likud.
Netanyahu defeated Peres by a margin of less than 1% in the election of
May 1996 and immediately set about destroying the foundations for the peace that
his Labour predecessors had begun to build. Netanyahu spent his three years in
power in a successful attempt to freeze, subvert, and undermine the Oslo accords.
He kept talking about reciprocity while acting unilaterally in demolishing Arab
16 Hamas is the Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement. It is a Palestinian Sunni
fundamentalist and nationalist organization. It was founded in Gaza in 1988 during the First
Intifada. It has a social service wing, Dawah, a political bureau and a military wing, the Izz ad-Din
al-Qassam Brigades.
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houses, opening a tunnel in the old city of Jerusalem, imposing curfews,
confiscating more and more Arab land. Under intense American pressure,
Netanyahu signed the Wye River Memorandum in October 1998, promising to turn
over another 11 per cent of the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority. But he
reneged on this agreement. Ironically, it was not the Labour opposition that brought
down his government but his own nationalist and religious coalition partners who
considered that he had gone soft on the Palestinians and that he had compromised
the integrity of the historic homeland.
Netanyahu’s rise to power marked a break with the pragmatism that
characterised Labour’s approach to the Arab world and the reassertion of a
nationalistic ideological hard line. In 1993, three years before Netanyahu became
Prime Minister and just before he was elected leader of the Likud, he published a
book under the title A Place Among the Nations: Israel and the World. The central
theme of the book is the right of the Jewish people to the whole Land of Israel.
History was rewritten in order to demonstrate that it was not the Jews who usurped
the land fron the Arabs, but the Arabs who usurped it from the Jews. Netanyahu’s
image of the Arabs was comprehensively negative and it did not permit the
possibility of diversity or change. Much of his venom was reserved for the
Palestinians. For him the Palestinian problem was not a genuine problem but an
artificially manufactured one. Compromise with the PLO was completely out of
the question because its goal was the destruction of the State of Israel, and this goal
allegedly defined its very essence.17
Once in power, Netanyahu continued to deny that the Palestinians had any
right to national self-determination. He treated the Palestinian Authority not as an
equal partner on the road to peace but as a defective instrument of Israeli security.
17 Benjamin Netanyahu, A Place Among the Nations: Israel and the World (London: Bantam, 1993).
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The expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank proceeded apace, in flagrant
violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of Oslo. The so-called peace process became
a charade: all process and no peace. In fact, it was worse than a charade for it gave
the Likud just the cover it needed to pursue the aggressive Zionist colonial project
on the West Bank.
On Netanyahu’s watch the Oslo peace process broke down. Why did it
break down? There are two radically different answers to this question. Netanyahu
maintains that the Oslo accords were doomed to failure from the start because they
were incompatible with Israeli security and with the historic right of the Jewish
people to the Whole Land of Israel. The other view is that, following the return of
the Likud to power, Israel reneged on its side of the bargain. More specifically, the
Oslo accords were killed by the relentless expansion of Jewish settlements in the
occupied territories. Settlement expansion involved seizing more and more
Palestinian land. Land-grabbing happened also under previous Labour
governments but was significantly increased under the Likud.
XI. CAMP DAVID II
The Labour Party, under the leadership of Ehud Barak, won the elections
of 17 May 1999 with a clear mandate to return to the Oslo path. Like Rabin, Barak
was a soldier who later in life turned to peace-making. While donning civilian
clothes, Barak remained essentially a soldier. Barak is what in Hebrew is known as
a bitkhonist—a security-ist. As Prime Minister, no less than when he was army
chief of staff, he had three priorities: security, security, and security. All
developments in the region, including the peace process, were viewed by Barak
from the narrow perspective of Israel’s security needs and these needs were
significantly inflated.
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Barak saw relations with the Palestinians as a zero-sum game. It is only a
slight exaggeration to say that Barak approached diplomacy as if it were the
extension of war by other means. His modus operandi was not peace by
compromise but peace by ultimatum. Barak famously described Israel as ‘a villa in
the jungle’. Leaving aside the racist undercurrent, this clearly indicated the
importance he attached to maintaining the separation between Israel and its
neighbours.
From his first day in office, Barak pursued a policy of ‘Syria first’, of
working for a breakthrough on the Syrian track. Syria was a major military power
whereas the Palestinians were not. As a military threat to Israel they were, as Barak
pointed out, completely negligible. By removing Syria from the conflict, Barak
hoped to change the whole strategic landscape in the region and to leave the
Palestinians even more weak and isolated and therefore more likely to accept
whatever terms Israel eventually chose to offer them for the final settlement. The
main reason for the failure of the Israeli-Syrian negotiations was Barak’s refusal to
accept total Israeli withdrawal to the lines of 4 June 1967 on the Golan Heights. It
was only after the talks with Syria failed that Barak turned, belatedly and
reluctantly, to the Palestinian track. He did not do well on this track either.
On Barak’s watch Israel accelerated the pace of settlement on the West
Bank. True, some settlement activity had gone on under all three previous Prime
Ministers. But under Barak the building of settlements proceeded at a frenetic pace
and in blatant disregard for the spirit of Oslo. More houses were constructed, more
Arab land was confiscated, more access roads were built to isolated Jewish
settlements. For the Palestinian population these settlements were not just a symbol
of the hated occupation but a source of daily friction and a constant reminder of the
danger to the territorial contiguity of their future state. Barak seemed intent on
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repackaging rather than ending the occupation and on tightening Israel’s control
over the Palestinian territories.
