Two peoples' experience of displacement
Israel was founded with a UN mandate in 1948. The background was the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis. The idea that Jews needed a state of their own to feel safe was widely accepted.
The UN had also foreseen a separate sovereign Palestinian state, but the despots of neighbouring Arab countries did not want that to happen. They thought they could get rid of Israel immediately, but they lost the war they started on the occasion of Israel's independence. As a result, Israel conquered additional territory.
The conflict was bizarrely asymmetrical from the very beginning. Things would probably have been different had there been something like a Palestinian nation in the 1940s. There wasn't. As a matter of fact, many Arab countries still lack the kind of nationhood that means people share a sense of identity obliging them to mutual respect and solidarity.
The background is that Arab borders were arbitrarily drawn at the end of the Ottoman empire. Society was basically feudal, with city-dwelling absentee landlords exploiting illiterate peasants. It thus wasn't unusual for Palestinian farmers to work for landlords who lived far away, in –say – Damascus.
The Middle East 'peace process': A slogan to mask the marking of time
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UN Security Council Resolution 242, 1967: United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, passed on 22 November 1967, called for the exchange of land for peace. Since then, many of the attempts to establish peace in the region have referred to 242. The resolution was written in accordance with Chapter VI of the UN Charter, under which resolutions are recommendations, not orders -
Camp David Accords, 1978: this picture, taken on 26 March 1979, shows Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, his U.S. counterpart Jimmy Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin after signing the peace treaty in Washington. A coalition of Arab states, led by Egypt and Syria, fought in the Yom Kippur or October War in October 1973. This war eventually led to the peace talks which lasted 12 days and resulted in two agreements -
The Madrid Conference in 1991: the U.S. and the former Soviet Union came together to organise a conference in the Spanish capital city of Madrid. The discussions, which involved Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinians, who met with Israeli negotiators for the first time, achieved little, although it did create the framework for later talks -
Oslo Agreement, 1993: negotiations, which took place in Norway, between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) resulted in the first deal between the two sides, the Oslo Accord. The agreement was signed in the U.S. in September 1993. It demanded that Israeli troops withdraw from West Bank and Gaza and a self-governing, interim Palestinian authority be set up for a five-year transitional period -
Camp David 2000: U.S. President, Bill Clinton, invited Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak and PLO Chairman, Yasser Arafat, to discuss borders, security, settlements, refugees and Jerusalem. Despite more detailed negotiations than ever before, no agreement was reached. The failure to reach a consensus at Camp David was followed by renewed Palestinian uprising -
The Arab Peace Initiative 2002: the Camp David negotiations were followed by meetings in Washington, then in Cairo and Taba, Egypt. They too were without results. Later, the Arab Peace Initiative was proposed in Beirut in March 2002. The plan called on Israel to withdraw to the lines of June 1967, so that a Palestinian state could be set up in the West Bank and Gaza. In return, Arab countries agreed to recognise Israel -
The Roadmap, 2003: the U.S., EU, Russia and the UN worked together as the Middle East Quartet to develop a road map to peace. In June 2003, Prime Minister Sharon and his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas, accepted the road map, with the Security Council also approving it in November. The timetable called for the final agreement to be reached in 2005. Unfortunately, it was never implemented -
Annapolis, 2007: in 2007, U.S. President George W. Bush hosted a conference in Annapolis, Maryland, to re-launch the peace process. Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority’s President, Mahmoud Abbas, took part in talks with officials from the Quartet and over a dozen Arab states. It was agreed that further negotiations would be held with the goal of reaching a peace deal by the end of 2008 -
Washington 2010: in 2010, special U.S. Envoy George Mitchell’s efforts led to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreeing to and implementing a ten-month moratorium on settlements in disputed territories. Later, Netanyahu and Abbas agreed to re-launch direct negotiations to resolve all issues. Negotiations began in Washington in September 2010, but within weeks there was a deadlock -
Cycle of escalation and ceasefire continues: a new round of violence broke out in and around Gaza late 2012. A ceasefire was reached between Israel and those in power in the Gaza Strip, which held until June 2014. The kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in June 2014 resulted in renewed violence and eventually led to the launch of the Israeli military operation, Protective Edge, which ended with a ceasefire on 26 August 2014 -
Paris summit, 2017: envoys from over 70 countries gathered in Paris, France, to discuss the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. Netanyahu slammed the discussions as "rigged" against his country. Neither Israeli nor Palestinian representatives attended the summit. "A two-state solution is the only possible one," French Foreign Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, said at the opening of the event. By Aasim Saleem
Feudal mentality and absentee landlords
Before Israel's independence, such absentee landlords had sold land to Jews, with the result that some Arab farmers lost their livelihoods. The new Jewish owners and their families did the farm work themselves. Moreover, Bedouin communities added a sense of anarchy because they did not stay in one place.
