Why is there no Palestine state?

The King David Hotel of Jerusalem is one of the landmark buildings of the contested city. Built with locally sourced pink limestone and opened in 1931 by Ezra Mosseri, a wealthy Egyptian Jewish banker, the hotel, overlooking the Old City that is holy for all three Abrahamic faiths, is a standing example of both Israel’s Jewish roots and its bloody history. From its early days during the British Mandate of Palestine, the hotel hosted royalties and other key visiting dignitaries. During the Mandatory period, the British used the southern wing of the hotel for its administrative and military offices.

On July 22, 1946, members of Irgun, a right-wing Zionist underground militia, entered the hotel disguised as Arab workers and waiters. Their mission: plant explosives in the basement of the main building of the hotel. The powerful explosion led to the collapse of the western half of the southern wing. At least 91 people were killed and 46 injured. The bombing of the King David Hotel, the deadliest attack by Zionists against the British, was one of the early terrorist attacks in modern West Asia. The British found it increasingly difficult to continue their rule of Palestine after the Second World War. Britain turned to the United Nations, saying it wanted to vacate the Mandate. In 1947, the UN General Assembly decided to set up a Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). In a report submitted to the General Assembly, UNSCOP proposed to divide Palestine into ‘an independent Arab State, an independent Jewish State, and the City of Jerusalem’. The committee proposed that the city be under an international trusteeship system.

The Jewish Agency immediately accepted the plan, while Arab nations opposed the partition. On May 14, 1948, the day the British Mandate expired, the Jewish People’s Council gathered at the Tel Aviv Museum (today known as Independence Hall). David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Jewish Agency, made the declaration from a podium. “We, the members of the National Council, representing the Jewish people in Palestine and the Zionist movement of the world…, hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish State in Palestine, to be called Israel,” he said.

The next day, the Armies of four countries — Egypt, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq — entered Palestine and clashed with the Jewish army, triggering the first Arab-Israeli war. The Arab nations’ plan was to destroy the newly created state. But they failed to do so. The war continued for a year and when a ceasefire was signed, Israel was controlling more territories of historic Palestine than even the UN plan offered for the Jewish state.

For Israel, it was the ‘war of independence’, but for Palestinians, it was Nakba (catastrophe). Roughly 7,50,000 Palestinians were violently displaced from their homes and lands by Zionist militias. Thousands of Palestinians were killed. Hundreds of Arab villages and towns were depopulated and destroyed. West Asia suddenly looked like a different region. Arab pride and confidence were hurt, and a Jewish state has been established in the heart of the Arab land. It was only the beginning of the conflicts to come.

In 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israel captured the entire Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt; the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem from Jordan; and the Golan Heights from Syria. The UN Partition plan promised 55% of historical Palestine to the Jewish state; Israel controlled some 75% after the 1948 war, and now, after the 1967 war, the whole of Palestine came under Israel’s control.

And it never gave the land back.

Palestinians today demand an independent state based on the 1967 border — which means the whole of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Different Palestinians factions, including Fatah, which runs the Palestine Authority based in the West Bank, and Hamas, which is the main force in the Gaza Strip, have either directly or indirectly accepted the 1967 border. While the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), of which Fatah is the main constituent, has officially recognised the state of Israel, Hamas has said it would accept a lasting ceasefire with Israel if the Jewish state withdraws to the 1967 border. Israel in the past had committed itself to the two-state solution, but it has never made its position clear on the border. In recent years, Israel’s position has further shifted to the right, with its rulers publicly disowning the two-state plan. East Jerusalem has been annexed by Israel. The West Bank has been under Israel’s direct military rule since 1967. Israeli troops withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but from 2007 onwards, the enclave remained under Israel’s military blockade. The occupation had almost been normalised with even Arab nations reaching out to Israel for normalisation agreements. But then Hamas carried out a massive attack in Israel on October 7, 2023, bringing the Palestine question back to the fore of West Asia.

