Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel: 4 

Israel does not (and never has) opposed freedom for the Palestinians

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”

Anyone who has witnessed a pro-Palestine demonstration will have heard those words being chanted with feeling. But what do they mean?

“From the river (Jordan) to the (Mediterranean) sea” asserts that all of Israel plus the West Bank are Palestinian and that Israel is therefore illegitimate. “Palestine will be free” implies that the Palestinian nation is being held captive by the State of Israel that occupies their land. 

In other words, the absence of freedom from which the Palestinians suffer is directly attributable to the existence of Israel. The corollary is that Israel must disappear to enable the Palestinians to acquire their freedom. 

It seems, then, that Palestinian freedom is contingent on Israel’s demise. Sympathetic as many Israelis may be towards the Palestinians’ aspirations to freedom, they are understandably reluctant to commit suicide to pave the way for the fulfilment of this vision. 

If the above logic is valid, it consigns Israelis and Palestinians to endless conflict, or at least until one side prevails over the other. The prognosis is indeed gloomy if that is the case. Isn’t this the classic zero-sum-game? Fortunately for all of us – and especially for Israelis and Palestinians – it isn’t. The contested territory may be a tiny strip of land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea but there’s ample room for both peoples. All that is required is for each to acknowledge the right of the other to self-determination. What’s more, one side – Israel (and the pre-state Zionist movement) has done exactly that for close to a century – while the other has not. 

Let’s look at the historical facts. 

Two years after the Balfour declaration of 1917, the Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, reached an amicable agreement with Faisal, son of Emir Hussein of Mecca and the undisputed leader of the Arab world, whereby the right of self-determination of both Jews and Arabs was recognised. Faisal later tore up that accord under pressure from radicals. 

When Great Britain was granted the Palestine Mandate by the League of Nations in 1920, the territory allocated to the embryonic Jewish National Home spanned both sides of the Jordan. In their desire to accommodate Arab hostility to the Mandate, the British decided to create a large Arab state, Transjordan, that had no prior historical, political or cultural identity, in 78% of Palestine. This was a unilateral decision (to which the Americans are believed to have given a discreet green light) that was taken without consultation with the Zionist leadership who were, understandably, displeased – particularly as this new country, carved out of the prospective Jewish homeland, was utterly barred to Jews. But in the interests of peace, Chaim Weizmann and other Zionist luminaries, adopted a policy of compromise that would characterise all key future Jewish decision-making in the region, and reluctantly agreed to this first partition plan. Unfortunately, the Arab leadership was far less inclined to adopt a similar strategy and conflict became inevitable. 

Although a Palestinian Arab state had existed since 1922, the Zionist leadership twice more accepted proposals for a second Palestinian state – first in 1937 (the Peel Commission) and again in 1947 (the UN partition plan). In both cases, the Arab leadership rejected these attempts to establish two-states-for- two peoples. Despite their profound reservations about all of these ideas, the Zionist leaders accepted proposals to partition Mandatory Palestine – and establish a second Palestinian state alongside Israel – decades earlier than any other Middle Eastern country. 

There then followed a long litany missed opportunities for peace and mutual coexistence. I can only skim the surface here: the Rhodes armistice conference of 1949 that was supposed to lead to peace treaties but was frustrated by Arab intransigence; UN Security Council resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973) that were met by the Three Noes of the Arab League; the 1978 Camp David accords (between Sadat, Begin and Carter) where an empty chair for Arafat symbolised his utter abrogation of responsibility for the future of his people; the 1993-5 Oslo accords that Arafat appeared to embrace but then refused to follow through with a negotiated peace; the 2000 Camp David summit where Israel’s PM Barak offered Arafat 94% of the West Bank and shared sovereignty of Jerusalem; the 2001 meet at Taba where Bill Clinton set out his Parameters for Peace and was snubbed by Arafat who was too busy whipping up the murderous Second Intifada; the 2003 initiative of the US’s President George W Bush who set out a Roadmap for Peace; the historic 2008 conference at Annapolis when Israeli PM Olmert offered Abbas even more than Barak had offered Arafat – 94% of the West Bank plus 6% in land swaps; the recurrent efforts throughout 2014-16 during the Obama administration when the Kerry-Allen and Biden plans were tabled and dismissed by Abbas. 

Every one of these attempts to grant the Palestinians their freedom was crushed to dust by the Palestinian leadership’s irresponsible posture of unremitting hostility to the idea of a Jewish state behind any borders. 

Israel even unilaterally withdrew from territory (from all of the Gaza Strip in 2005) in an attempt to facilitate the realisation of Palestinian self-rule leading ultimately, should that be their choice, to Palestinian statehood. None of these high-risk efforts by Israel have ever been reciprocated. On the contrary, they have been met by increased aggression and terrorism. 

Recognition of rights has to be mutual or it is meaningless. Here’s the rub: Arab and Palestinian leaders have remained steadfastly opposed to the existence of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the Middle East for a hundred years despite some latterly professing approval of the “two state solution,” a hollow phrase in the absence of definition. Today in 2019 we see yet another attempt – Trump’s so-called Deal of the Century – to kickstart a diplomatic process. Because the Palestinian leadership has rejected it in advance, it too looks destined for the dustbin of diplomatic history. 

Far from Israelis opposing Palestinian freedom, the historical record shows precisely the opposite – Israelis have consistently accepted the right (and desirability) of the Palestinian Arabs to achieve their national goals, while the Palestinians and most Arab leaders (plus some Muslim countries, notably Iran) have repeatedly refused to accord reciprocal rights to Jews and Israelis. This double standard is immoral and indefensible. Once again, conventional wisdom about this conflict is not just flawed but the exact opposite of the truth.   

Next time you hear the Israel-haters chanting From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!, reflect on the poor quality of Arab leadership over the decades and remind anyone who will listen to the truth exactly who is and who is not responsible for the lack of Palestinian freedom.