Barak asked Bill Clinton to convene a summit with himself and Yasser
Arafat. He thought that at a trilateral summit, he and the American president would
be able to force Arafat to accept a settlement on Israel’s terms. Bill Clinton, obliged
by convening a summit at Camp David in Maryland in July 2000. Arafat warned
Clinton that the positions of the two sides were too far apart and that if the summit
failed, it would make things not better but worse. Clinton persuaded Arafat to go
anyway by promising that if the summit failed, there would be no finger pointing.
At the summit Barak refused to meet face-to-face with Arafat to negotiate.
Through his aides he sent successive offers, the last of which was for a
demilitarised Palestinian state on the Gaza Strip and 90% of the West Bank. This
offer did not meet two of Arafat’s key demands: Palestinian sovereignty over the
Muslim holy places in the Old City of Jerusalem and the right of return of the
Palestinian refugees. There was a chance that Arafat would have given up one
demand if the other was satisfied; there was no chance he would give up on both.
The summit failed basically because the Israeli offer was not good enough. Yet, no
sooner had the conference failed, when both Barak and Clinton pointed the finger
of blame at Arafat.
On his return home, Barak propagated the myth of the ‘generous offer’ and
the notion that there was no Palestinian partner for peace. The historical record
showed that there was a serious Palestinian partner for peace but not on Barak’s
terms. This was most clearly demonstrated by the PLO’s endorsement of the Oslo
Accord. Nevertheless, virtually the whole Israeli nation, left, right, and centre,
accepted Barak’s explanation for the failure of the Camp David summit. The claim
that there was no Palestinian partner for peace had far-reaching electoral
consequences. It seriously damaged the peace camp in general and the Labour Party
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in particular. For if there was no Palestinian partner for peace, why vote for a party
that advocated negotiations and compromise? It made more sense to vote for a
tough, uncompromising leader.
XII. THE CHAMPION OF VIOLENT SOLUTIONS
Ariel Sharon, the new leader of the Likud, fitted the bill. He was the
champion of violent solutions. On 28 September 2000, he stage a much-publicised
visit to al-Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, in the Old City of Jerusalem which
the Jews call Temple Mount. Flanked by a thousand security men and in deliberate
disregard for the sensitivity of the Muslim worshippers, Sharon walked into the
sanctuary with what he claimed was a message of peace. The day after his visit,
following Friday prayers, large-scale riots broke out around the Old City.
Palestinians on Temple Mount threw rocks over the Western Wall at Jewish
worshippers and Israeli policemen fired rubber-coated steel bullets, killing four
Palestinian youths. In the days that followed, demonstrations erupted all over the
West Bank and Gaza. This was the beginning of the second intifada which lasted
until 2005 and claimed the lives of 1,100 Israelis and 4,907 Palestinians.
The return to violence helped the Likud to win the elections of 6 February
2001. During the 2001 election campaign, Sharon declared that the Oslo accords
were null and void. Rejecting the notion that Oslo had been ‘the peace of the brave’,
he dubbed it ‘the peace of the grave’. He drew up a list of ‘red lines’ that he vowed
not to cross: no dismantling of settlements, no withdrawal from the Jordan Valley,
no concessions on Jerusalem. The dominant narrative during Sharon’s premiership
was the ‘war on terror’. Here he was in his element, making the fight against
militant Palestinian groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad the top priority of his
government.
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After 9/11, the al-Qaeda attack on the twin towers, Sharon was the first
world leader to jump on the bandwagon of the ‘Global War on Terror’. His message
to the neoconservatives in George W. Bush’s administration was that they were on
the same side: the Americans were fighting terror worldwide while he was fighting
terror in his back yard. The Palestinian Authority, the embryonic government of
the state-in-the-making, was according to him a terrorist entity. He therefore
proposed to deal with it as one should deal with terrorists − with an iron fist. No
peace negotiations took place between 2001 and 2006 and it was highly revealing
that Sharon regarded this as something to be proud of. Because he disliked
compromise, he also rejected all international peace plans aimed at a two-state
solution.
The most important plan came from the Arab side. At its summit meeting
in Beirut, on 28 March 2002, the Arab League unanimously adopted a Saudi plan
that became known as the Arab Peace Initiative (API). This API offered Israel
peace and normalization with all 22 members of the Arab League in return for
agreeing to an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza with a
capital city in East Jerusalem. Sharon ignored the initiative and the following day
he declared war on the Palestinians.
The defining moment of Sharon’s premiership occurred on 29 March 2002.
It was the first day of ‘Operation Defensive Shield’, launched in retaliation against
a Hamas suicide attack in Natanya which killed 29 Israelis and wounded close to
150. The IDF was ordered to reoccupy the big Palestinian cities on the West Bank
which the Oslo II agreement had placed under the control of the Palestinian
Authority. In many ways the operation was a replay of Sahron’s 1982 war in
Lebanon: it was directed against the Palestinian people; it stemmed from the same
unjustified equation of all Palestinians with terrorists; it was based on the same
denial of Palestinian national rights; it employed the same strategy of brutal and
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overwhelming military force; and it displayed the same disregard for public
opinion, international law and UN resolutions. Sharon’s real agenda was to put the
clock back; to sweep away the remnants of Oslo; to cripple the Palestinian
Authority; to inflict pain and misery on the Palestinians; to replace Yasser Arafat
with a pliant, collaborationist leadership; and to extinguish all hope for a free
Palestine. Sharon continued his ‘war on terror’ until the end of his life.
