Is There a Solution to the Ongoing Middle East Crisis?

For more than 75 years, since the founding of the State of Israel, there has been conflict in the Middle East, not just between Israel and Palestinians, but between Israel and most of the Arab countries surrounding it.  The cause of the ongoing conflict boils down to the following:  The Arabs who have lived there for centuries understandably consider the entire area their homeland, while Jews, Zionists, consider the land to be their homeland, it being the land of Israel in Biblical times.

Politically, the land was not part of any modern state.  Prior to WWI the land was part of the Turkish Caliphate.  After WWI, the area became a British mandate called Palestine, which after WWII, the British proposed dividing into two states - Jewish and Arab.  In 1948 Jewish Zionist leaders unilaterally declared the creation of the State of Israel within the boundaries set by the British.  The Arabs countries rejected the division and launched an attack against the new Israeli state.

Ever since that time, Israel has claimed its right to the land and has defended it, while the surrounding Arab countries and Palestinians living in the territory outside Israel claimed it was their land and sought to drive Israel back to the sea and eliminate its existence.  

All the wars that have occurred during this period - 1948, 1967, 1973, and present - were started by the Arab countries and/or the Palestinians in an attempt to destroy the State of Israel, wipe it off the map.   I should note that Egypt and Jordan signed peace agreements with Israel in 1976 and 1994 respectively.  Most recently, the UAR and Bahrain entered into a normalization of relations agreement with Israel in 2020.

After their defeat in the 1967 "6-day war" and Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (it had been under the control of Jordan since the 1948 war), the Arab League made clear its stand once again:  no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.

The conflict worsened when, after the 6-day war and the Arab League statement, Israel began to build settlements in the occupied territory.  Initially the Labor Party government established a small number of settlements in the West Bank for security reasons.  But the conservative/ultra-right parties that have governed for most of the time since 1977 have considered the occupied land part of Israel (it was part of the Biblical Jewish land) and have through aggressive settlement building in the West Bank, especially in the past 2 decades, made the West Bank de facto part of Israel and have made a Palestinian state almost impossible to configure.

During the late 1990s, international diplomatic efforts resulted in the PLO - the Palestine Liberation Organization headed by Yasser Arafat, the recognized voice of Palestinians for decades - removing the offending clause calling for the elimination of Israel from its charter so that the two-state process could move forward.  

Israel in fact made two offers, in 2000 and 2008, to end their occupation and for the creation of a Palestinian State, but those offers were rejected by the PLO.  Regardless, in 2005 Israel unilaterally - that is to say with no conditions or agreement - evacuated all Israeli settlements in Gaza and the army withdrew.  

That action did not result in any lessening of the conflict.  While the PLO still maintains its stance accepting Israel, Hamas, which has become the more prominent Palestinian movement, seeks nothing less than the destruction of Israel. The peace offers in fact resulted in more hostile actions by the Palestinians led by Hamas - suicide bombings, etc. with more than 1000 Israelis killed.

This ongoing conflict is an example of extremism on one side breeding extremism on the other.  As much as I understand the desperate need after WWII for Jews to finally create their own nation, to do so in a land already inhabited by Arabs, without their agreement, was an extreme action. And that extreme action was met by an extreme reaction by the Arabs – their wanting to erase Israel from the map.  

Israel's aggressive settlement building in the West Bank, which accelerated in the past two decades, has been a further extreme aggravating action by Israel, which was in turn partially a reaction to the extreme actions of the Arabs in repeatedly trying to destroy Israel.  

I should note that regardless how much I question the wisdom of the creation of the State of Israel unilaterally, once it was in existence, I certainly support its right to defend itself.  But in the current Gaza War, Israel under Netanyahu has gone beyond defense to seeing a chance to destroy Hamas regardless the civilian toll.

As a side note, Israel's aggressive actions in the Gaza War have provoked large-scale protests in the West.  However, this war is not an example, as many protesters and Palestinians claim, of genocide.  Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas and unfortunately has no concern if in the process tens of thousands of civilians are killed and homes reduced to rubble.  But Israel has no intent or desire to eliminate the Palestinian people.  Also, people need to be reminded that the war was a reaction to the invasion of Israel by Hamas on October 7.  If that had not occurred, and if Hamas' actions - rape, killing, kidnapping - not been so horrendous, the war would not be occurring and the tens of thousands of civilians and their homes would not have been destroyed.  Israel is guilty of overreach, and stopping the war is critical, but the immediate situation was caused by Hamas' action.

