The Annapolis Conference: A Chance to Right an Historical Wrong?

The Annapolis Conference is scheduled for Tuesday November 27, two days before the 60th anniversary marking the passage of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine. If historians were mystics, this cosmic coincidence would set hearts a-fluttering and computer screens flickering. The Southern novelist Thomas Wolfe, steeped in his own region’s tragic history, immortalized the phrase “You can’t go home again.” Historians agree, being in the business of tracking national tragedies and triumphs. But while mistakes are irrevocable, life is not unchangeable. Sixty years later, Palestinians can reject the most destructive mistake their grandparents and leaders ever made, and accept a Jewish State in parts of historic Palestine.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations endorsed a complicated compromise that challenged both Jews and Arabs – at the time, with the British ruling, the term “Palestinians” referred to both peoples. The Jews were thrilled to get a state but the plan divided the contested land between Palestine’s Jews and Arabs, based roughly on their settlement patterns. The proposed Jewish state’s map looked like Swiss cheese, scattered with difficult to defend settlements. The Jewish people’s national and spiritual center, Jerusalem, was cut out of this state and slated to be internationalized. Heartbroken, the Palestinian Jews’ leader David Ben Gurion nevertheless accepted “half a loaf,” reflecting mainstream Zionism’s pragmatic, solution-oriented character.

Unfortunately, most Arabs rejected the UN plan. The Arab League Secretary, Azzam Pasha, told Jewish mediators on Sept 16, 1947: “The Arab world is not in a compromising mood.” Pasha acknowledged the plan’s logic, but said, “Nations never concede; they fight. You won’t get anything by peaceful means or compromise. You can, perhaps, get something, but only by force of your arms. We shall try to defeat you. I am not sure we’ll succeed, but we’ll try.” More brutally, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem called for Jihad, Holy War.

Heeding the Mufti, local Arabs launched a devastating campaign of truck bombs and ambushes, of shootings and stabbings. In the five months before the British left and the neighboring Arab armies invaded the new Jewish state in May 1948, local Arabs killed 1,256 Jewish men, women and children. Absurdly, these stark facts do not prevent anti-Zionist critics today from falsely blaming the Jews for rejecting the compromise.

Still, despite the slaughter, and despite the subsequent Arab invasion when Israel formally became a state in May, 1948, the Jewish state survived. The 1948 war resulted in a divided Jerusalem but somewhat more defensible boundaries. Now called Israelis, the Jews built a modern, Western-style democracy in their traditional homeland.

The outcome for the Palestinians was sadder. Instead of the “Independent Arab State” U.N. Resolution 181 endorsed, Palestine’s Arabs ended dependent on either their fellow Arabs or the Jews. The land the Arab armies captured was controlled by Jordan or Egypt, with no UN authorization. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs had left or fled their homes, hoping to return in victory. Hundreds of thousands stayed in Israel creating an Israeli Arab community that currently constitutes 20 percent of Israel’s population. Those who left their homes were kept in a perpetual state of statelessness – partially because of Arab political calculations to pressure Israel.

In an extraordinary Washington Post interview on September 30, 2007, the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas acknowledged what Israel’s supporters have long recognized. Abbas said of the 1947 partition plan, “we rejected this, so we lost.” The interviewer asked “You should have taken it?” He replied: “Yes, at that time, of course.”

This is the essential historical background to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s reasonable request that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Since David Ben-Gurion led the Jews toward compromise in 1947, Israel, though not perfect, has compromised repeatedly. Most notably, in 1979 Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula it captured legitimately from Egypt in 1967, in return for Egypt’s promise of recognition and peace. Fourteen years later, Israel tried to repeat that miracle with the Oslo Peace Process, offering Palestinians land in return for recognition and peace. Unfortunately, Oslo spawned Yasir Arafat’s terrorist kleptocracy next door to Israel’s democracy. The result: the deaths of over a thousand Israelis and thousands more Palestinians, when Arafat immorally led his people away from negotiations and back toward terror in September 2000, after rejecting another Israeli compromise at the Camp David meeting Bill Clinton hosted.

Palestinians have not only been ill-served by their rejectionist leaders, they have suffered from the extremism of their anti-Zionist friends as well. Israel would not need to demand recognition as a Jewish state – and it would not be so hard for Palestinians to concede this point – if the anti-Israel rhetoric was not so harsh, if Palestinian ideology respected Jewish claims, if Palestinian terror had not killed so many Israeli civilians, and if Israeli concessions to Palestinians had yielded peace not war. The clash between Jews and Palestinians is a clash of two nationalisms. Caricaturing Zionism as colonialism or racism denies Jews’ right to a homeland and denies the reality of Jewish nationalism. The Jews are a people tied to a particular land, connected to a particular language, united by a certain culture, but also embracing a particular religion – which, in fairness is a multi-dimensional identity that confuses many Jews and non-Jews.

Now, in Annapolis, the Palestinian people have an historic opportunity to right the historical wrong, to correct their sixty-year-old error. As always, the future of Middle East peace depends mostly on Arab readiness to stop fighting. Israelis also have responsibilities to reassure Palestinian moderates that true acceptance of the Israeli reality will be respected and rewarded. Six decades of war is long enough. Let us hope that the time has come for a millennial stretch of peace.