XIII. THE BARRIER IN THE WEST BANK AND DISENGAGEMENT FROM GAZA
Sharon was an ardent nationalist and a territorial expansionist who hoped
to realise in his own lifetime the dream of Greater Israel. His ultimate aim was to
redraw unilaterally Israel’s borders, incorporating large swaths of occupied
territory. Stage I was to build on the West Bank the so-called security barrier which
the Palestinians call the apartheid wall. The wall is three times as long as the pre-
1967 border and its primary purpose is actually land-grabbing. At some points the
barrier deviates from the Green line to penetrate as much as 14 miles into the West
Bank, a huge distance considering that the width of the West Bank ranges from
12.5 to 35 miles. Occasionally, the Israeli Supreme Court would rule in favour of
Palestinian plaintiffs and order the re-routing of a section of the wall for which
there was no obvious security reason but in most cases the IDF ignored the rulings.
Stage II in Sharon’s grand strategy consisted of the unilateral
disengagement from Gaza in August 2005. This involved the uprooting of 8,000
Jews and the dismantling of 22 settlements. Withdrawal from Gaza was presented
to the world as a contribution to the Quartet’s Road Map (discussed below), but it
was not. It was not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a
prelude to further expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move
undertaken in what was seen as an Israeli national interest. The withdrawal from
Gaza was part of the determined right-wing Zionist effort to prevent any progress
towards an independent Palestinian state and to consolidate Israel’s grip over the
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West Bank. In the year after the withdrawal, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the
West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent and territorially
contiguous Palestinian state.
‘The Roadmap for Peace’ had been launched by the Quartet – America,
Russia, the UN, and European Union – on 30 April 2003, just over a month after
the invasion of Iraq. Before the invasion, Tony Blair and George W. Bush had
promised that after disarming Iraq, they would address the situation in Israel-
Palestine. The roadmap was the long-awaited plan for resolving the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict. It envisaged three phases leading to an independent Palestinian
state alongside Israel by the end of 2005. The Palestinian leaders embraced the
Road map with great alacrity. The Israeli attitude towards the roadmap was very
different. Likud’s ideology of a Greater Israel was simply incompatible with a
genuine two-state solution. The expansion of settlements on the West Bank, the
construction of the wall, and the destruction of the infrastructure of the Palestinian
Authority were the three key elements in Likud’s strategy for undermining the twostate
solution. Sharon had fourteen reservations and he had the temerity to tell the
Americans that he would present the road map to his government for consideration
only if all fourteen amendments were included in the text. The Americans yielded.
What the government eventually approved was not the Quartet’s excellent road
map but Sharon’s emasculated version of it.18 Another major international initiative
to resolve the conflict was dead on arrival.
18 ‘Israel’s Response to the Roadmap’, Appendix 7 in Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), pp. 243-47.
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XIV. EHUD OLMERT’S PEACE PLAN
Disagreements on foreign policy within his own party drove Sharon to quit
the Likud in November 2005 and form a new centrist party, Kadima, which means
Forward in Hebrew. In January 2006, Sharon went into a coma from which he
never recovered. He was succeeded as party leader and Prime Minister by his
deputy, Ehud Olmert. Like Sharon, Olmert was a life-long supporter of Greater
Israel. Another element of continuity was the privileging of military force over
diplomacy to achieve political objectives. Olmert only departed from Sharon’s
position by declaring publicly that the wall being built on the West Bank was not
just a security measure but the marker of Israel’s final border.
A police investigation of a series of corruption scandals led Olmert to
announce, on 28 September 2008, his intention to resign—though he stayed on as
a caretaker Prime Minister until May 2009. Olmert’s main claim to be a
peacemaker rested on an offer he made to Mahmoud Abbas, who was elected
President of the State of Palestine and the Palestinian National Authority following
Yasser Arafat’s death in 2004. The meeting took place at Olmert’s residence on 16
September 2008 – twelve days before he announced his resignation. After leaving
office, Olmert made the offer public, claiming he had been willing to place the
entire Old City under an international regime, divide Jerusalem, give the
Palestinians 93.5 per cent of the West Bank with one-to-one swaps for the areas to
be retained by Israel, and absorb 5,000 refugees inside the Green Line over a period
of five years.
This was certainly a far-reaching proposal which addressed all the key
permanent status issues. On Jerusalem and borders Olmert went well beyond what
Ehud Barak had been prepared to offer. Yet Olmert’s version of events in the last
moments of 2008 is not entirely accurate. By his own account, Olmert demanded
that Abbas meet him the very next day, together with map experts, in order to arrive
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at a final formula for the border between Palestine and Israel. Abbas asked to take
the map with him to show to his experts. Olmert declined, fearing the map would
be used not for closure but as the starting point in future negotiations. Abbas was
not prepared to be rushed by the ‘caretaker’ Prime Minister on a matter of such
supreme importance and no meeting took place the following day. Olmert claimed
that he never heard from Abbas again and that the most generous offer in Israel’s
history remained without a Palestinian answer. But Olmert and Abbas did negotiate
subsequently, on more than one occasion. Far from ignoring the offer, the
Palestinians requested clarifications which they did not receive. Palestinian doubts
about Olmert’s credibility were compounded by his deep unpopularity at home and
his imminent political demise. He was a ‘lame-duck’ Prime Minister and his
constitutional authority to sign the agreement he proposed was wide open to
challenge.
