The Middle East conflict and the two-state solution
American president Barack Obama is committed to the Middle East peace process and the two-state solution. That is, that between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River there should be two states: one Israeli and the other Palestinian. We take a look at the history of the two-state solution.
Major General retired. Former head of the Israeli National Security Council and General in the Israel General Staff.
Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University in America.
Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, at the University of Connecticut in America.
Annabelle Quince: Welcome to Rear Vision, here on ABC Radio National. I'm Annabelle Quince. And today, the story of one of the most protracted conflicts in history.
Barack Obama: For decades there has been a stalemate. Two peoples, with legitimate aspirations, it's easy to point fingers, for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought about by Israel's founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attack throughout its history. The only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met, through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.
Annabelle Quince: US President Barack Obama has clearly outlined his commitment to the Middle East peace process, a process based squarely on the idea of a two-state solution. That is, that between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, there should be two States, one Israeli and the other Palestinian.
Today on Rear Vision, a look at the history of the two-state solution. As with many aspects of Middle East politics there is no agreement about when the story begins, but for our purpose we begin in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration. Major General retired, Giora Eiland, is the former head of the Israeli National Security Council and before that General in the Israeli General Staff.
Giora Eiland: Well if we go back through history, Jews were looking for the opportunity to return to their home for the past 2,000 years, but it became to be a real practical decision, something like 100 years ago, a little more, when the British Minister, Lord Balfour, made a statement known as the Balfour Statement, in which he said that the State of Israel - he referred to the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea - should be the homeland of the Jewish people. Now it was received by the Jewish community, the small Jewish community here, and by the larger Jewish community elsewhere, as a promise of the international community to establish a Jewish state in this part of the world.
At the very same time, or a few years later, as a response to the Arab assistance that was given to the British when they fought against the Turkish Empire, the Arabs were promised that this land would be given to them. So actually they were conflicting British promises that were given to both sides.
Rashid Khalidi: Even before World War I, even before the Balfour Declaration, there was in a very limited segment of the population, a great deal of unease.
Annabelle Quince: Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University.
Rashid Khalidi: Everywhere that there were Jewish settlements there was a great deal of friction, and the argument that I make is that peasant resistance to what was going on in terms of settlement and land purchase and so forth, and dispossession of the peasantry, is an indication that there was a great deal of unease in all segments of society, that as they became aware f Zionism and what it entailed and what it meant in practice.
Commentator: It was Paris in the Spring, and there was hope in the air. The eyes of the world were focused on the Palace of Versailles. The business at hand was the Treaty to end World War I. They decided it must never happen again.
Annabelle Quince: At the end of World War I, Britain gained a mandate over Palestine. That mandate incorporated the terms of the Balfour Declaration and required Britain to facilitate Jewish immigration into Palestine. That mandate also required Britain to ensure 'that the rights and positions of other sections of the population were not prejudiced.'
Rashid Khalidi: The terms of the Balfour Declaration, as you say, were reprised in the terms of the mandate, in fact the whole text was included, and that talks about the dues of the people and national home, so it talks about them in political and national terms. The rights that were to be protected for others were civil and religious, and the other were not mentioned. There was just the non-Jewish population. 90% of the population had no identity, no colour, no name, and doesn't have political and national rights, they don't have any existence, they're just an under-frontiered mass of people whose civil and religious rights are to be protected, but there's no mention for the Arabs, for the overwhelming majority of the population of their getting political or national rights or of anything like self-determination, whereas the Balfour Declaration enjoined the mandatory power to see to it that the country evolved in the direction of a national home for the Jewish people.
Giora Eiland: The Jewish people of course had a completely different interpretation of the reality, because the Jewish people said at that time and continue to say today, that the Arabs have already 22 countries and the Jewish people can have only one country and the only place is this area, so here is where the dispute is all about.
Annabelle Quince: Throughout the 1920s and the 1930s, there were disputes between Palestinians and the Jewish immigrants. In 1936 an uprising of Palestinians against Jewish immigration began, known as the Arab revolt; it lasted from 1936 to 1939.
Rashid Khalidi: The British showed absolute ruthlessness in putting down the Arab revolt in the 1930s, killing or imprisoning or exiling or wounding a very large proportion, I think almost one in ten of the adult male population, Palestinian Arab male population. They did this in the '30s, essentially because Palestine was vital to their imperial strategy, they were not going to let go of the space in the Eastern Mediterranean, when they were on the brink of a war with Italy and Germany.
