Palestinians are prisoners of geography, but statehood is possible

Times

2 days ago

A rose may be a rose by any other name, but a territory is different. What's in a place name? Geography, history, identity and … politics. That is why most of what follows is disputed by one side or another, and why the Israel-Palestine conflict remains so intractable.
In recent days, France, Canada and the UK announced plans to recognise Palestine as a state at the United Nations general assembly in September. Already 147 countries out of 193 at the UN recognise Palestinian statehood.
However, that has not made the 'two-state solution' envisaged 32 years ago in the Oslo Accords any likelier. Last month, Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, said it was no longer a goal of American policy.
But on Saturday Hamas said it would not disarm until Palestinian national rights had been restored, 'foremost among them the establishment of an independent, fully sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital'.
The statement left open if Hamas means all of Jerusalem but that is unlikely. In 2017 the group updated its 1988 charter and while it rejected 'any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea' it also said it considers a Palestinian state 'with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967 … to be a formula of national consensus'. This leaves the door open for Hamas accepting (possibly temporarily) Jerusalem being divided between its east and western parts, as it was before the Six Day War broke out on June 5, 1967.
Perhaps emboldened by the global headlines that followed the French, British and Canadian announcements, Hamas appears to be trying to make itself part of future debate about statehood, including during the intense discussions which will come ahead of and during the UN General Assembly in New York. However, yesterday's statement brings us no closer to a ceasefire as it would take months if not years to negotiate the contours of statehood.
The near future, like the past, brings areas of disagreement. They are always easier to spot than any common ground.
Palestine is an ancient name, but its geographic area and political status have changed frequently over three millennia. The word derives from Philistia, the term the ancient Greeks used for a pocket of coastal land stretching along what is now Gaza. It was home to the Philistine people who had arrived from the Aegean in the 12th century BCE. The Israelites, who by then had conquered most of ancient Canaan, called them P'lishtim.
The Philistines clashed with the Israelites, usually ending up on the losing side (see David and Goliath). They were eventually overrun by the Babylonians and by the 5th century BCE no longer existed as a people.
Later, the Greeks referred to the entire land of Israel as Philistia, as did the subsequent Roman invaders who expelled most of the inhabitants of what they called Palaestina. Over the centuries this evolved into Palestine, or in Arabic, Falestina. History marched on, bringing with it the Islamic conquests, followed by the Ottoman Empire — both of which treated the land as part of a larger unit.
Before the First World War, the terms Western Palestine and Eastern Palestine were used to refer to lands each side of the River Jordan, but contemporary understanding of existing political Palestine generally defines it as running from the River Jordan to the border with Israel — the West Bank — and the Gaza Strip.
The Ottoman defeat in the First World War resulted in the Allies creating new political units. The British had issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, promising to help create a Jewish homeland on the understanding that 'nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine'.
The result was the Mandate for Palestine. Originally it was to include Transjordan (Jordan) but the League of Nations approved two separate mandates. Over 25 years there was an influx of Jews, many of whom bought land. The communities clashed and in 1947 the British handed the problem to the UN. It proposed two independent states, with Jerusalem internationalised.
The Jews said yes, the Arab countries said no. The following year the State of Israel was declared, followed immediately by the first Arab-Israeli war, resulting in hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs fleeing, never to return. Jerusalem was divided, Egypt occupied Gaza, and Jordan annexed the West Bank. In the 1967 war, Israel captured East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank, and began settling Jews in all of them. Since then, we have seen wars, uprisings, the building of the 'separation barrier', a withdrawal of settlers from Gaza but a huge increase in their numbers in the West Bank, and now the Gaza war.
That is a rough and probably disputed tale of the Palestinian territories, but what of the people? Here we enter the emotional and mutually exclusive claims of historic tenancy and sovereign rights.
Arab Palestinians point out they were the overwhelming majority of inhabitants for more than a thousand years. In 1917, they comprised about nine-tenths of the population. Many trace ancestry to the arrival of Arabs during the 7th century Islamic conquests. Others are from Syrian and Egyptian families who came seeking work in the early 20th century. A distinct Palestinian Arab identity had already begun to emerge in the 19th century, and there is now a strong sense of nationhood.