Even without the added complications of internal Israeli rivalries, Olmert’s
peace initiative faced an uncertain future. On a number of critical issues the two
sides remained far apart. The Palestinians were not told whether Olmert’s
percentages for the West Bank included or excluded the Jewish neighbourhoods of
Jerusalem. Nor was there agreement on the West Bank settlements to be removed:
Olmert, for example, insisted on keeping Ariel which extended nearly halfway
across the West Bank and this was not acceptable to the Palestinians. Olmert
stipulated that IDF forces remain in the future Palestinian state and this too was not
acceptable to the Palestinians. Olmert offered to allow 5,000 refugees to return to
Israel; Abbas wanted 150,000 to return over a period of ten years. So even if his
hold on power had been much firmer, it is far from certain that Olmert could have
reached an overall settlement.
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XV. PALESTINIAN ELECTIONS AND HAMAS VICTORY
Mahmoud Abbas had serious domestic problems of his own following the
decision by Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, to enter the political
process. In January 2006, free and fair elections were held in the West Bank and
the Gaza Strip and Hamas unexpectedly won a decisive victory over Fatah. Fatah
was the largest faction in the PLO and it became the dominant party in the post-
Oslo Palestinian Authority with a majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council
or parliament. Numerous international observers confirmed that the elections had
been both peaceful and orderly. Hamas won a clear majority (74 out of 132 seats)
in the Palestinian Legislative Council and it proceeded to form a government. Israel
refused to recognise the new government; the United States and European Union
followed its example. Israel resorted to economic warfare by withholding tax
revenues while its western allies suspended direct aid to the Hamas-led Palestinian
Authority.
With Saudi help the warring Palestinian factions managed to reconcile their
differences. On 8 February 2007, Fatah and Hamas signed an agreement in Mecca
to stop the clashes between their forces in Gaza and to form a government of
national unity. They agreed to a system of power-sharing, with independents taking
the key posts of foreign affairs, finance, and the interior. And they declared their
readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel.
With external encouragement, Fatah began planning to stage a coup in order
to recapture power. Hamas found out and pre-empted the Fatah coup with a violent
seizure of power in Gaza in June 2007. At this point the Palestinian national
movement became fractured, with Fatah ruling the West Bank and Hamas ruling
the Gaza Strip. Israel responded to the Hamas move by declaring the Gaza Strip a
‘hostile territory’. It also enacted a series of social, economic, and military
measures designed to isolate and undermine Hamas. Most significant of these
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measures was the imposition of a blockade. The purpose of the blockade was
purportedly to stop the transfer of weapons and military equipment to Gaza, but it
also restricted the flow of food, fuel, and medical supplies to the civilian
population.
The Palestinians bear the ultimate responsibility for the fragmentation of
their national movement. The differences between the pragmatic Fatah and the
theocratic Hamas are not superifial. But Israel actively worked to deepen the
cleavage by a policy of divide and rule. Had Israel’s aim been genuine peace with
the Palestinians, a strong and unified Palestinian leadership would have helped to
achieve it. Israel’s real aim, however, was to maintain its dominant position in the
occupied territories and to this end it pursued a policy of playing off the Palestinian
parties against one another. Additionally, Israel played a part in undermining
Palestinian democracy which at that time was the only democracy in the Arab
world with the possible exception of Lebanon. One consequence of Israel’s actions
was to delegitimize President Abbas, to weaken his authority, and to make him
appear like a collaborator.
Three months after announcing his resignation, on 27 December 2008,
Ehud Olmert presided over the launch of a war on the Gaza Strip. The name given
to the war was ‘Operation Cast Lead’. Its undeclared political objectives were to
drive Hamas out of power, cow the people of Gaza into submission, and crush the
Islamic resistance to the Israeli occupation. The idea was to make life for the
inhabitants of Gaza so unbearable that they would revolt against their Hamas rulers.
Israel was determined to destroy Hamas because it knew that its leadership, unlike
that of Fatah, would stand firm in defence of the national rights of the Palestinian
people and refuse to settle for an emasculated Palestinian entity on Israel’s terms.
Israeli propaganda presented the Gaza war as an act of self-defence to
protect its civilians against Hamas rocket attacks but in fact the rocket attacks had
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effectively ended in June 2008 as a result of an Egyptian-brokered truce between
Hamas and Israel. The IDF wrecked the truce by launching, on 4 November, a raid
into Gaza and killing six Hamas fighters. Israel also failed to honour its obligation
under the terms of the ceasefire to lift the blockade of Gaza. In December, Hamas
offered to renew the truce on the basis of the original terms but Israel ignored the
offer and launched an invasion.
