Ever since the establishment after the First World War of the
British Mandatory regime in Palestine, the mainstream in the
Zionist movement accepted as part of its vision the possibility of
sharing historical Palestine with another independent Arab entity.
This said, two qualifications to this statement should be added:
first, that this scenario did not exclude other maximalist
ambitions, such as the establishment of a Jewish state over all of
historical Palestine and even beyond; and second, that for most of
the Mandatory period, the Zionist leadership preferred sharing the
land with the Hashemites of Transjordan, rather than with the
indigenous Arab population of Palestine. Thus, the Zionist
leadership was ambivalent, and in a sense pragmatic, wishing to
take over all of Palestine should circumstances allow, but willing
to be content with less, provided the partner for partition would
be the Hashemites, not the Palestinians.
When in 1937 the British tried, for the first time, as a Mandatory
power to solve the conflict over the land, they relied heavily on
this Zionist pragmatism. Hence, the pro-Hashemite orientation of
the report prepared that year by the Enquiry Commission sent by the
British government under the chairmanship of Lord Peel. This
commission recommended the creation in Palestine of three entities:
one Jewish, one Arab to be annexed to Transjordan, and one British
(the latter including all the strategic strongholds in the land and
other vital areas for the Empire).
This same British position lay behind London's policy towards the
end of the Mandate after the Second World War. After Britain
decided to leave Palestine in February 1947, it wanted the country
divided between its ally, Jordan, and the Jewish state. This vision
was shared by both King Abdullah and the Jewish Agency. However,
the UN. had a different concept and, for the first time, the idea
of an independent Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state was
officially put on the table.
Both Abdullah and the embryo Jewish state had to navigate between
their wish to divide the land between themselves, and the U.N.
partition resolution recommending the creation of two independent
Jewish and Arab states in Palestine. The Jewish Agency concluded a
secret tacit alliance with the Jordanians on the division of the
land, while publicly declaring its support for the partition
resolution (a double-play made easy by the firm knowledge on the
Jewish side that the Arab world and the Palestinians would publicly
reject the partition and make every possible effort, including the
use of military force, to prevent its implementation).l
An Option Rejected
Towards the end of the 1948 war, the idea of establishing an
independent Palestinian state and even a Palestinian
government-in-exile was raised by the Palestinian leadership,
seated mainly in Cairo and Damascus, but this was categorically
rejected by both Israel and the British government. Again these two
governments found out they could rely on Amman to support their
campaign against these proposals. Such a state, even in the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip, was referred to by these three partners as
a "Mufti State," a state that would be controlled by the ex-Mufti,
Haj Amin al-Husseini and, therefore, would be hostile to British
interests and a threat to Israel and Jordan alike.
It was only after the war, in the spring of 1949, during the
Lausanne peace conference convened by the U.N. to try and end the
conflict, that within Israel a support for such a state was heard.
The conference was based on the partition resolution and the
Americans, who were running the show there, were, for a while,
seriously considering pressuring Israel to concede some of the
areas it had occupied during the 1948 war and transferring them to
an independent Palestinian state.
Due to that American pressure, Moshe Sharett, Israel's foreign
minister at the time, toyed with a plan of establishing a
Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank, under Israeli auspices, a
better solution than the annexation of that area to Transjordan.
The appearance in the U.N. peace conference in Lausanne of
self-appointed Palestinian delegates willing to discuss this
possibility increased Sharett's interest in this limited
Palestinian option. However, Oavid Ben-Gurion, Israel's prime
minister, saw no need to promote any substantial peace negotiations
beyond the armistice agreement Israel had signed with Arab
countries. These included the one with Egypt, which recognized
Egypt's presence in the Gaza Strip, and the one with Jordan, which
affirmed the Hashemite annexation of the West Bank ¬agreements
that, in his eyes, rendered useless any additional discussion over
the future of Palestine. Thus, the "Palestinian option" of those
days was neither exhausted, nor explored.2
When Martin Buber wrote an open letter to Ben-Gurion in 1958
suggesting, among other things, a political solution to the
Palestinian refugee problem which would include the establishment
of an independent Palestinian state, his was a lone voice in the
political wilderness. The Israeli scene was characterized by an
intransigent position vis-a-vis any compromise with the
Palestinians. Only the Israeli Communist party had in its platform
a clear call for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside
the Jewish state.
Yigal AlIon's Dream
The Labor movement, dominating the political scene in Israel in the
1950s and 1960s, was tom between pragmatism that dictated
compliance with the status quo and territorial ambition fomenting a
desire to occupy the rest of western Palestine. The territorial
appetite was fed by a sense, shared by most of the movement's
leaders, that 1948 was a missed opportunity as Israel had frittered
away the chance of expanding its control as far as the Jordan
River. Year after year, military officers and politicians searched
for the opportunity that would justify such an expansion. The
events of 1956 and 1958 provided the best circumstances for such
operations.3
These ambitions were curbed by Ben-Gurion's fear of reactions from
the Western bloc whose great powers wished to maintain the
Hashemite rule over the two banks of the River Jordan, rather than
witnessing the making of a Greater Israel. Moreover, Ben-Gurion
recognized the demographic problem incurred in an Israeli
annexation of the West Bank. He always cherished the need to have a
firm Jewish majority in the Jewish state and did not wish to
enlarge the number of Palestinians under its control. These
considerations did not deter his main partners in the Labor
movement, people such as Yigal Allon, who cherished the romantic
dream of establishing an Israeli empire and demanded of the prime
minister a more active Israeli policy, i.e., an Israeli initiative
for the occupation of the West Bank. Hence, until 1967, the very
idea of an independent Palestinian state as a principal constituent
in a future possible solution was totally absent from the Israeli
policy-makers' vision or plans.