The Jews who settled in Palestine and created Israel, by contrast, had a strong sense of nationhood, solidarity and mutual support. Socialist ideas from Europe were very common. Men and women were literate. People appreciated formal education. At the same time, the Jewish community had a strong culture of public debate, which provided space for expressing dissent in a context of solidarity.
Post-Ottoman Arab countries, in comparison, were rather rigidly authoritarian and hierarchical. One important reason why Israel's army triumphed in 1948 was that its soldiers were defending their nation, whereas Arab soldiers were really only serving their leaders.
While pan-Arab agitation did little to help Palestinians, it did lead to Jews being persecuted from Iraq in the east to Morocco in the west. As a result Jewish communities largely disappeared from Arab countries.
It is estimated that some 800,000 people were forced to flee, and their obvious destination was Israel. Their expulsion from Arab countries obviously did not alleviate the Palestinians' suffering. The latter paid a heavy price for the Arab defeat in 1948, when 700,000 or so were displaced. Their descendants still speak of the “Nakba”, which means catastrophe. Others were displaced in later wars which Israel again won.
Most of their descendants are still refugees who lack citizenship of any state. The West Bank and Gaza have been occupied territories since 1967. Israeli settlements are spreading in the former area, and enjoy the protection of formal security forces. Their infrastructure is far better than that of the neighbouring Palestinian villages. The Israeli government has publicly announced its intention to annex large areas. Serious grievances thus persist.
Israel indeed has a history of displacing Arabs. What is less well known and gets lost in anti-Israeli agitation, however, is that about 50 % of Israel's population originally comes from the MENA region. Like the survivors of the Nazi genocide, the Jews that fled Arab countries also have a history of violent displacement.
As peoples, both Israelis and Palestinians share the experience of discrimination, oppression and forced migration. As the Israeli scholar Yuval Noah Harari has pointed out, both sides have empirical reasons to believe the other wants to destroy them. Accordingly, peacebuilding is extremely difficult.
The Middle East conflict is back
In recent years the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had gradually become uncoupled from the other lines of conflict in the Middle East. This "encapsulation of the Middle East conflict" may be off the table for now, but it does nothing to change the parameters of the larger regional struggle for dominance
No real pan-Arab solidarity
From the 1970s on, the governments of neighbouring Arab countries more or less abandoned the Palestinian cause. Unsurprisingly, they did not have a good track record of taking care of their own people either. The problem is that strongmen anywhere tend to defend their power, suppress any opposition and surround themselves with cronies. Those in North Africa and the Middle East are no different.
While Arab countries suffered stagnation, Israel became a prospering and dynamic economy. Of course, direct foreign investment, particularly from the United States, helped, but the institutional landscape mattered too. It was missing in the Arab world, which as a whole did not lack funding. Indeed, the region might look different today, had the oil monarchies of the Gulf invested more in Arab development rather than entrenching their absolutist power and exploiting natural resources to the benefit of their own families. The full truth is that pan-Arab rhetoric served despots' authoritarian needs yet did not lead to tangible pan-Arab solidarity.
Scars on Middle East landscape bear witness to past peace failures
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The Golan is strewn with reminders of the 1967 and 1973 wars between Israel and Syria: minefields, foxholes and abandoned armour -
Buildings constructed during the British Mandate era to serve as jails and fortified positions are seen in Al-Jiftlik village near Jericho, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Long abandoned, sheep now wander through the empty buildings, searching for vegetation in the scorching heat of the Jordan Valley. The Israeli military sometimes uses them for training, Palestinian residents say -
Huge amounts of money were spent creating the institutions of the Palestinian Authority under its first president, Yasser Arafat, who used Gaza's airport to fly abroad on official visits. Yet, following 9/11, the airport was an early casualty of the ʹwar on terrorʹ: Israeli air strikes and bulldozers destroyed its runway during the second Palestinian Intifada, a few months after the atttacks on the World Trade Center -
An abandoned mosque on a rainy morning in the Golan Heights, in territory that Israel captured from Syria and occupied in the 1967 Middle East war: until 1967 a Syrian village inhabited by Circassians stood near the site, which now lies just 5km on the Israeli side of the United Nations-monitored 'Area of Separation' that divides Israeli and Syrian military forces under a 1974 ceasefire agreement -
Part of a trench visible in a former Jordanian military post known as Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem, now preserved as a memorial: originally built by the British, the site was captured by Jordan in the 1948-1949 war and held by them until Israeli troops took it in the 1967 Six Day War -
Arafat’s helicopter – the presidential transport of a long-dead president – is now a rotorless relic on public display in Gaza City, while the skeletal remains of Gaza Airport lie gutted and abandoned close to the southern border with Egypt -
An upturned Syrian tank lies in the Hermon Stream in the Banias Nature Reserve on the western edge of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Israel captured the moutainous plateau, a former demilitarized zone, from Syria during the 1967 Six Day War. Today, Israeli tourists carve graffiti into the metal of the tank while dangling their feet in the foaming water below -