Operation Cast Lead was not a war in the usual sense of the word but a onesided
massacre. For twenty-two days, the IDF shot, shelled, and bombed Hamas
targets and at the same time rained death and destruction on the defenceless
population of Gaza. In its main aim of driving Hamas out of power Operation Cast
Lead was a complete failure. While the military capability of Hamas was
weakened, its political standing was enhanced. Internationally, the main
consequence of the Gaza War was to generate a powerful wave of popular
sympathy and support for the long-suffering Palestinians. As always, Israel claimed
to be the victim of Palestinian violence, but the sheer asymmetry of power between
the two sides left little room for doubt as to who was the real victim. This was
indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image was inverted –
a small and defenceless Palestinian David faced a heavily armed, overbearing
Israeli Goliath. While leaving the basic political problem unresolved, the war thus
contributed to Israel’s political isolation on the world stage. At home, however,
Operation Cast Lead enjoyed the support of 90 per cent of the population who saw
it as a necessary act of self-defence. This high level of popular support translated
into a further shift to the right in the parliamentary election held the following
month.
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XVI. BLOCKING THE PATH TO A PALESTINIAN STATE
The Likud won the elections of 10 February 2009 and proceeded to form a
right-wing government. Its election manifesto retained an explicit rejection of a
Palestinian state. The new government was led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who had
already demonstrated his nationalist credentials in his first term in office.
Netanyahu and the majority of his ministers remained firmly wedded to the agenda
of Greater Israel. In the worldview of Netanyahu, and that of his even more extreme
religious-nationalist coalition partners, only Jews have historic rights over ‘Judea
and Samaria’. The main thrust of their policy was the expansion of Jewish
settlements on the West Bank and the accelerated Judaization of East Jerusalem.
They were determined that no progress should be made on any of the key issues in
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Jerusalem, as always, lay at the heart of the dispute.
By putting Jerusalem at the forefront of their expansionist agenda, ministers
knowingly and deliberately blocked progress on any of the other ‘permanent status’
issues.
Only at the rhetorical level was there any discernible change and this was
made only grudgingly in response to strong pressure from the Obama
Administration in the United States, which came to power in January 2009. In a
speech at Bar-Ilan University, on 14 June 2009, Netanyahu endorsed for the first
time a ‘demilitarized Palestinian state’, provided that Jerusalem remained the
undivided capital of Israel and provided the Palestinians recognized Israel as the
nation state of the Jewish people and gave up the right of return of the 1948
refugees. He also claimed the right to ‘natural growth’ in the existing Jewish
settlements on the West Bank while their permanent status was being negotiated.
Most observers, however, inside as well as outside the Likud, doubted that
Netanyahu meant what he said. Senior Palestinian official, Saeb Erekat, said that
the Bar-Ilan speech had ‘closed the door to permanent status negotiations’ due to
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its declarations on Jerusalem, refugees and settlements. Most foreign leaders
thought that Netanyahu’s speech did not live up to what was agreed on by the
international community as a starting point for achieving a just and lasting peace
in the region.
By blocking the path to a Palestinian state, Netanyahu’s government
strained relations with the Obama administration and made a mockery of the
American-sponsored peace process. In the early months of his first administration,
Obama correctly identified settlement expansion as the main obstacle to a two-state
solution. In his Cairo speech, on 4 June 2009, he made it clear that ‘The United
States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements’.19 During his
first term in office, Obama had three confrontations with Netanyahu over the
demand for a complete settlement freeze, but nothing came of it.
In response to pressure from the US, the Israeli government did announce,
on 25 November 2009, a partial ten-month freeze on settlement construction. But
by insisting on excluding East Jerusalem altogether and going forward with the
3,000 housing units already approved for the rest of the West Bank, the government
turned the settlement freeze into little more than a cosmetic gesture. The
announcement had no significant effect on actual housing and infrastructure
construction in and around the settlements. In September 2010 Netanyahu agreed
to enter direct talks, mediated by the Obama administration. But toward the end of
the month the ten-month partial freeze expired, and the government approved new
construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
In an effort to persuade Netanyahu to extend the ten-month partial
settlement freeze by sixty days, Obama offered a long-term security agreement, a
19 Remarks by President Barack Obama at Cairo University, 6 June 2009, available at
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-cairo-university-6-04-
09.
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squadron of F-35 fighter jets worth $3 billion, and the use of the American veto on
the UN Security Council to defeat any resolution that was not to Israel’s liking.
Secure in the knowledge that aid to Israel is determined not by the President but by
Congressional appropriations and that Congress is overwhelmingly pro-Israeli,
Netanyahu rejected Obama’s offer.
XVII. THE KERRY ROUND OF PEACE TALKS
The Palestinians responded to Netanyahu’s moves by suspending their
participation in the peace talks and insisting on two conditions for returning to the
conference table: a complete freeze on construction activity in the occupied
territories, and the 4 June 1967 lines as the basis for negotiations.
The diplomatic deadlock persisted until July 2013, when John Kerry, who
served as the US Secretary of State during Obama’s second term, persuaded the
two sides to restart talks with the goal of achieving a ‘final status agreement’ within
nine months. Netanyahu categorically rejected the two basic Palestinian conditions,
but he agreed to resume peace talks without any pre-conditions. In general, he
considered peace talks to be an American interest, not an Israeli one. On the other
hand, he did not wish to incur the opprobrium of being a peace refusnik. The
Palestinians knew that the Israeli government was not serious about negotiations
because it was unwilling to end the occupation or to acknowledge Palestinian
national rights. They also feared that, as in the two decades after Oslo, Israel would
exploit peace talks that go nowhere slowly in order to appease the international
community, dig itself deeper into their land, and break it into isolated enclaves over
which the Palestinian Authority would have no real power. Palestinian negotiators
only agreed to join in the talks to avoid being cast as the unwilling party. In the
first three months of the talks that Netanyahu instructed his negotiators to adopt
hard-line positions while refusing to state his ultimate objective. His ultimate
endgame remained Greater Israel.