Annabelle Quince: The British responded to the Arab revolt by establishing the Peel Commission, a Royal Commission set up to determine the reasons behind the revolt. The Commission's report recommended that the Mandate be abolished, except for a small area around Jerusalem. The rest of Palestine was to be divided into two states, an Arab and a Jewish state, with the largest area of land going to the Arab state.
Giora Eiland: And that conclusion was the first time where the notion of the two-state solution was mentioned, because they came with a proposal that most of this land would be given to the Palestinians, or to the Arabs, only 17% of this land would be given to the Jewish people, and some part especially around Jerusalem had to be kept as an international area. This was the Peel Commission proposal. Now it was accepted by the Jewish community but it was totally rejected by the Arabs at the time, not only because they denied the fact that the Jewish people deserved to get certain lands, but also they said, why should we ever another Palestinian state, at the end of the day this area should belong to Syria. But at least in '37 the British tried to come with this notion of two-state solution.
Rashid Khalidi: The Peel Commission essentially argued that it was impossible to square Britain's commitments under the Balfour Declaration, to the establishment of the Jewish national home, in the sense in which the Zionists understood it, which was turning the entirety of Palestine into a Jewish state, with the realities on the ground, which meant that the only solution, according to Lord Peel and the Commission, was partition. And so they recommended the creation of a very small Jewish state, of a small area which would remain under British control and of the larger chunk of Palestine, the largest chunk, being added to Transjordan. What was called an Arab state. Transjordan of course was a satrapy of Britain, it was under the control of Britain at the time, the budget was provided by Britain, the army was officered by Britain, the Emir of Transjordan essentially did as the British told him. So what the British were doing was in effect, affecting that there'd be a Jewish state in a very small part of Palestine. The British two years later, in '39, issued yet another document, the White Paper of 1939 in which they admitted that this was just not going to work after two more years of Arab revolt and unrest. They essentially accepted that after a certain period of continued immigration, that there'd be self-determination for the country, implicitly accepting that it have an Arab majority at that point. That was obviously never carried out; World War II intervened, the Holocaust, Britain was no longer the great imperial power in the Middle East once World War II was over, and so the White Paper was always a dead letter.
Jeremy Pressman: What we today call a two-state solution, really emerges in the 1930s and 1940s as the idea of partition.
Annabelle Quince: Jeremy Pressman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut and the author of Point of No Return: The deadly struggle for Middle East peace.
Jeremy Pressman: You progress from the late 1930s to really the seminal year of 1947 when the British by this time have said the Arabs and Jews are fighting so much, we can't figure this out in the traditional way of doing it; we are getting out. And they turned it over to the new United Nations. And that's where 29th November, 1947, we get the formalisation of two states, an Arab state and a Jewish state.
UN Official: Soviet Union, yes; United Kingdom, abstain; United States, yes.
The resolution of the Duct committee for Palestine was adopted by 33 votes, 13 against, 10 abstentions.
BBC broadcaster: The result of the vote sent both Jews and Arabs through the streets of Jerusalem, the Jews dancing in joy, and the Arabs rioting in anger.
Rashid Khalidi: The November 29th 1947 partition resolution did call for the division of Palestine into two states, one Jewish, described as such in the resolution, and one described as Arab. With a corpus separatum, a large area around Jerusalem which was to be administered internationally by the UN. The larger part of the country, more than half, more than 50% was to go to the Jewish minority, to the population of 33% or 34% of the population that was Jewish. The smaller part of the country was to go to the overwhelming Arab majority. It was seen as terribly unjust by the Arabs and they therefore refused it. For the Zionists it was the realisation of a dream, even though the frontiers were not what they would have wanted, they wanted, obviously, the whole country. It gave them much more than they had any right to hope for, the so-called Jewish state would have had an Arab population of 49% and it was almost half of the population, in what was to become the Jewish state and the partition boundaries would have been made up of Arabs, and most of the land in the Jewish state was Arab-owned, and most of the cities had very large Arab populations. So for them it was an enormous step forward.
Giora Eiland: The notion was that the size of the Jewish state should give enough room not only for the people who already lived in this area at that time, but for hundreds of thousands, millions of other Jewish refugees who were left in Europe homeless after the Second World War, after the Holocaust, after 6-million Jews were killed by the Nazis, and at the same time, to be a homeland for hundreds of thousands of other Jewish people who lived in Arab states who had to flee because they were killed and they were punished by the Arab countries. But there's no denying that the concept of a division of the land as it was taken by the United Nations at the time, was to guarantee enough place for the Jewish people, not only for those who already lived here, but for many others who did not have any other place where they could live.
