Lost Opportunities for Peace in Palestine

In the wake of the October 7 Hamas terror attack on Israeli civilians and Israel’s military response, a narrative is emerging that condemns Hamas for its brutality while blaming Israeli policies toward the Palestinians as the root cause of the Hamas atrocities. This narrative defies historical accuracy. It is time to set the record straight.

First, to ascribe the root cause of the Hamas attacks to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank ignores the century-long history of Palestinian terrorism against their Jewish neighbors, commencing long before the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and indeed long before the creation of the State of Israel. For example, in August 1929, two decades before Israel existed, Palestinian terrorists massacred 70 Jewish civilians in Hebron. The Times of London carried a chilling report of the massacres in its September 2, 1929, edition, describing how the terrorists slaughtered women and Yeshiva students.

Second, Israel is not to blame for the Palestinians’ lack of statehood. On multiple occasions over the past 85 years Palestinian leaders rejected both the one-state and two-state solutions.

For example, on May 17, 1939, the British Government, serving as “Mandatory” (Trustee) for Palestine since 1922 under the auspices of the League of Nations, offered the one-state solution for Palestine, with Jewish immigration severely restricted and ultimately terminated after five years, Jewish land acquisition largely banned, and the Palestinian Arabs (then comprising a two-to-one majority in the country) achieving statehood after 10 years.

But the Palestinian leader, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al Husseini, rejected the British offer. He demanded immediate statehood and an immediate halt to Jewish immigration. The Mufti refused to consider anything short of his maximalist position. Had the Mufti said yes, all of Palestine today would be under Arab rule, and no Jewish state would ever have been created.

Following World War II, Britain handed the Palestine matter to the United Nations. The UN convened separate proceedings in 1947 under the auspices of UNSCOP (UN Special Committee on Palestine) and the Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine, both of which endorsed the two-state solution, dividing Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab countries.

The UN General Assembly approved the two-state solution on November 29, 1947. The area allocated for the Arab state was larger than the modern-day West Bank and Gaza Strip. The area allocated for the Jewish state was smaller than modern-day Israel.

The Jews enthusiastically accepted the UN’s November 29, 1947, offer of two states, celebrating by dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv. The Palestinian Arabs, however, flatly rejected the two-state solution and responded by launching a bloody war. In February 1948 the UN’s Palestine Commission reported to the Security Council that “powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein.”

The Palestinians continued their November 1947 renunciation of the two-state solution for months and decades afterward. In December 1948 hundreds of Palestinian leaders met in Jericho and passed a series of resolutions asking King Abdullah I of Jordan to formally annex the West Bank. Jordan accepted the request and annexed the West Bank, occupying the area until the June 1967 Six-Day War. Egypt, meanwhile, occupied Gaza from 1948-1967.

Significantly, not once during the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank and the Egyptian occupation of Gaza between 1948-1967 did the Palestinians ever demand statehood in the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, the Palestinians demanded the destruction of Israel.

Moreover, in May 1964 the Palestinians expressly reaffirmed their longstanding rejection of sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza, declaring in Article 24 of the original Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Charter: “This Organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, or the Gaza Strip.”

The closest the parties came in recent years to reaching a permanent status agreement occurred during the short-lived efforts of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, in 2008 to agree on final terms. Unfortunately, the talks collapsed when Abbas inexplicably rejected what Olmert later described as an unprecedented Israeli offer to withdraw almost entirely from the West Bank and the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, and to cede the Old City of Jerusalem to international control.

Finally, it is important to recall the Oslo Accords of 1993-1995. Those agreements, which remain legally binding on both the Israelis and the Palestinians, resulted from lengthy and vigorous negotiations between the PLO and Israel. The Palestinians agreed that the West Bank would be divided into three separate areas, leaving roughly half the West Bank under Israeli control. The Palestinians also agreed the Israeli occupation and settlements could remain in place until a permanent deal would be reached down the road regarding “permanent status” issues such as borders, the status of Jerusalem, etc.

The political situation in the West Bank today reflects exactly what the Palestinians bargained for at Oslo.

The Palestinians also agreed at Oslo to renounce violence and terrorism, to stop teaching their children to hate Israelis and Jews, and to pursue their political aims solely through negotiations.

Israel has upheld its part of the Oslo Accords. It handed control to the Palestinian Authority of the major West Bank towns such as Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, and Jericho. It withdrew completely from Gaza in 2005, going beyond the requirements of the Oslo Accords to withdraw only from the Palestinian populated areas of Gaza. The Palestinians, for their part, have repeatedly breached the Oslo Accords, evidenced most recently by President Mahmoud Abbas’s refusal to condemn the Hamas atrocities earlier this month.

Here’s the bottom line: Israel left Gaza completely in 2005. Hamas has ruled the area with an iron fist since 2006. Hamas has fired tens of thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians ever since, using its population as human shields, placing them in harms’ way when Israeli defends itself.

The Hamas atrocities earlier this month demonstrate once and for all that Hamas and its supporters have no interest in pursuing the two-state solution. Instead, they want the Final Solution, to finish what Hitler began with the Holocaust.

We should grieve for the innocent Palestinians of Gaza, who are solely the victims of Hamas’s policy of using them as human shields. We should support the aspirations of the Palestinian people for statehood in the West Bank and Gaza. We should sympathize with the Palestinian people, whose leaders repeatedly have chosen to perpetuate rather than resolve the conflict.

Hopefully, the Palestinians will return someday to the path they negotiated for at Oslo by abandoning terrorism and incitement, and pursuing diplomacy and statecraft instead.

Steven E. Zipperstein is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the UCLA Center for Middle East Development. He is the author of “Zionism, Palestinian Nationalism and the Law: 1939-1948” (Routledge, 2021) and “Law and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Trials of Palestine” (Routledge, 2020). The views expressed are solely the author’s.