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John Kerry was an energetic and assiduous peacemaker. He was also a true
friend of Israel. He tried to bring about an end to occupation not to punish Israel
but as a way of enabling Israel to preserve both its Jewish and democratic character.
In his first year as Secretary of State, Kerry made no less than ten trips to the region
in a relentless effort to nudge the two parties closer to an agreement. Yet the peace
talks he led with such conviction produced no positive results.
Kerry’s sincere effort to save Israel from itself earned him nothing but
ingratitude and abuse. Moshe Ya’alon, Israel's former Minister of Defence, told the
mass-circulation Yediot Aharonot in January 2014: ‘Secretary of State John Kerry
− who comes here determined, who operates from an incomprehensible obsession
and a sense of messianism – can’t teach me anything about the conflict with the
Palestinians’.20 Ya’alon also dismissed Kerry’s security plan for the Jordan Valley
as ‘not worth the paper it is printed on’. ‘All that can “save us” is for John Kerry
to win a Nobel Prize and leave us in peace’, said Ya’alon.
Kerry for his part, in a major speech he gave in his last month in office,
spoke with unprecedented clarity and harshness about the Israeli government and
the Prime Minister whom he accused of thwarting peace in the Middle East by his
settlement policy. The speech also gave public voice to the Obama administration’s
long-held concern that Israel was heading towards international isolation and was
condemning itself to a future of low-level, perpetual warfare with the Palestinians.
20 Avi Shlaim, ‘Israel Needs to Learn Some Manners’, New York Times, 30 January 2014.
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XVIII. PALESTINIAN UNITY AND ISRAEL’S MILITARY ESCALATIONS IN GAZA
Diplomatic standstill was accompanied by the escalation of IDF military
assaults on Gaza. In November 2012, the Israeli government ordered the extrajudicial
assassination of Ahmed Jabari, the chief of Hamas’s military wing in Gaza,
while he was reviewing the terms of a proposal for a permanent truce from Israeli
peace activist Gershon Baskin. The timing of the assassination suggests a deliberate
attempt to pre-empt the threat of a diplomatic solution. At any rate, Israel broke the
informal ceasefire to launch Operation Pillar of Defence in November 2012, its
second major military operation against Gaza following disengagement. In eight
days of intense aerial bombardment, 132 Palestinians were killed. The operation
ended with a ceasefire brokered by Egypt. This specified that Israel and the
Palestinian factions would stop all hostilities and that Israel would open the border
crossings to allow the movement of people and the transfer of goods. During the
three months that followed the ceasefire, only two mortar shells were fired from
Gaza. The IDF, on the other hand, failed to end the closure, made regular incursions
into Gaza, strafed Palestinian farmers working in their fields near the border, and
fired at fishing boats inside Gaza’s territotial waters.
Hamas for its part continued to abide by the ceasefire for another eighteen
months. But in April 2014 it committed what Israel considered an unforgivable
transgression: it reached a reconciliation agreement with Fatah and proceeded, on
2 June, to form a unity government with responsibility to govern the Gaza Strip as
well as the West Bank. The unity government produced by the accord was in fact
remarkably moderate both in its composition and in its policies. It was a
government of Fatah officials, technocrats, and independents. To escape isolation
and bankruptcy, Hamas handed over power to the Fatah-dominated, pro-Western
Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. The unity government explicitly accepted the
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three conditions of the Quartet for receiving Western aid: recognition of Israel;
respect for past agreements; and renunciation of violence.
Nevertheless, Netanyahu immediately denounced the new government as a
vote not for peace but for terror and threatened Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbas with a boycott. For Netanyahu any sign of Palestinian unity or moderation
posed a threat to the existing order. Israel therefor responded with economic
warfare. It prevented the 43,000 civil servants in Gaza from moving from the
Hamas payroll to that of the Ramallah government and it tightened the siege around
Gaza’s borders thereby nullifying the two main benefits of the merger.
Israel followed up with a military assault on Gaza on 8 July 2014 that it
portrayed as an act of self-defence in response to Hamas rockets launched against
its civilian population. But these rocket attacks were themselves a response to a
violent crackdown against Hamas supporters on the West Bank following the
abduction and murder of three Israeli teenagers on 12 June 2014. Netanyahu stated
that Hamas was responsible for the abduction and that Hamas would pay the price.
He could produce no evidence, however, to support the charge because there was
no evidence. The murder was committed by a lone cell without the knowledge of
the Hamas leadership.
Operation Protective Edge was the third Israeli attack on Gaza in six years,
the fiercest in the firepower it deployed, and the most devastating in its impact. The
aerial and naval bombardment of the enclave was followed by a large-scale land
invasion. The toll on the Palestinian side after 50 days of intermittent fighting was
over 2,200 dead, mostly civilians, including 577 children. On the Israeli side the
death toll was 67 soldiers and five civilians.