BBC broadcaster: British responsibility ended on May 15th, 1948 on the same day David Ben Gurion proclaimed the independent state of Israel. Within hours, the new state was at war with the four Arab countries surrounding it. For six months, the fighting continued. The Israelis lost the old city of Jerusalem to Jordan, but managed to hold on to most of their territory elsewhere.
Jeremy Pressman: The Gaza Strip which was supposed to be part of the Arab state, ended up in Egyptian hands. Egypt did not annexe it, they never claimed Egyptian sovereignty but they controlled it. The West Bank, including East Jerusalem and including inside Jerusalem the old city and many of the holier sites of the three major monotheistic religions in that region, ended up in Jordanian hands, and unlike Egypt, Jordan asserted its sovereignty there, and claimed that the West Bank was a part of Jordan just like the East Bank on the other side of the Jordan River. Israel ended up being significantly larger as a country, than it would have been had the borders of the UN partition plan been implemented. Israel ended up with about 78% with the remaining 22% of the territory basically being the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Giora Eiland: Jordan and Egypt conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip respectively, and from that moment, they did not even think about the idea to give independence to the Palestinians. Surprisingly enough, neither the Palestinians claimed that they needed to have an independent state in the West Bank in Gaza, so between '48 and '67 when this area was controlled by the Arab states, the notion of the creation of a Palestinian state was not even mentioned by the Arab people and by the Palestinians themselves.
Rashid Khalidi: Well an all-Palestine government was declared in Gaza, and was initially supported by the Egyptians, but it went nowhere. And it eventually faded out, made up of a number of pre-1948 leaders. Part of the problem was that Palestinian society was shattered by what Palestinians called the Nakba the disaster of 1948. More than half of the Palestine population was driven from its homes, lost everything they owned, became refugees. The Palestinian Arab population was about 1.35-million, over 750,000 of those people became refugees in 1948. The entire elite lost the material bases of its wealth, which in many cases, most cases was either land or property in either Haifa or Yaffa or Jerusalem, much of which was lost in 1948, all of the property in Jaffa and Haifa obviously were lost, but much of the property in West Jerusalem was also lost. So these people lost their wealth, and they moreover lost their status, because they failed miserably in the '30s and the '40s in defending Palestinian interests. So partly because of the shattering of Palestine society and partly because the Arab governments in particular the Jordanian government which controlled the largest piece of Palestine that hadn't been incorporated into the State of Israel, were not interested in any independent expression of Palestinian wishes. The Palestinians stood, disappeared from the map for the better part of the next decade, decade and a half.
Giora Eiland: And when the Palestinians created what they called the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation back in '64, it was three years before we conquered the West Bank and Gaza, so whenever they spoke about liberation of Palestine, they did not refer to the West Bank and Gaza, they referred to the other part of the State that was the State of Israel. So that's why there is in a way a sense of suspicion, or a lack of trust by many Israelis who do not really believe that many Palestinians want to achieve only a small Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza because they never wanted to achieve such a state when this area was under the control of Jordan and Egypt.
Rashid Khalidi: The Palestinian aim was essentially returning things to the status quo. When they talked about it, they talked in terms of liberation, or they talked in terms of vengeance, or they talked in terms of return. If you look at the names of the organisations that developed in the 1950s and the early 1960s, The Heroes of the Return, or abtal al-awda and names like that. In fact a Palestinian National Liberation Movement was typical, it eventually became the biggest of these groups, and tended to dominate the Palestine Liberation Organisation in the late'60s. Essentially they saw liberation as the Palestinian Arab majority regaining its rights, regaining its property when in fact they finally put this down into a program in the late '60s they talked about a democratic secular state for Palestine, in which Muslims, Christians and Jews would live under a democratic regime, and that's as far as the thinking went, which is not really very far, so it was a one-state solution, but it was a Palestinian state.
Annabelle Quince: You're listening to Rear Vision on ABC Radio National. I'm Annabelle Quince and today we're taking a look at the history of the Two-State Solution.
In 1968 everything changed. War broke out between Israel and its Arab neighbours, Egypt, Jordan and Syria. The Arab armies were defeated, and Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza.