Palestinian Independence on the Arena
The occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 war
reopened the question of Palestinian statehood. It was raised as a
subject for discussion by various Palestinian dignitaries who
engaged in a futile negotiation with Israeli politicians, among
them Moshe Dayan, about the possibility of creating a Palestinian
entity in the occupied territories. This option was on the agenda
until the demise of the Eshkol government in 1969. The Golda Meir
government, following it, was not only opposed to the idea of an
independent Palestinian state, but fanatically denied the very
existence of a Palestinian people. Yet, within the wider Israeli
political scene, the notion was no longer alien or confined to the
Communist party alone. Other groups, even within what can be called
the Zionist left, began supporting the implementation of
Palestinian independence on all, or most, of the areas occupied by
Israel in the 1967 war.
Nevertheless, in the first decade after the war, the ruling party
in Israel, the Labor party, maintained its past support for the
"Jordanian option," namely, the division of the West Bank between
Israel and Jordan. Two schools of thought emerged with regard to
this compromise: Dayan offering a functional division of
responsibilities between Israel and Jordan, AIlon a territorial
division. Both ignored and rejected the idea of a Palestinian
state, although Allon toward the end of his political career was
willing to replace the Hashemites with the Palestinians in his
famous Allon Plan. This left within Israel's control the Jordan
Valley, the Gush Etzion settlements, and Kiryat Arba near Hebron,
allowing the Palestinians autonomy in their populated towns in the
West Bank. In 1996, an enlarged version of the plan was adopted by
Binyamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon as the basis of the permanent
settlement of the conflict.
The advent of the nationalist Likud party to power in 1977 was
supposed to push into even deeper oblivion the support for an
independent Palestinian state in ruling Israeli political circles,
but surprisingly it did exactly the opposite. The peace with Egypt
brought with it an Egyptian pressure on the Begin government to
propose a solution to the Palestine question, in order that the
bilateral peace with Egypt, as the late president Sadat hoped,
would be more acceptable to the Arab world at large. Begin came up
with the idea of an autonomy, a very limited one, but, nonetheless,
one that referred at Camp David to the "legitimate rights of the
Palestinians." The Labor party, now in opposition, failed to see
the opportunity, or more probably did not wish to seize it, and
still offered as an alternative the Jordanian option.
Polarization
Within the more marginal groups on the Zionist left, the Egyptian
initiative contributed to the enlargement of the pro-Palestinian
camp on their side of the political map. However, it was not until
the Intifada, and the change the uprising produced in the American
position in 1988, that a clear support for an independent state
became the established position of the Zionist left, a grouping
representing at the time about 20 percent of the Jewish population
in Israel. This was, by the way, part of a polarization process
dividing the Jewish society in Israel into two distinct
politico-cultural camps. While the notion of Palestinian
independence became the bon ton of the left, the idea of Greater
Israel, to be brought about by settlement and even by transfer,
attracted a growing number of people on the right. The Greater
Israel movement grew from a small group from the right, the
religious and the Labor party into a substantial political force
located mainly, but not only, in the Jewish settlements in the West
Bank which had been started by the Labor government in the first
decade after the occupation, and in the many new settlements added
by the various Likud governments ever since.
There is no point in elaborating for readers of this journal the
recent processes that produced the Oslo Accords. In the context of
this article, it is worth mentioning that the Madrid conference of
1991 convinced the twin leaders of the Labor party, Shimon Peres
and Yitzhak Ra'Jin, that, behind the scenes, the PLO was
controlling the Palestinian delegation from the occupied
territories, as it was dominating Palestinian politics in general.
Therefore, the two, still in the opposition at the time, accepted
the need to negotiate directly with the PLO on partial withdrawal
from the occupied territories. When they won the 1992 elections,
this realization lay behind their peace policy of direct
negotiations with the PLO.
A State in Name?
At the time of the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993,
the discourse of both leaders, and most members of their party, did
not include a reference to an independent Palestinian state.
However, the consensual interpretation given to Oslo, and what
seemed at the time to its architects the natural consequence of the
process, indicated that it can all only end in Palestinian
independence. How much the two leaders, Peres and Rabin, were
supportive of this option, is hard to say, especially now that
Peres, out of office and of leadership, accepts wholeheartedly the
establishment of a Palestinian state. They may have hoped that,
whatever the nature of the Palestinian identity would be, they
would not have to call it a state. But it is also quite possible
that they were not deterred by referring to a new entity as a
state, provided it was a state only in name and not in substance.