So to answer the question posed in this post's title, there is no solution to this conflict so long as the Arab countries and the Palestinians do not accept Israel's right to exist.  Only then is the 2-state solution imaginable.  Because, understandably, only then will Israel feel secure in turning the occupied territory over to a Palestinian state.  

As has always been the case, the ball is in the Palestinians' hands - either they truly accept Israel and seek to live in peace next to Israel or they maintain their position and be subjected to the eternal enmity of Israel.  There is nothing Israel can do other than once again being on record as being in favor of the 2-state solution (that is not currently the case) on condition that the Palestinians and surrounding Arab states accept the right of Israel to exist and cease all hostile actions.  At such time, Palestinian citizens of Israel should no longer be second-class citizens but be given equal rights and responsibilities with Jewish citizens.

Understanding the Israel - Palestine Conundrum

Recently I viewed a DVD about the struggles of West Bank Palestinian villagers against the encroachment on their land and olive groves by both the nearby Israeli settlement ... a city, really ... as well as the “wall.”  It's a depressing reminder of what Israel has become mired in as a result of its decades-long occupation of the West Bank.  The Israel Defense Forces came off, not surprisingly, as cold and heartless, and the Palestinian villagers as only wanting peace and their land.

I should say at the start of this post that I have always been of a different mind about Israel than my family and most Jews that I know.  While I am a strong supporter of the State of Israel and its right to exist, I have always been critical of actions taken by the Israeli government almost from the beginning that made and continue to make 2nd class citizens of Israeli Arabs (those Arabs who chose to stay in Israel at the time of independence were granted citizenship but lived under martial law until 1966 and continue to be discriminated against in areas such as village infrastructure, education, and social funding).  By its own actions, the State of Israel is not an example of how these two people can live in peace and harmony to their mutual benefit.

But things here are never so black and white.  The Palestinians are not the equivalent of the American Indians or blacks during Apartheid nor are the Israelis the land-grabbing fascists that many have come to believe they are in more recent decades.  There is ample blame to be placed on both sides for the ongoing conflict.  To understand the dynamics and make any effort at being a helpful broker one must understand the history of the conflict.

Prior to WWI, the land that is now Israel and the West Bank, as well as most of the modern states in the Mideast, were part of the Caliphate of Turkey.  There was no Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, or Palestine.  These countries were created by the Allied powers after winning WWI (Turkey was allied with Germany and so was on the losing side).  They basically drew lines on a map and created these countries and then proceeded to install monarchies in most.

This was not the case with Palestine, however.  Here a British Mandate was created, meaning that the British were responsible for governing this territory.  It was not a colony in the normal sense of the word, but in effect it was.

Around this same time a movement was growing among European Jews called Zionism.  It’s aim was to create a Jewish homeland in what had been biblical Israel and was now part of the Palestine mandate.  If one asks why Jews wanted this, one only has to look at the centuries of persecution that Jews have suffered in almost every country they lived in at the hand of the Christian, and especially the Catholic, rulers and people of those countries.  And I’m not talking about mere discrimination.  There are ample examples, from the Spanish Inquisition to the progroms of Czarist Russia, where the persecution took on a very violent, bloody, government-instigated form as well as the normal day to day beatings that Jews were often subjected to at the hands of Christian thugs.

During the interwar period, Zionists began immigrating to the Palestine mandate and buying land.  As their numbers increased, periodic violence erupted between the Jews and the Palestinians, the longest such incident lasting from 1936-1939. 

Then of course came WWII and the Holocaust.  And the dynamics of the Zionist’s search changed.  In November 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations recommended the partition of the Palestine mandate into two separate states ... one for the Jews and one for the Arabs.  The Zionists accepted the proposed partition but all the surrounding Arab states rejected the partition plan, as did the Palestinians.  Note: the Palestinians could have had their own state right then, but because their Arab sponsors would not agree to a Jewish state and the Palestinians rejected partition for a variety of reasons but basically an inability to compromise, they lost it.

When Zionist leaders proclaimed the independent state of Israel in 1948, all the surrounding Arab countries attacked the new state of Israel, a war which they quickly lost.  At the same time, some 700,000 Palestinians left, fled or were driven from their homes and took refuge in surrounding Arab countries where they remain today, still refugees, not citizens of the host country.  Jordan took control over the West Bank, Egypt over Gaza.  Control of Jerusalem was split between Israel and Jordan. The Palestinians were a people left with nothing. 