Jeremy Pressman: It's almost like you have to pair 1948 with 1967 in the 1967 war, because in a way, the changes that take place in 1967, I would argue, are a real mark of what happened before and after that 1967 war, because before 1967, from '48 to '67, the question is focused on Israel; is Israel going to survive? Should Israel survive? Is Israel a legitimate member of the international community or as many in the Arab world argued, Is Israel simply another colonial imposition? But to see that in a way you have to see what happened in 1967 when Israel has a massive military triumph, Israel captures a lot of territory, but it includes both the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, and in doing so, that starts to shift the terms of the debate from Israel yes or no, Israel legitimate or illegitimate to something by the mid to late 1970s becomes Yes, probably Israel is going to be around, the question is, is there going to be a Palestinian state alongside it. And that's one we really shift into the two-state solution as a potential resolution for the conflict.
Annabelle Quince: Six years later, in 1973, war broke out again, when Egypt and Syria attempted to regain the land they had lost in 1967. The Arab states were again defeated.
Rashid Khalidi: The 1973 war really did change things, in the sense that the Palestinians were forced to recognise that the Arab states were not under any circumstances committed to anything but the liberation of the territories occupied in 1967, and the Palestinians eventually adjusted their aims, and so starting just before that war, the first proposals among the Palestinians of a two-state solution, of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza in 1974 the Palestinian National Council for the first time adopted the idea of a two-state solution, with very great limitations, and by 1988 when it was much more formally adopted by the Palestinian National Council, the Palestinians had shifted to the idea of a two-state solution.
ABC News Reader: Overseas, and several hours ago at a late night meeting of the Palestine National Council in Algiers, Yasser Arafat brought down the Declaration of Independence for the State of Palestine.
Giora Eiland: It was created primarily by the Palestinians themselves that the previous leader, Yasser Arafat understood that the best way to promote their interests was to declare that the Palestinians who live in this area, did live under the illegitimate Israeli occupation, and the only solution is independence, and independence means to have a Palestinian state. Now this is something that of course automatically gets the support of everyone in the world because it seems to be natural, reasonable and fair enough. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that this is the real intent of the Palestinians, so the concept of two state solution is a very effective tool, it does not necessarily represent the real will of the Palestinians.
Annabelle Quince: Despite continuing tensions and suspicions between Palestinians and Israelis, there was a renewed optimism in the early 1990s, due in part to the end of the Cold War and to changes brought about by the Palestinian uprisings.
Jeremy Pressman: You know, there was a lot of optimism in the early 1990s. The Cold War was ending, so the US-Soviet competition over the Middle East disappeared overnight when the Soviet Union disappeared. The 1991 Gulf War when the US-led forces forced Iraq back out of Kuwait, seemed to deal a blow to so-called Arab rejection like Saddam Hussein. The first President Bush talked about a new world order at the time, so at the grand strategic level, it seemed like things were moving in a direction where there could be a resolution of Arab Israel peace process. And the then US Secretary of State, James Baker, who was the first President Bush's Secretary of State, made it look at that linkage in 1991, first we are going to deal with the Iraqi-Kuwaiti question and after we deal with that, we're going to shift over to the Arab-Israel conflict, because that's a force of instability, the reason we're going to try to resolve it. If you add to that at the local level, the lessons that both sides learned from the first Palestinian uprising in the late '80s and early '90s, the Israelis learned that the Palestinians had national aspirations. Now you could say Well of course they had national aspirations, but I mean for the first 20 years of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the Israelis could believe or there were reasons you could kind of believe the well you can go back and forth it's not a big deal, they're relatively quiet. But with the uprising the Intifada, it was clear the Palestinians were not going to sit quietly and they were occupied by the Israelis.
The Palestinians also learned that an uprising alone did not achieve Palestinian status. So it seems like everything's kind of favourable, so you get the Oslo process which is launched in 1993.
Rashid Khalidi: I think that the Israeli view changed in the early 1990s. The Israeli government which went to Madrid, which was the Shamir government, then in October 1991 was reluctantly dragged kicking and screaming to Madrid by Secretary of State Baker, was resolutely opposed to a Palestinian state, was resolutely opposed to giving up any part of what it called Judaea and Samaria. They were committed to a one-state solution, to one state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.
In 1992 the Israelis elected a government headed by Yitzak Rabin, and Rabin came around to the idea that this was probably untenable, that the incorporation of the occupied territories into Israel was probably unfeasible, and though he I think wanted to retain as much control over as much of that territory as possible he began to move towards acceptance of the idea of a Palestinian state, but the Oslo accords, don't talk about a Palestinian state, Israel's never recognised a Palestinian state at Oslo.
