Just as in 1948

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Some years ago I spent some days at Churchill College, Cambridge. One morning, having a few hours to spare, I went to the great man’s archive which is housed there. Among other things, I was shown a small part of a collection of letters which he, as Secretary of the Colonies, received in connection of his visit to Palestine in the winter of 1921. Some of the letters were written by local Jews, others by Arabs.  One that has stuck in my memory, written in good English by an Arab resident, argued that there would never be peace in the Holy Land until and unless the Balfour Declaration—with its promise of establishing a Jewish National Home in the country—were cancelled.

A century has passed. Some of the smallest and weakest trees in the forest have been reaching for the sky, some of the largest and mightiest have been cut down or else fell of their own accord. Amidst all this turmoil, attempts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict there have been by the hundred. Nevertheless it persists and has lost none of its underlying hatred and bitterness. Just as the letter predicted.  With President Trump promising to publish his “peace plan” in the near future, today it pleases me to reflect on some of the outcomes to which it may still lead.

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* Separation. This is the solution much of the world, as well as I personally, would prefer. The idea of solving the conflict by establishing two states, one Jewish, the other Palestinian, has been in the air at least since the British came up with it, as the map shows, back in 1920-21. In 1947 the idea of applying it to the territory west of the Jordan was adopted by the United Nations which voted in its favor, thereby enabling the State of Israel to be established. In 1994, twenty-seven years after the 1967 Six Days’ War in which Israel occupied the Palestinian-inhabited part of the country, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Agreements which seemed to represent a small step in that direction. Since then, however, no further progress has been made. The main obstacles are, first, the fate of the Jewish settlements in West Jordan, as it is sometimes known. Second, control over East Jerusalem, which each side claims for itself. And third, the Palestinian Right of Return. It is as a Palestinian diplomat once told me to my face. We have our rights; why should we give them up?

* A single State with a Palestinian majority. This is the Zionist-Israeli nightmare. The very purpose of setting up the State of Israel was to make sure that Jews would never again have to live in a country where they are a minority and, as such, exposed to discrimination and persecution of every kind. Yet already today, counting Israel’s own Arab citizens, about as many Palestinians as Jews live in the land west of the Jordan. In every way that matters, all of them come under the same government, i.e. that of Israel in Jerusalem. Had it not been for Israel, Abu Mazen’s Palestinian Authority, such as it is, would have been toppled by its own people in a very short time. In this sense the single Palestinian State, reaching from the Mediterranean in the west to the Jordan River in the ease, already exists or will do so quite soon. As in the former unlamented South Africa, all that is needed is a change of government. And of the flag, of course.

* A single Jewish State. In view of the demographics, which are working against it, clearly such a state could only come about as a result of war. And clearly the most likely cause of such a war would be a double one. A desperate Israeli attempt to avert a single Palestinian State on one hand; and an opportunity provided by the collapse of the Hashemite regime in Jordan on the other. A collapse followed by the kind of chaos that will enable organizations similar to Hamas, Hezbollah and ISIS to use it as a base for terrorism against Israel, dragging the latter into an unwinnable war like the American one in Afghanistan and spreading west across the Jordan River. Here the fact that a great many—no one knows, just how many—citizens of Jordan are themselves Palestinian or of Palestinian origin could play a critical role.

Both many Israeli Arabs and many right-wing Israelis see the problem the way the French saw that of Alsace Lorraine in 1871-1914. To quote Prime Minister Léon Gambetta (1881-82): Never speak of it, always keep it in mind. And just as the conflict over Alsace-Lorraine played a large role in turning what started as a relatively minor conflict in the Balkans into World War I, so the collapse of the Jordanian State, the outbreak of terrorism from across the Jordan, and an Israeli attempt to throw at least a considerable number of the Palestinians currently under its rule across the river is almost certain to lead to a much larger war in the Middle East.

Just as in 1948, let me add.