Later that year, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution stating that those Palestinians who wished to return to their homes should be permitted to do so and those who do not should be compensated by Israel.  That resolution has never been implemented.

The Palestinians became an official entity in 1964 for the first time when leaders gathered with the support of the Arab League and created the Palestine Liberation Organization.  It’s charter clearly states that the creation of the State of Israel is null and void.  

In 1967, aware that the Arab countries were again preparing to attack it, Israel conducted a pre-emptive war against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.  At the end Israel gained control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, as well as the Golan Heights from Syria, and the entire Sinai Peninsula and Gaza from Egypt.  That was the beginning of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.,

In response to the war, the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the occupied conquered lands and the acknowledgment of the sovereignty of all states in the region and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized borders.  This resolution, with its land for peace strategy, would form the basis for all future negotiations.

In 1973, Egypt and Syria mounted a surprise attack against Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.  After 3 weeks, Israel had rebuffed those forces and regained control of the Sinai and the Golan Heights.

The first major movement towards peace in the area came with the Camp David accords between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Eqypt’s Anwar Sadat.   Israel agreed to hand back the Sinai to Egypt in return for peace and normalization.  As a result of making peace, Egypt was expelled from the Arab League and Sadat was assassinated.  

At the same time, Begin began a policy of greatly expanding the number and size of Israeli “settlements” on the West Bank in order to frustrate any future attempts to hand the West Bank back to the Palestinians.  Note:  No country other than Israel considers the settlements legal, since they are built on occupied territory and violate the Fourth Geneva Convention.

In 1993, the PLO and Israel signed the Oslo agreements in which Israel recognized the PLO and gave them limited autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza in exchange for peace.  The PLO in turn gave up its claim to the territory of Israel as defined by its borders before the 1967 war and agreed to end the Intifada.  Both sides agreed that they would make gradual steps towards a final settlement and that they would do nothing to change the status of West Bank and Gaza pending the outcome of negotiations.  

Note that while the PLO (as its leader Yasser Arafat had previously done) tacitly recognized Israel’s right to exist, it did not and has not changed the language in its charter calling the State of Israel “null and void.”  A public vote was finally taken in 1998 which supposedly nullified the pertinent clauses, but a new amended charter has never been produced, raising the inevitable questions.

Fast forward to July 2000.  At Camp David, President Clinton shuttled back and forth between Ehud Barak of Israel and Yasser Arafat.  Barak agreed to most of what the Palestinians had wanted.  The major holdback was the right of return. The other problem was that because of the number of Jewish “settlements”  on the West Bank that Israel wanted to keep control of for a variety of reasons, the proposed Palestinian state would have been divided into disconnected regions and the Israel army would have been in their face constantly.  The talked ended without agreement.

In the Israeli election that followed, the right wing of Israeli politics took the helm once again.  In the intervening years, the parties have never come as close to peace again.  The peace process is moribund.  Israel has drifted into an increasingly insular and right wing perspective, continuing the process of building new and expanding old “settlements” and erecting the “wall” separating Palestinian towns from the Jewish settlements and Israel proper.  Hamas, the more militant Palestinian group in control of Gaza, has been resurgent.  The PLO has been weakened.

At this point, it is hard even for the most positive and peace-seeking individuals to imagine what the shape of a two-state solution would look like on the ground or how the two sides with a history of decades of hate and distrust could find the trust necessary to make compromises and feel secure in peace.  The goal of Menachem Begin of increasing and expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank in order to make it impossible for a future Israeli government to arrive at a viable peace agreement with the Palestinians succeeded.  

There are no winners here, only losers.  There is no real security for Israel without peace, but peace in and of itself does not bring about security for Israel.  And so long as the Palestinians do not view Israel as a legitimate state, they will never reach their dream of having their own country at last. 

So you see why I say that neither party, Israel nor the Palestinians, come to this matter with “clean hands.”  Both parties, as well as the larger Arab community, have their share of blame.  Pointing one's finger at one or the other party thus is not realistic nor does it move the matter forward.  Peace, and a two-state solution, will only come to be when both the Israeli and Palestinian leadership really want peace and are willing to make the hard compromises that will be necessary and sell them to their people.