Israeli Jews argue that there has been a continual Jewish presence in the lands for 3,000 years, and that this is the birthplace of their national identity. They contest the notion that they are alien to the region and point out that about 50 per cent of Israel's Jewish population are descendants of the 600,000 Middle Eastern Jews who were among the million or so who migrated, or were expelled from, Arab countries after 1948.
The population of Israel now stands at 9.5 million, of which about two million are Arabs. The West Bank Palestinian population is 3.19 million and there are 2.1 million people in Gaza. However, the UN regards another 5.9 million people living outside the territory as Palestinian refugees.
This brings us to contemporary politics.
In 2011, President Abbas applied for Palestine to join the UN, and the following year it was granted non-member observer state status (which Switzerland also held until its people voted to join in 2002). The security council must agree to a country becoming a member before the application is sent to the UN general assembly; it can be vetoed by any of the permanent five members of the council (China, France, Russia, the UK and the United States). While the US remains primed to do just that, the Palestinian application is unlikely to proceed, despite the recent announcements by France, the UK and Canada.
The three western powers have at least helped to resuscitate discussion around a two-state solution. There is urgency here: continued Israeli settlement of the West Bank means the window of possibility is closing. At some point the geography for two states will not work.
That is why the more significant declaration this week was by the 22-member Arab League.
EDUARDO MUNOZ/REUTERS
For the first time it backed a declaration at the UN in New York that condemned Hamas for the massacres on October 7, 2023, as well as subsequent Israeli actions. It called on Hamas to hand its weapons to the Palestinian Authority and stand down, and, in another first, hinted at the normalisation of diplomatic relations with Israel.
The text calls for 'tangible steps in promoting mutual recognition, peaceful coexistence, and co-operation among all states in the region'. This is significant because it is possible that the key to unlocking recognition of Palestine is full Arab recognition of Israel.
However, pre-existing problems, and a new one, put a roadblock in front of this potential progress.
• Why Israel can't brush off France's recognition of a Palestinian state
The new barrier was the US State Department's announcement of sanctions against the Palestinian Authority for 'continuing to support terrorism, including incitement and glorification of violence (especially in textbooks) and providing payments and benefits in support of terrorism to Palestinian terrorists and their families'.
Washington knows the Palestinian Authority pays the families of suicide bombers stipends, an accusation it has levelled for years — so why issue sanctions, including visa bans, now? It is clearly to undermine the new international push for a two-state solution, including the Arab-led plan for Gaza's reconstruction, with policing undertaken by Egyptian-trained Palestinian Authority police.
Less clear is if this indicates that President Trump will never allow a Palestinian state, or that he will, but wants to ensure only he can bring it about (and thus win a Nobel peace prize). Within two days, Trump went from 'having no view' on world leaders saying they would recognise Palestine to castigating Canada's prime minister, Mark Carney, for doing the same thing. A post on his Truth Social platform said: 'That will make it very hard for us to make a trade deal with them. Oh Canada!!!'
Some of the pre-existing problems were contained in the New York declaration.
It reiterated that the 5.9 million Palestinian refugees have the 'right of return' to the places in Israel they left in 1948. The UN categorises as refugees the descendants of Palestinians who fled. Israel asks why only Palestinians have this UN status and says there is no way it would ever allow almost six million Palestinians to enter its borders.
We are back where we began — definitions. The most used criteria for statehood are in the 1933 Montevideo convention: a permanent population, a defined territory, an effective government, the capacity for external relations.
Opposing sides argue about whether Palestinian refugees should be included in the definition of a permanent population, and what are the defined borders. Some will say the Palestinian Authority can be an effective government and others that it is a corrupt fossil with little authority over the West Bank, never mind Gaza, which was/is run by Hamas.
Perhaps, though, these are technicalities that can be overcome by compromise. Ah yes — compromise.
For almost 80 years, since the United Nations became involved, the failure to compromise on rights, territorial inheritance, geography and competing historical narratives has often led to 'provisional' agreements on the intertwined futures of Israel and the Palestinian territories. But as the adage goes, sometimes nothing is so permanent as the provisional.