We are all trying to make sense, where sense cannot be made, but still we try, out of the horrific tragedy in the Gaza Strip, an area of 140 square miles now reduced to rubble with more than 40,000 innocent civilians dead.
This week, Israeli Defense Forces killed Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who orchestrated the terrorist barbarism that started it all on 7 October 2023. Tom Friedman, writing in the New York Times, suggests there seems to be a decent chance Sinwar’s death will create an opportunity to end the war in Gaza and create a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians if Middle Eastern and U.S. leaders actively engage in the extraordinary diplomacy required for such an outcome.
Personally, I am highly doubtful.
For nearly a year, we have been repeatedly treated to an American President strongly telling our long-time ally to pull back, slow down, end the bloodshed, only to get a sharp stick in the eye for his trouble from Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is happy to keep taking boatloads of money from U.S. taxpayers, because he knows we’re not about to turn off the spigot. We need Israel as much as it needs us.
I think it is impossible to appreciate this all-out horrendoma if one does not examine the history that got us here — and I’m not talking about recent history.
Jews and Arabs have lived in Palestine more or less collegially for more than 2,000 years. At the time of Jesus, Palestine, then Judea, was part of the Roman Empire, although Rome left governance of the area to its “client kings,” who were Jewish. Herod the Great is a good example. He ruled a stable Judea, as did his sons following him.
Then, in CE66, the Jews revolted and drove the Romans out of Jerusalem. They set up a new government and stabilized the country. In 69, the Roman Emperor Vespasian sent his son Titus, himself to become Emperor following his father, to quell the revolt and destroy Jewish opposition. In the year 70 Titus captured Jerusalem and burned the Temple, and the Jewish state collapsed, although the fortress of Masada was not conquered by the Roman general Flavius Silva until April 73.
Titus returned to Rome, a bona fide hero. His father gave him a victory celebration through the city, where Titus paraded the spoils from his conquest, including captured Jews, now Roman slaves, and the Temple’s Holy Menorah. If you visit the Roman Forum you will see the Arch of Titus, one of the three major surviving arches. The interior of this arch shows the humiliation of the Jews. The Jewish defeat of 70 begins the Jewish diaspora that lasted until 1948 and the creation of the state of Israel.
In 1516, the Ottoman Turkish Empire invaded, captured, and occupied Palestine for the next 402 years. This was a time the Middle East, and Palestine, was relatively stable, and it lasted until the end of the first World War.
Arabs who had helped win the war (remember Lawrence of Arabia?), had been promised the land by double-talking British generals. However, in May 1916, Great Britain, France, and Russia reached a secret agreement (the Sykes-Picot Agreement), under which after the war the victors would divide the former Ottoman territories between British and French control, effectively creating mandates over regions like modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine.
In April 1920, at a peace conference held in San Remo, Italy, the Allies followed through and divided the former territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire. The San Remo conference awarded the British government a mandate to control Palestine. The League of Nations formally approved the mandate in 1922.
A crucial piece of the British Mandate was its incorporation of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which provided for both the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine and the preservation of the civil and religious (but not the political or national) rights of the indigenous Arab Palestinian communities. In part, the Balfour Declaration states, “… it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
From that point on, Jewish immigrants, about 18,000 of them, and Palestinian Arabs were at each others’ throats, with the British in the middle.
By 1937, the British concluded nothing was working and formed the Peel Commission to find a way out. The Commission recommended what everyone is agonizing over today: that Palestine be partitioned into three zones: an Arab state, a Jewish state, and a neutral territory containing the holy places. Unfortunately, the British government rejected this proposal.
And so the fighting continued. The University of Central Arkansas has compiled a chronology of the hundreds of attacks by both sides, which shows how turbulent and vicious the battle was for the land that is now Israel.
Unable to stand it anymore, the British left in 1948, and Israel became an independent state, whereupon, under the agreement that created Israel, Egypt took control of Gaza and Jordan got the West Bank. However, Palestinians in what was the new State of Israel revolted, and a civil war, the first of many such battles, ensued. Palestinians, 750,00 of them, made the long march to Gaza under the protection of Egypt. And there they stayed. But they never forgot.
In the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza, and it has held them ever since.
If you study the history carefully, you will not be the least surprised at the ferocity of the current war. It is an extension of the long, dark night that is Judea, Palestine, and now Israel.
The only way out of this calamity is for Palestinians and Israelis to stop fighting and negotiate a two-state agreement, along the lines that was recommended 86 years ago by the Peel Commission. Both sides have to give, but we seem to have reached the point where the immovable object has encountered the irresistible force.
A two-state solution would likely cede all of the West Bank, as well as Gaza, to the Palestinians. But there are 144 Israeli settlements in the West Bank, 12 of them is East Jerusalem. They are strategically placed with roadblocks and checkpoints that deny Palestinians easy access to anywhere in the territory. Visiting neighbors can be problematic. The settler population has grown to more than 600,000 people among 3 million Arabs. Here is a map of Israeli settlements in the West Bank:
Clearly, when one looks at the map above, which was prepared in the spring of 2015 for President Obama by Frank Lowenstein, a senior State Department official, one has a hard time imagining how a two-state solution could ever happen. Since 2015, the settler population has nearly doubled, according to Israel’s Ministry of the Interior. And more are on the way.
“We’ve reached a huge hallmark,” said Baruch Gordon, the director of a settler organization and a resident of the Beit El settlement. “We’re here to stay.”
In Gaza, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu says he will not stop until total victory. This, by the way, is the same Netanyahu who has done all in his power over the last 15 years, both publicly and privately, to ensure there will never be an independent state of Palestine. This is the same Netanyahu who is currently wading through three separate trials for corruption in which he’s charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust; continuing this war has delayed the trials, as he does his best to assume Churchillian importance. This is the same Netanyahu who cut a deal with Qatar to send hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas to use in its governance of the Strip, thereby weakening the Palestinian Authority, which, as part of the 2003 Oslo Accords, had renounced terrorism and recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace. Much of the money that reached Hamas went to its military wing, enabled the building of hundreds of miles of tunnels by which to move armaments and soldiers, and led to the horror of October 7th.
If you think this can ever end well, I want some of whatever it is you’re smoking.