Peace efforts

Why there is no peace between Israel and Palestine? To answer this question, one has to look into the history of the peace process between the two sides. After the 1967 war, Israel for years refused to accept Palestinian nationalism. The first Israeli recognition of the Palestinian nationalism came in the 1978 Camp David agreement.

Under the agreement, signed five years after the 1973 Yom Kippur War which shocked the Jewish nation, Israel agreed to withdraw completely from the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. Menachem Begin, the Israeli Prime Minister, also agreed, under the Framework for Peace in the Middle East agreement, to abolish Israel’s military rule over the West Bank and Gaza, and establish a Palestinian self-governing authority with elections and local policing. The agreement established peace between Israel and Egypt, its most powerful Arab adversary then. The Framework Agreement was not immediately implemented. But it set the agenda for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which was set in motion by a host of local and regional developments.

Israel saw the PLO’s claim to the whole of Palestine as a threat. It attacked Lebanon in 1978 and 1982, mainly to oust the PLO from the neighbouring country. Israel also continued its military rule over the Palestinian territories amid mounting resentment among the Palestinians. This resentment blew off in 1987 after an Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) truck collided with a civilian car, killing four Palestinians in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza. The accident sparked widespread protests and civil disobedience movements across Gaza and the West Bank, which came to be known as the First Intifada.

Subsequently, Jordan gave up its claims over the West Bank, two decades after Israel captured it. “It was intifada that really caused our decision on disengagement,” Jordan’s King Hussein said in 1988. Jordan’s decision to give up claims foreclosed the possibility of settling the question of the West Bank between Israel and Jordan. Seizing the moment, the Palestinian National Council, the legislative body of the PLO, adopted a resolution, written by poet Mahmoud Darwish, declaring independence for Palestine, which it called ‘the land of the three monotheistic faiths’. On November 15, 1988, Arafat read out the declaration in Algiers, Algeria, proclaiming the birth of ‘a State of Palestine in our Palestinian territory with its capital Jerusalem’. Weeks later, at least 100 UN member states acknowledged the declaration of the state of Palestine.

Israel faced two major challenges at this juncture. One was the growing difficulties in governing the Palestinian territories amid continuing protests. The other was the global recognition the Palestinian leadership was drawing. The PLO’s policy was also undergoing changes. If earlier it called for ‘the liberation’ of the whole of historical Palestine, it was now sending signals of compromise for a deal with Israel. The peace bid gained momentum after Yitzhak Rabin, of Labour, became Prime Minister in 1992. Rabin joined secret talks in Oslo based on the Framework Agreement. On September 9, 1993, both parties exchanged Letters of Mutual Recognition, signed by Prime Minister Rabin and Chairman Arafat. The letters indicated that both parties recognised each other as serious partners of negotiations. Four days later, on September 13, 1993, Rabin and Arafat shook hands in Washington in the presence of U.S. President Bill Clinton and signed the Oslo Accord I. Rabin was forthright in his message to the Palestinians. “Let me say to you, the Palestinians: we are destined to live together, on the same soil in the same land,” he said.

According to the Oslo II Agreement, reached between the Palestinian leadership and Israel in 1995, the West Bank was divided into three areas — A, B and C. Hebron, Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem and some towns and villages that do not border Israeli settlements are in Area A, which comprises some 18% of the West Bank. Area B, which comprises around 22% of the territory, is under Palestinian civil administration while Israel retains exclusive security control. Area C is the largest division in the West Bank, comprising some 60% of the territory, it is under full Israel civil administration and security control. The Oslo Accords were initial agreements aimed at taking some preliminary steps towards resolving the Palestine question in five years. But the resolution never came.

The permanence of conflict

In the history of Israel and Palestine, there is always a U-turn after a serious push for peace. On November 4, 1995, Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist. His immediate successor, Shimon Peres, called for an election hoping that he could mobilise the peace dividend and take the Oslo process further. But in the 1996 election, Likud returned to power and Benjamin Netanyahu became Prime Minister for the first time.

The fate of Oslo was sealed.