Jeremy Pressman: At the time in 1993 it was still kind of veiled the way in which people talked about a two-state solution. For instance, if you look at the 1993 Oslo agreement or Declaration of Principles, it goes by different names, it never explicitly mentions that the Israelis and Palestinians are negotiating for a two-state solution. Because to put that in writing at that time was still much for the Israeli government. So the Palestinians assumed that was where it was headed, and I think most of the US negotiators did, and maybe in their heart of hearts Israeli negotiators thought about that, but there's still problems there is still scholarly debate about whether Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzak Rabin was thinking that he wanted the process to lead to a two-state solution when he signed off on Oslo in the summer of '93. So it's interesting, absolutely it's a process that at the end in '99 and 2000 was trying to achieve a two-state solution and failed. But it wasn't clear, explicit from the beginning, that that's what it was designed to do, and some of the that ambiguity probably then contributed to the failure at the end.
Rashid Khalidi: The Accord signed on the White House lawn in September involved Israeli recognition that there is a Palestinian people, but that Palestinian people is not recognised by Israel in Oslo, or after Oslo for that matter, as having the right of national self-determination or the right to establish a state. Israel has never recognised what the Palestinians have recognised for Israel, which is their right of national self-determination, Netanyahu finally uttered the words 'a two-state solution', and Israelis have grudgingly come around to accept that there has to be a Palestinian state, but in the documents that constitute the agreements between the two sides signed in Washington and afterwards in the '90s, Israel never did come around to accepting the idea of the Palestinians are not only people, which Rabin accepted, but that they are people with the right to national self-determination and statehood inside Palestine, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with Jerusalem as the capital, which is what the Palestinians have always maintained is their right.
Giora Eiland: The majority of the people in Israel do accept the notion of a Palestinian state, but we suspect that most Palestinians don't accept the notion of a Jewish state. This is the problem. When we speak about the Oslo Accord and in a way we return to the same concept again and again, in 2000, and then in Annapolis Summit in 2007 and these days response to the American new initiative we see what kind of paradox exists here because on one hand everybody wants to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, at the same time the concept seemed to be acceptable. This is the two-state solution that says that between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea there will be two states and the border between these two states will be based on the '67 line. So the concept is widely supported by everyone, from Japan to Canada, from Norway to South Africa, by the United States, European Union, Russia, the Arab Leagues and the relevant parties. More than that, nine years ago, President Clinton tried to give detailed answers to all the delicate questions, and he came with a very specific detailed solution based on the two-state solution. Now everybody understands that what Clinton proposed nine years ago is probably the only practical solution if we are based on the two-state solution. In other words, it is not only that the concept is well known, but also the details are well-known. So if it is so important to solve the problem, if the concept is acceptable and if the details are so well-known, what is the problem? Why both parties don't sit together and sign an agreement, and here is the paradox, both parties don't do it because this solution is not really desired by both sides. The maximum that the government of Israel, any government Israel, can offer the Palestinians, is less, much less, than the minimum that any possible Palestinian leader can accept. So the gap between both sides is much bigger than the way that it is perceived. Everybody is committed to say that he is committed to this solution, but no-one really really means it.
Jeremy Pressman: While there's broad agreement about an idea, and that idea's called the two-state solution, what it would mean on the ground in terms of where you draw the borders, how you address the Palestinian refugee question, what's the status and sovereignty, how are sovereignty issues resolved with Jerusalem? That issue is still contested and from my perspective that's one of the most challenging things right now. The two-state solution has almost become a buzzword that everyone accepts but when everyone accepts it does that somehow strip it of some of the meaning that when you actually look at the details, make it a much more complex issue.
Annabelle Quince: Jeremy Pressman author of Point of No Return: The deadly struggle for Middle East peace ending today's program.
Our other guests were retired General Giora Eiland, who was the former head of the Israeli National Security Council. And Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University.
The sound engineer is Jennifer Parsonage, and this Rear Vision on ABC Radio National. I'm Annabelle Quince; thanks for joining us.
Rethinking the Two-State Solutionby Giora Eiland, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, September 2008
The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehoodby Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press. 2006
Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousnessby Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University Press, 1997
Point of No Return: the Deadly Struggle for Middle East Peaceby Jeremy Pressman, Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for Peace, 1997