The pragmatic nature of Labor politics, as well as that of people
on the right, such as Ariel Sharon and, at various moments, even
Binyamin Netanyahu, leads to a distinction between symbolism and
substance.
The way the Oslo interim agreements were implemented had created
such irreversible facts - in the form of expanded Jewish
settlements and bypass roads bisecting the Palestinian areas and of
security parameters encircling the West Bank and the Gaza Strip -
that whatever one calls the entity to be established on this
network, it cannot be a state. These facts turn an entity that
would be declared today as a state into a Bantustan, where
symbolism cannot make up for the absence of real sovereignty or
genuine statehood. This state of affairs means that when we talk
today of the acceptance of the idea of a state, for many Israelis
in the political center this means a limited autonomy in three
Palestinian cantons in the West Bank and within an encircled and
crippled Gaza Strip.
Four Positions
There are currently four Israeli positions on statehood that have
to be noted. The first is typical to the center, transcending the
boundaries of partisanship, and accepted by most people in Labor
and Likud: the perpetuation in a final settlement of, more or less,
the present balance of power and the freezing of the current map of
Palestine as the permanent solution of the Palestine question. The
permanent so~:!tion is in the form of a mini-state of Palestine,
next to Israel, comprising 55 percent of the West Bank and 65
percent of the Gaza Strip, without territorial integrity and with
no clear capital; a state which has no foreign or security policies
of its own, nor independent economic and developmental policies,
free from Israeli sanctions and vetoes.
The second option is that adhered to by the right: the annexation
of as much as possible to Israel of the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip and the imposition of Israeli law there. There seems to be
less interest and thought invested in what would be the nature of
the remaining areas, as it is hoped that these would be minimized
to a few percent of the occupied territories. It is within these
circles that the idea of Jordan as a Palestinian state is most
popular.
The third option is that proposed by the Zionist left: a
demilitarized state of Palestine, with a symbolic capital in East
Jerusalem, although it is difficult to portray a coherent position
here. Meretz still supports a united Jerusalem as Israel's capital;
Hadash, on the other hand, accepts unconditionally the Palestinian
demand for a capital in East Jerusalem. The same ambiguity applies
to the question of demilitarization and the final borders. Meretz
demands demilitarization; Hadash demands a full sovereign
Palestinian state in the pre-1967 borders. Meretz foresees
rectifications in the June 4, 1967, line; Hadash desires a complete
withdrawal to these lines. Both parties are unclear on how the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip would be connected.
On settlements there are also differences of opinion. Hadash
demands full eviction, even by force, of the Jewish settlements;
Meretz hopes that most settlers would voluntarily evict, and that
the rest can stay if they accept Palestinian sovereignty.
A fourth solution has only recently been termed by Edward Said as
the "third way." This is a revival of the binational state idea,
already proposed in this journal by Sara Osacky-Lazar and As'ad
Ghanem. This option is based on a recognition that the present
balance of power, the demographic distribution of Palestinian and
Jewish population in Israel and in Palestine and the need to solve
the Palestinian refugee problem through the implementation of the
Right of Return, leave no other option than to accept the
impossibility of creating two distinct nation-states.4 A political
structure that would fit the demographic and social realities of
Israel/Palestine can only be a unitary one or at least a federated
one. Settlements would have no special meaning in a unitary state,
and refugees could return without generating fears for the Jewish
majority in Israel. This vision today is shared only by few
Israelis and Palestinians, so far, but it may be the only feasible
solution.
All the recent polls and surveys in Israel indicated over
50-percent support for a Palestinian state. The majority of these
are supporters of what we called the first option. It is a
political stance which, at the most, only a handful of Palestinians
could accept. The Palestinian Authority goes along with the third
option we mentioned, but has no powerful partner on the Israeli
side upon which to build the permanent solution. Nor is this option
accepted by the opposition in the occupied territories or among the
refugees in the diaspora. It also does not include a solution to
the problem of the Palestinians in Israel itself. Yet between that
and the fourth option we mentioned, lie the hearts and minds of the
peace camp in Israel- the only partner that can help bring about
the implementation of the Palestinian right to self-determination
and statehood.
Footnotes
1. See Ilan Pappe, Britain and the Arab-Israel Conflict, 1948-1951
(London and New York, 1988), pp. 1-21.
2. See Ilan Pappe, "Moshe Sharett, David Ben-Gurion and the
'Palestinian Option,' 1948¬1956," Studies in Zionism, Vol
7/1,1986, pp. 77-96.
3. These incidents are detailed in my article "The Junior Partner:
Israel and the 1958 Crisis," in R.w. Louis and R. Owen (eds.), The
1958 Middle East Crisis (London and New York, 1999).
4. Even more recently in The New York Times Magazine, January 10,
1999, under the title "The One-State Solution." See also As'ad
Ghanem and Sara Osacky-Lazar, "Towards an Alternative
Israeli-Palestinian Discourse," Palestine-Israel Journal, Volume
3/4, Summer/ Autumn 1996, pp. 91-94.