Netanyahu initially refused to honour the commitments of the past governments. The rise of Hamas, which never accepted the Oslo process, and suicide attacks by Palestinian militants further complicated the peace process. When the interim five-year period since the Oslo agreements was over in May 1999, a comprehensive agreement between Israel and Palestine was still elusive. The Palestinian Authority was running parts of the West Bank and Gaza. Israel, instead of directly ruling over the West Bank and Gaza, started controlling territories indirectly, and continued to build Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands. The status of Jerusalem and the right of return of Palestinian refugees remained the crux of the problem with no meaningful efforts from either side to settle the issues.

U.S. President Bill Clinton tried to revive the stalled peace process in 2000 in a Camp David summit in which he hosted both Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack and the Palestinian leader Arafat. All key components of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict came up for discussions during the summit. But the summit collapsed as the two sides failed to agree on the status of Jerusalem and the right of return. Israel refused to recognise Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem and allow the Palestinian refugees who were forced to flee from home during the 1948-49 war to return to their lands, which were now part of Israel. The failure of the Camp David talks triggered another spell of violent protests across Palestinian territories; this came to be known as the Second Intifada.

The collapse of the Oslo process, the failure of peace bids, the mushrooming of Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories and the strengthening of Islamist parties such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad among the Palestinians all contributed to the uprising. It was amid growing protests by the Palestinians that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in late 2003, announced his plan to pull out troops as well as settlements from Gaza in a unilateral move. He completed the Gaza pullout in 2005, but it did not bring the occupation to an end.

Unsustainable status quo

There were several attempts to revive peace talks since the collapse of the second Camp David negotiations. In 2002, the Arab League, at its Beirut Summit, endorsed the Arab Peace Initiative, which called for normalising relations between Arab countries and Israel, in exchange for a full withdrawal by Israel from the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, and a ‘just settlement’ of the Palestinian refugee problem based on UN Resolution 194. But the Israeli government rejected the offer. In the same year, the Middle East Quartet — the U.S., the EU, Russia and the UN — proposed a ‘roadmap’ for peace which called for an independent Palestinian state living side by side with Israel in peace. According to the road map, the peace process should start with an immediate and unconditional ceasefire that would be followed by political institutional reforms in Palestine, including elections. In phase two, establishment of an independent Palestinian state with provisional borders was proposed. A final settlement was to be found in phase three in which issues such as the status of Jerusalem, right of return of refugees, and Jewish settlements would be decided. Israel, however, refused to freeze new settlements in the occupied territories, and the plan never took off. President Barack Obama had also tried and failed to revive talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

After the Obama administration’s efforts collapsed, the international community largely looked away from this conflict, until recently. During this period, Gaza was bombed, violence spread in the occupied West Bank, and ties between the Israelis and the Palestinians fell to a new low, closing hopes for a restart in the peace process. When the Obama administration gave up on finding or facilitating a solution to the crisis, France stepped in by announcing plans to host an international summit on Israel-Palestine peace. The conference in January 2017 was attended by diplomats from 29 countries, but Israel and Palestine were absent. The initiative proposed the creation of two states, based on the 1967 border, with Jerusalem as the capital of both. But the ground reality of mistrust, hostility, violence and occupation was markedly different from the mood set in the conference.

During the first Trump presidency, Israel stepped up the pace of the settlements. From 2017 to 2021, the number of settlers in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) shot up from 3,99,000 to 4,65,000, according to data collected by Peace Now. Trump’s decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem was a concession to Israel without anything in return. In a U-turn from Washington’s previous position, in November 2019, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Israeli settlements on the occupied Palestine land were not necessarily illegal. The Biden administration reversed this stand on settlements but stopped short of taking any punitive measures or pressure measures towards Israel against the illegal settlements.