Behind Israel’s ever-changing stated military objectives for the war lurked
undeclared geopolitical aims. First and foremost was the desire to reverse the trend
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towards Palestinian reconciliation and to undermine the unity government. This
was in keeping with the policy of ‘divide and rule’ and of keeping the two branches
of the Palestinian family geographically separate. Then there was the urge to punish
the people of Gaza for electing Hamas and for continuing to support it in defiance
of Israel’s repeated warnings. The overriding aim, however, was to defeat the
struggle for Palestinian independence and to maintain the colonial status quo.
The late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling coined a word to describe
this policy: ‘politicide’. Politicide is defined in a book with that title as ‘a process
that has, as its ultimate goal, the dissolution of the Palestinians’ existence as a
legitimate social, political, and economic entity’.21 Applied to this context,
politicide means denying the Palestinians any independent political existence in
Palestine. The idea is to make the Palestinians so vulnerable, divided, and
exhausted by the struggle for physical survival that they would cease to constitute
a coherent political community capable of asserting its right to sovereignty on even
a fraction of historic Palestine.
It was not only rocket attacks that Israel does not tolerate but also peaceful
protest. On 30 March 2018, a campaign of protest was launched by Palestinian
activists in the Gaza Strip along the perimeter fence with Israel. It was called ‘The
Great March of Return’. The protesters demanded the UN-sanctioned right of
return of the 1948 Palestinian refugees and their descendants to their homes in
present-day Israel and the lifting of the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Underlying the
protest was a Palestinian shift away from violence towards non-violent forms of
resistance. Israel’s response to the demonstrations, however, was swift and savage
21 Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War against the Palestinians (London: Verso
Books, 2006), pp. 3-4.
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and included the use of live ammunition against unarmed civilians, killing
hundreds.
XIX. THE ‘UNITY INTIFADA’
In May 2021 there was another major escalation of hostilities between
Israel and Palestinian armed groups in Gaza. Israeli police provoked the crisis by
raiding the Al Aqsa mosque in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem on
6 May, manhandling worshippers, and firing rubber-tipped bullets and stun
grenades at protesters. The attack came during the holy month of Ramadan when
tensions often run high. Another cause for the unrest was a march by far-right-wing
Israelis through the Muslim Quarter of the Old City on Jerusalem Day, an annual
event to mark the capture of the city in June 1967. Hamas demanded that Israel
remove its security forces from the Al Aqsa mosque compound by 10 May.
Minutes after the deadline passed, it fired more than 150 rockets into Israel from
Gaza. Israel retaliated by launching airstrikes into the Gaza Strip on the same day.
The Israeli government continued to restrict access to the mosque and a popular
plaza where young people like to congregate; it did nothing to deescalate the crisis.
Eleven days of clashes left 227 Palestinians dead, including 64 children, and 1,000
injured, while 12 Israelis, including two children, were killed by rocket fire.
The catalyst for the flare-up of violence was recent efforts by Israel to evict
Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in East Jerusalem. This
became a rallying cry for the Palestinian protesters who saw it as ethnic cleansing.
Evictions were accompanied by house demolitions. According to the UN Office
for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 6,825 Palestinian owned structures
were demolished because of a lack of permits over the course of the previous
decade. As a result, 9,662 people, including thousands of children, were forcibly
displaced. The threatened displacements in Sheikh Jarrah and other Jerusalem
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neighbourhoods was not an anomaly, but part of a larger pattern of Palestinian
dispossession.
One noteworthy feature of this crisis was the unusually high number of
Palestinian citizens of Israel who protested in solidarity with Gaza following the
airstrikes. The Palestinians of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and
Israel itself appeared united in confronting the oppressor. It was this remarkable
unity that lent to this round of violence the name of ‘the unity intifada’. Once again,
the inter-communal, as opposed to the inter-state, aspect of the conflict came to the
fore.
Taken together the five outbursts of violence, or mini-wars, in Gaza reflect
a profoundly militaristic Israeli outlook and a colonial mindset. Israeli generals talk
about their recurrent military incursions into Gaza as ‘mowing the lawn’. By this
they mean weakening Hamas, degrading its military capability, and impairing its
capacity to govern. This operative metaphor implies a task that has to be performed
regularly and mechanically and with no end in sight. It also alludes to
indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and inflicting the kind of damage on the
civilian infrastructure that takes several years to repair. Under this rubric, there is
no lasting political solution: the next war is always just a matter of time.
XX. THE ABRAHAM ACCORDS
At the inter-state level of the Arab-Israeli conflict Israel scored notable
achievements. In the second half of 2020 four Arab states (the United Arab
Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco) signed the so-called Abraham Accords,
normalising relations with Israel. None of these states have a border with Israel and
none of them is officially at war with Israel. Nevertheless, the accords were hailed
as a historic turning point in the Arab-Israeli conflict. There is no question that the
accords represented a major diplomatic victory for Netanyahu. For decades
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Netanyahu has been arguing, against the conventional wisdom, that it would be
possible to normalise relations with the Gulf states without the need to resolve the
conflict with the Palestinians first. This is what he calls the outside-in approach:
developing open diplomatic, economic, and strategic relations with the Gulf states
in order to isolate and weaken the Palestinians and compel them to settle the
conflict on Israel’s terms.
