I am far from being an expert on the current situation in Palestine. I write from the perspective of an interested observer who knows some of the history of that area and who feels sympathy for people on all sides of the conflict.
Palestine has been fought over by Arabs and Jews for centuries, so it’s impossible to say who has the best historical claim to it. Space here doesn’t permit listing all the various conflicts and peace efforts of that region’s complicated history, but I’ll note a few.
The nation of Israel was established in 1948 after the United Nations voted in 1947 to partition Palestine, which had been administered by Britain since 1922 under a mandate from the League of Nations after the Ottoman Empire collapsed during World War I.
With the Holocaust of World War II fresh in people’s minds in 1947-8—six million Jews had been killed (in addition to five million others, including political dissidents, homosexuals and the intellectually disabled)—the state of Israel was created to provide a safe homeland for all Jewish people.
At the time of partition, other land was designated for an Arab state. The partition plan was rejected by the Arabs, and in ensuing conflicts (including the Arab/Israeli War of 1948-49, the Six-Day War of 1967, and the Yom Kippur War in 1973) Israel acquired more territory, including that in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (www.britannica.com/topic/ two-state-solution).
I agreed with the decision to establish a Jewish state because of the horrors of the Holocaust, as well as the history of antisemitism that had preceded it. I still believe in Israel’s right to exist, but I also believe the Arabs of that region have a right to create and defend a state of their own.
The Two-State Solution envisioned at the time of partition has never come to pass, though negotiations have occurred from time to time to try to find a formula to accomplish it. The closest the parties involved have ever come to achieving that goal was the Oslo Accords of 1993, in which the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) agreed on a plan to implement a Two-State Solution.
But the agreements reached then felt apart amid resistance and violence from both sides, and current prospects don’t look bright. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly said that he’ll never accept a two-state solution.
Instead of working toward that outcome, Netanyahu has encouraged the building of illegal settlements by Israelis on Arab-owned land.
Too, many Israelis apparently haven’t seen the irony— after the treatment Jews received in Nazi Germany and at other places and times—of treating Arabs who live within Israel like second-class citizens, restricting their movements, denying them full voting rights, etc. (Kali Robinson, “What to Know about the Arab Citizens of Israel,” October 26, 2023, cfr.org/background/ what-know-about-arab-citizens- israel).
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that any behavior on the part of Israelis justified the October 7 attack on them by Hamas: the killings, the rapes, the taking of hostages. Hamas is clearly a terrorist organization that does not follow the “accepted rules” of war.
However, I also don’t think that the October 7 attack justifies the repeated bombings of innocent occupants of Gaza by Israel, or the denial of food, water, and fuel to those innocents. Thousands have died, been maimed, or uprooted from their homes more than once, all apparently in the name of revenge.
When and how will the killing and other hateful acts stop?
It’s past time that both sides remember another momentous event that occurred in December of 1948, the same year that Israel became a state: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Just three years after the end of World War II, the United Nations pondered a more peaceful planet that would never again find itself enmeshed in world war. Its leaders drafted and signed the Declaration, setting out for the first time a statement of ‘fundamental human rights to be universally protected,’ a document that “has been translated into over 500 languages” (Rick Halperin and John Vernon, “Embrace the sanity of 1948 U.N. declaration,” The Dallas Morning News,” December 10, 2023).
The Declaration emphasized the “basic civil, political, social, cultural and economic rights to be guaranteed to all people everywhere” and the hope that “governments worldwide would have learned that the wages of war beget only more suffering and death” (Halperin and Vernon).
Humanity has a poor record of learning such lessons. But for the sake of all who just want to live our lives in peace (the great majority of all human beings, I believe), we have to somehow find ways to solve problems without war.