The wall of a structure in a former Syrian outpost in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, the territory that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war. In stark contrast to the beauty of the surrounding countryside, it is now crumbling and covered in graffiti, one Arabic message reading: "The Syrian army passed by here" -
A house in Lifta, a ruined Palestinian Arab village whose inhabitants left or were forced from their homes in the conflict that accompanied the end of British rule and the founding of Israel in 1948. The abandoned ruins are visible to travellers arriving at the western entrance of Jerusalem -
Part of a structure at a former Jordanian military base near the Dead Sea in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The building has stood deserted since the 1967 Middle East war when Israel captured the area from the Jordanians -
A sign warning of landmines is seen on a fence in the Golan Heights, the territory that Israel captured from Syria and occupied in the 1967 Middle East war. Many Israeli and foreign tourists drive past the site on their way to popular holiday spots -
British soldiers depicted in a mural on an old pillbox in Jerusalem: dating back to the era of British Mandatory rule before 1948, the pillbox stands abandoned at a busy intersection in Jerusalem. The mural was added in recent years -
Concrete blast walls in an open area once used by the Israeli military near Rahat, southern Israel. Once part of a facility for training in urban warfare, the barriers are now an isolated scar on the landscape
The rise – and divisiveness – of political Islam
Frustration with authoritarian leaders eventually led to pan-Arab ideology becoming largely irrelevant, while Islamist groups became more influential from the late 1970s on. Again, however, it was not really about pan-Muslim solidarity. There are three different brands of political Islam that vehemently disagree with one another. The Wahhabis, the Muslim Brothers and Iran's theocracy share little common ground. The consequences have been dreadfully bloody in some places, especially Syria.
In Palestine, however, the shared history of displacement and oppression fostered a sense of Palestinian nationhood. To alleviate the people's suffering, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) decided to stop the armed struggle and make peace with Israel. Hamas, which has roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, disagreed and opted for violent subversion. Today, things look worse for the Palestinians than ever before.
Hamas' Islamist ideology has led to deadly terrorism. This outfit opposes peace and wants to eliminate Israel. For this cause, it is willing to sacrifice thousands of Palestinian lives.
Western observers, however, tend to neglect the fact that right-wing extremists in Israel have a history of making peace impossible too. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, for instance, was murdered by an Israeli, not an Arab. Violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers on the West Bank keeps feeding Palestinians' Nakba narrative, which revolves around displacement.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have spelled out in detailed reports why they accuse Israel of apartheid. While one need not necessarily agree with the term, such criticism should not be dismissed as mere anti-Semitism. The reports deal with Israeli state action and are not concerned with Judaism as a faith or as an ethnic identity.
Palestinians are still politically divided. There has been deadly violence between the PLO and Hamas in the past. It also matters, that people live in very different socio-political conditions in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and Israel itself. All four areas have sizeable Palestinian populations.
The search for the Middle East formula
Without rights for the Palestinians, there can be neither security for Israelis nor stability in the Middle East. There are four possible future scenarios
Israel's Palestinian citizens
It is ironic, to put it mildly, that for decades Palestinians with Israeli citizenship were the Arab community with the most civil liberties in the world. While Arab Israelis do face discrimination and have reason to feel they are only second-class citizens compared to Jews, they are represented in Parliament, enjoy freedom of speech, are free to organise and hold assemblies. Before the Arab Spring, Palestinian Israelis had more civil rights than had been granted in any Arab country. With Tunisia's regime becoming increasingly authoritarian, that may be the case again today.
Palestinians in East Jerusalem were never granted citizenship after Israel annexed that part of the city, breaching international law. They only have permanent residency rights, and they forfeit this if they spend too much time outside Jerusalem. Israel's planning system discriminates against Palestinians no matter where in the four different jurisdictions they live.
The bizarre thing, however, is that Hamas and Netanyahu both have long relied on their "violent coexistence". Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a history of making the PLO look weak and corrupt while maintaining an awkward cooperation with Hamas. His hardline militarism has thrived on occasional skirmishes with the hostile militia, but apart from such skirmishes, he has done nothing to weaken Hamas. His overarching goal has been to remain able to tell Western allies that he has no partner for making peace.
Left to themselves, Israel and Palestine are unlikely to make peace. Mutual resentment runs deep. Both sides have suffered brutal violence in the past. There is precious little trust. The implication is that peace will certainly depend on international mediation. Given that the multilateral system is increasingly polarised and was never strong enough to ensure the global governance we need, this would seem hard to accomplish. Without peace, however, deadly violence will continue to haunt both Israelis and Palestinians.
© D+C | Development & Cooperation 2024
Hans Dembowski is editor-in-chief of D+C.