A rectification: Palestine and the two state solution

Editor's note: The author's name was changed to a pseudonym after publication to protect the author from physical danger that could result from the views presented.

It was 1988 when Edward Said said that “for the present… the wall-to-wall nonsense about terrorism can inflict grave damage.” Unfortunately for Dr. Said, may he rest in peace, very little has changed. A recent column, “One state, one Israel,” peddled numerous fictions about Palestinian history and can be readily filed away in Dr. Said’s file of “wall-to-wall nonsense.”

Initially, the column attempts to sell us the “Two-State Solution” as “a call to split Israel using its pre-1967 borders into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state in exchange for an official recognition of Israel’s right to exist by its anti-Semitic, war-hungry neighbors.” This sentence is comprised solely of racist assumptions built upon a blatant historical fiction. Nothing substantiates it, and its blatant disregard for clear historical record somehow went unchecked.

The two-state solution did not emerge in “1973,” after the Yom Kippur War as the article attempts to convince us, and there is no scholarship to support such a facile claim. Neither, obviously, did the two-state solution exist to “split Israel.” Either of these claims would be laughed out of the room by people with even a modicum of knowledge about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The first report calling for a partition between the two peoples to emanate from a major power was the Peel Commission in 1937, if not earlier. Lord Peel was commissioned by the British government to examine the area of historical Palestine and assess the practicality of Jewish immigration to the area. Later, UN Resolution 181(II) established what was called the “United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine”; it stated specifically the the British Mandate of Palestine be carved into two separate homelands—one for indigenous Palestinians, and one for Jews living there as a result of recent and future immigration, as well as those indigenous to historical Palestine. Specifically, Part II.3 says: “Independent Arab and Jewish States... shall come into existence in Palestine two months after the evacuation of the armed forces of the mandatory Power.” Thus, the British Mandate of Palestine was split by the plan in order to create a Jewish homeland, not the other way around. The historical record is easily accessible.

The second absurd point is that “Palestinian aggression” and Israel’s theocratic neighbors have made the two-state solution impossible. The author runs through the list of usual suspects: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and so on and so forth ad nauseum. In doing so, Schreiber lays bare his minimal understanding of Arab politics. Syria has been ruled since 1970 by the Alawite Assad regime, which has protected the interests of Syria’s minorities (Alawites, Christians, Druze) and has been antagonistic to its Sunni majority, which is a key cog in understanding the rise of Da’esh (ISIS) in Syria today. Lebanon has been ruled for years now by one of the least Islamic governments in the Middle East. Schreiber’s list of countries in connection to Shari’a Law contains no countries that abide by Shari’a Law. The closest country to anything resembling what he listed is Saudi Arabia, which ironically is one of the countries he noted as being “warm” to the idea of accepting Israel. One of the other two is Egypt, which is ruled by an autocratic dictator who brought himself to power in a military coup, placing Israel among conspicuous company.

Contrary to the baseless accusation that Arabs have hindered the peace process, the Arab League has presented a proposal for a two-state solution called the Arab Peace Initiative. Every single country in the Arab World signed it in 2002, and the proposal included a stipulation that all 22 Arab states would seek normalized relations with Israel, going above and beyond the author’s call to “recognize Israel.” The proposal was endorsed by Ban Ki Moon, Secretary General of the United Nations, who said it would lead to “a just peace.” It necessitated only a partition by the 1967 borders, a withdrawal from the Palestinian Territories and a “just resolution to the refugee crisis” created by al-Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of over 700,000 Palestinians from modern Israel.

The Palestinian Authority (P.A.) and Hamas accepted the plan, which reminds us that the P.A. (formerly PLO) has accepted a two-state solution since the ‘80s when Yasser Arafat publicly accepted Israel as a state. Only Israel refused the proposal.

Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders today are the only ones refusing outright a two-state solution. They have no intention of establishing a Palestinian state nor did they ever. As early as 1972, Israeli President Chaim Herzog said that Palestinians can “never be partners in any way in a land that has been holy to our people,” as quoted in Noam Chomsky’s “Terrorism and American Ideology.” Chomsky later quotes Shlomo Gazit, a senior military official from the same era, who says that “it is necessary to prevent the inhabitants of the territories from participating in shaping the political future of the territory… [hence] the absolute prohibition of political organization.” The columnist also accuses Abbas of “abandoning” peace by rightfully renouncing the Oslo Accords, but he is apparently unaware that Israel’s refusal to deal with the refugee issue or settlements in the West Bank means that Israel renounced the Accords years ago.