Arguably, however, the Abraham Accords do not merit the grand epithet of
‘historic’ because they do not touch the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The
Palestinian problem is the core and it has been the central issue in Arab politics
since 1945. Until very recently, there was a broad consensus in the Arab world in
favour of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel as the price of peace
with the Jewish state. This consensus found its most authoritative expression in the
Arab Peace Initiative, adopted unanimously by the Arab League summit
conference in Beirut in March 2002. As noted earlier, the API offered Israel peace
and normalisation with all 22 members of the Arab League in return for agreeing
to an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with a
capital city in East Jerusalem. Israel rejected the offer at the time and has continued
to ignore it ever since.
What all four Abraham Accords have in common is that they represent
peace on Israel’s terms; in other words, peace for peace rather than land for peace.
Israel has not had to pay any price for normalisation with the four signatories of
the Abraham Accords. Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip remain
under military occupation. The Palestinian response has been uniformly hostile,
denouncing the deal as a betrayal of the Palestinian struggle for liberation and even
as a stab in the back.
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XXI. CONCLUSION
The beginning of wisdom for the international community is to
acknowledge that it has failed to discharge its moral and legal obligations towards
the Palestinian people and to learn from its mistakes. The first major mistake was
the incorporation of the Balfour Declaration in the League of Nations Mandate for
Palestine. This enabled the Zionist movement to embark on the gradual takeover
of the country at the expense of the Palestinians. The second major mistake was
the 1947 UN partition resolution which made war between Arabs and Jews
inevitable. The circumstances surrounding the establishment of the the state of
Israel and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war is the subject of an ongoing controversy
between traditional Zionist historians and revisionist or ‘new historians’ of whom
the present author is one. But there is no denying the fact that the establishment of
Israel involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinian people.
Zionism was not simply about creating an independent Jewish state in
Palestine but about extending its borders as far as possible and reducing the number
of Arabs within its borders. In 1917 the Jews owned two percent of the land; in
1947 they owned seven percent of the land; the UN allocated to the Jews 55 percent
of mandatory Palestine; by the end of the 1948 war the Israelis had conquered 78
percent of the territory, and by the end of the June 1967 war they had effective
control of 100 percent of mandatory Palestine. Initially, Israel claimed that the
occupation was temporary, pending a political settlement of the conflict. But its
own diplomatic intransigence frustrated the international quest for a settlement. In
the meantime, Israel kept expanding its illegal colonies on occupied Palestinian
territory. It withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005 but it continued to consolidate
and to deepen its colonial project on the West Bank. Today there are around
670,000 Jewish settlers on the West Bank. From today’s perspective it is therefore
fair to say that Israel is addicted to occupation.
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54
There is the broadest international consensus behind the idea of a two-state
solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Once upon a time this was a viable
option but Israel has killed it by blockading Gaza, denying access between Gaza
and the West Bank, and planting civilian settlements and military bases across the
length and breadth of the West Bank. It has become fashionable to say that the twostate
solution is dead because of the settlements. The present author would argue
that the two-state solution was never born because no Israeli government has ever
offered a settlement based on the 1967 lines. Yet in some corners of the
international community, the two-state solution continues to serve as a convenient
slogan long after it has ceased to be a serious policy option.
The international community therefore urgently needs to develop a new
understanding of the situation in Israel-Palestine. It needs a new narrative for
addressing the relations between Israel and the Palestinians, one based on the real
facts of this tragic situation, international law, the norms of civilized international
behaviour, and common human decency. It also needs to hold Israel to account for
its illegal practices, excessive use of military force, ethnic cleansing, and war
crimes. The UN has passed countless resolutions critical of Israel’s actions but
these resolutions have had no discernible effect. The conclusion to be drawn from
this record is clear: as long as there is no price to pay, Israel will continue to act
with impunity.
The basic problem here is Zionist settler colonialism so the solution must
involve an end to the occupation and restoring to the Palestinian people their natural
right to national self-determination. To say that Israel is guilty of the international
crime of Apartheid, as many major human rights organisations have done in their
reports in recent years, may be accurate but not enough. The current Israeli
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55
Apartheid regime can only be properly understood in the historical context of
Zionist settler-colonialism.22
______________________
_____________________________
Professor Avi Shlaim
20 July, 2023
22 If the UN wishes to educate itself on the subject and explore genuine pathways to peace, there is
no better place to start than by reading the reports of Francesca Albanese, the current ‘UN Special
Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied Since 1967’.
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56
BIOGRAPHY OF PROFESSOR AVI SHLAIM
Professor Avi Shlaim is Emeritus Fellow
of St Antony’s College and an Emeritus
Professor in International Relations at the
University of Oxford. Born in Baghdad in
1945 to a Jewish family, he went to school
in Israel and served in the Israel Defence
Forces, 1964-66. He received three
degrees from British universities, and has
been a university teacher in the UK since
1970. He was elected Fellow of the British
Academy in 2006 and was awarded a
British Academy Medal for Lifetime
Achievement in 2017. He has dual
nationality, British and Israeli.
His academic expertise is on the international relations of the Middle East and his
main research interest is the Arab-Israeli conflict. His books on the Middle East
include Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the
Partition of Palestine (1988); War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History
(1995); Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace (2007), and
Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (2009). The updated
edition of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World was published by Penguin
Books in 2014 and is 900 pages long. He has published numerous scholarly articles
and countless newspaper articles.