Lopsided response

There’s no level-playing field between Israel and Palestine. One is the mightiest military power in West Asia, with nuclear weapons and the direct support of the U.S., while the other, Palestine, is not even a fully recognised nation state. For a just solution to emerge from talks, theoretically speaking, there has to be a balance between the two sides, and that can only happen in this case through the mediation of the international community. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s lack of interest in the peace process is not a secret. During the election campaign in 2015, he said no Palestinian state would be formed under his watch. His political allies, including settler parties, are now calling for the annexation of those parts of the West Bank where settlements have been built. How can peace be possible if Israel, the superior power, continues to grab more Palestinian land while violence and occupation continue?

Israel knows that it can get away with its actions, unlike other rogue states such as North Korea or Iran. It is the only nuclear-armed nation in West Asia. It faces allegations of war crimes and genocide. It continues the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in violation of UN resolutions. Despite criticisms even from its allies in the West, Israel’s settlement policy remains intact. Still, there was no meaningful international effort to hold Israel accountable for its actions.

Israel’s records show that it made limited concessions only in the face of external pressure and Palestinian violence. During the Suez war, Israel was forced to pull out of Gaza amid threats and pressure tactics from both American President Dwight Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1957. In the late 1970s, constant pressure from the Carter administration, and also the growing threat perception from Egypt following the Yom Kippur War prompted Israel to come to Camp David and finally sign both the Sinai pull-out and Framework Agreements. In 1993, the Oslo process was triggered by the First intifada. Sharon’s Gaza disengagement happened against the backdrop of the Second Intifada.

During the years that followed the Second Intifada, Israel thought the status quo was manageable. The Palestinians were a divided lot. The West Bank was run by Fatah and Gaza by Hamas. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas lacked the charisma and command of the late leader Yasser Arafat. The Palestinian Authority (PA) was flush with corruption and there was widespread anger among the Palestinians towards the PA. There was no organised resistance in the West Bank. There was no international pressure to make peace. And Arabs were ready to sidestep the Palestine question to make bilateral peace with Israel. The Israelis thought they could continue the occupation without consequences.

Then came the October 7 attack.

Did the October 7 attack help the Palestinian cause in any way? It is too early to reach conclusions. Initial signs suggest that Hamas’s attack, in which 1,200 people were killed, and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza, in which over 46,000 Palestinians were killed, have further set back the push for a two-state solution. Israel’s right wing today publicly rejects the idea of a Palestinian state. The settler parties demand Jewish resettlements in Gaza. With U.S. President Donald Trump threatening to ethnically cleanse the 2.3 million people of Gaza and Israel government cheering the Trump plan, Palestinians stare at a more tumultuous future. All the outstanding issues in the Israel-Palestine conflict — border, illegal settlers in Jerusalem, the status of Jerusalem, the right of the Palestinian refugees to return — remain unaddressed.

But at the same time, the war in Gaza brought the Palestine question back to the centre of West Asia’s geopolitics. Israel wanted to localise the Palestine question, and Hamas has re-regionalised it. The war has derailed the Arab-Israel normalisation process, at least for now. When Israel launched the war on Gaza, it said it would dismantle Hamas. But after 15 months of fighting, Israel had to make a ceasefire deal with Hamas to get hostages released.

If anything, October 7 and its aftermath are a bloody reminder that occupation is not a solution. Israel wants to continue the occupation without consequences. But Palestinian militants seem determined to keep fighting, with whatever available tactics they have, including the means of terror. Israel responds with deadly force, unleashing fire and fury on the Palestinians. But Israel’s collective punishment does little in destroying Palestinian militancy. This has set a cycle a violence, with occasional outbursts such as the First Intifada, Second Intifada and October 7, often shaking up regional stability.

Unless the Palestine question is addressed, neither Israel nor West Asia is going to enjoy durable peace and stability. And a lasting and just solution to the Palestine question is the creation of a state of Palestine, with all the rights other nation states enjoy, or the acceptance of the Palestinian people as equal citizens in a single state that’s purged of its apartheid ideology and architecture. Such a settlement looks remote today as Israel chooses war over settlement, Palestinians are bereft of a united national movement and the international community is not adequately invested. But the alternative is the unsustainable and untenable path of violence.