Why palestine is not a state

The word Palestine derives from the Greek word, Philistia , which dates to Ancient Greek writers' descriptions of the region in the 12th century B. Arab people who call this territory home have been known as Palestinians since the early 20th century. Much of this land is now considered present-day Israel. Today, Palestine theoretically includes the West Bank a territory that sits between modern-day Israel and Jordan and the Gaza Strip which borders modern-day Israel and Egypt.

However, control over this region is a complex and evolving situation. There is no international consensus concerning the borders, and many areas claimed by Palestinians have been occupied by Israelis for years. From about to , the Ottoman Empire ruled much of the region. The League of Nations issued a British mandate for Palestine—a document that gave Britain administrative control over the region, and included provisions for establishing a Jewish national homeland in Palestine—which went into effect in In , after more than two decades of British rule, the United Nations proposed a plan to partition Palestine into two sections: an independent Jewish state and an independent Arab state.

The city of Jerusalem , which was claimed as a capital by both Jews and Palestinian Arabs, was to be an international territory with a special status. Jewish leaders accepted the plan, but many Palestinian Arabs—some of whom had been actively fighting British and Jewish interests in the region since the s—vehemently opposed it.

Arab groups argued that they represented the majority of the population in certain regions and should be granted more territory. They began to form volunteer armies throughout Palestine. In May , less than a year after the Partition Plan for Palestine was introduced, Britain withdrew from Palestine and Israel declared itself an independent state, implying a willingness to implement the Partition Plan. Almost immediately, neighboring Arab armies moved in to prevent the establishment of the Israeli state.

By the war's end in July , Israel controlled more than two-thirds of the former British Mandate, while Jordan took control of the West Bank and Egypt took control of the Gaza Strip.

The conflict opened a new chapter in the struggle between Jews and Palestinian Arabs, which now became a regional contest involving nation-states and a tangle of diplomatic, political and economic interests. The Six-Day War was triggered during a volatile period of diplomatic friction and skirmishes between Israel and its neighbors. In April , the clashes worsened after Israel and Syria fought a ferocious air and artillery engagement in which six Syrian fighter jets were destroyed.

In the wake of the April air battle, the Soviet Union provided Egypt with intelligence that Israel was moving troops to its northern border with Syria in preparation for a full-scale invasion. The information was inaccurate, but it nevertheless stirred Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to advance forces into the Sinai Peninsula, where they expelled a United Nations peacekeeping force that had been guarding the border with Israel for over a decade. Israel Defense Forces then launched a preemptive aerial attack against Egypt on June 5, Both nations claimed that they were acting in self-defense in the ensuing conflict, which ended on June 10 and also drew in Jordan and Syria, who sided with Egypt.

The Six-Day War , as it came to be called, resulted in major land gains for Israel. The outcome of the Arab-Israeli War would lead to continued tension and armed conflict between Israel and its neighbors over the coming decades.

In , the First Intifada broke broke out, a boiling over of Palestinian anger over ongoing Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinian militia groups revolted, and hundreds of people were killed. A subsequent peace process, known as the Oslo Peace Accords, was initiated during the early s in a multilateral attempt to end the ongoing violence.

Arafat returned to Gaza in after being exiled for 27 years. He headed up the newly-formed Palestinian Authority. In , Oslo II laid the groundwork for a complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from parts of the West Bank and other areas. It also set a schedule for Palestinian Legislative Council elections. Add to cart. I Population and Territory The first condition under MC is for an entity to possess a permanent population. III Capacity to enter into relations with other states and Recognition of a state The Capacity to enter into relations with other states, takes on a new meaning post , with the establishment of the UN and other International Organizations.

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But the argument that it is somehow more realistic than two states only works if one ignores the basic realities on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides of the conflict. One-state advocates are not unaware of these barriers.

They believe they can be overcome by the moral force of the one-state democratic vision: an ideal that could galvanize a political movement akin to the South African anti-apartheid struggle, changing the way that people on both sides of the conflict think about themselves and their historic enemies. And that makes two states not only more feasible than one, but also in certain respects more desirable.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not just a fight for individual rights, though it is that. To overcome that, leaders and ordinary citizens on both sides would need to fundamentally change their national aspirations: Jews would need to reject Zionism and Palestinians reject Palestinian nationalism.

That would involve not just changing political institutions, but changing the sorts of identities people have and care about. That is not impossible, but it is exceptionally difficult to imagine in this case. Far more likely is a situation in which one national vision dominates the other, either by force of arms or force of numbers.

In either case, one side will feel unrepresented by a one-state reality — which is a recipe for disaster. This analysis depends, crucially, on exclusive national identities on both sides running quite deep. For instance, during the recent war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, communal violence between Jews and Arabs erupted on the streets of demographically mixed cities within Israel.

This fighting reflected the deepening mistrust between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel , fed by anti-Arab sentiment among Jews and a justified sense among Arabs that the Jewish majority does not consider them full and equal citizens.

And yet, Arab Israelis, also known as Palestinian citizens of Israel, had been part of the Jewish state for decades — and, in recent years, had made significant strides toward integration in Israeli social and cultural life.

The first step, these experts say, should be to abandon the US-led peace process as traditionally conceived. The goal of a deoccupation strategy is to halt and eventually reverse the processes that are pushing the two sides further away from two states, with the ultimate aim of returning to final status negotiations when conditions have changed. It involves three key aspects: 1 raising the costs of the status quo for Israel; 2 changing the political equation on both sides; and 3 rethinking what an acceptable two-state solution might look like.

It also means using US leverage over Israel to push it back on a better path. This kind of approach used to be unthinkable in Washington, given staunch pro-Israel sentiment on both sides.

But a dramatic shift in attitudes on the Democratic side — both in public opinion and on Capitol Hill — has created an opportunity for the US to use its leverage over Israel in pursuit of peace. It has the support of both prominent legislators like Rep. This means both supporting the pro-peace camp in Israel and, more controversially, working to reconcile Hamas and Fatah to create a unified Palestinian leadership that could make authoritative promises. Mechanisms for achieving that include increasing funding to pro-peace civil society groups, negotiating with Hamas through third parties like Egypt, and investing significant resources in repairing broken Palestinian political institutions.

This will mean the US having to abandon its longstanding skepticism about including Hamas, which it considers a terrorist group, in a Palestinian government — working not only to making such an outcome happen, but to create a world in which Israel could accept and even negotiate with its longtime enemy.

Finally, the US and other international actors need to think more flexibly about the conditions that make two states so difficult — and what a solution to them might look like. For example, a final agreement could allow some West Bank settlers to stay if they agree to Palestinian rule — an option once proposed by the late Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said as the only viable alternative to his preferred one-state solution.

Another option would be a confederal solution , a kind of 1. Israeli citizens could live in the West Bank, and many Palestinian refugees could return to their homes inside the Green Line — but they would vote in Israeli and Palestinian elections, respectively. This sort of modified two-state solution is hardly easy.

Much like the one-state solution, there are no meaningful factions on the ground lobbying for it. And leaving a large number of settlers in the West Bank has the potential to reignite violence even after an agreement. But the purpose of proposing ideas like confederation is not to present a silver bullet replacement for two states. There is no guarantee that this three-pronged approach will succeed.

But if implemented, it would represent a radical shift away from the current American approach — abandoning the conceit that the US-Israel alliance alone would give Israel the confidence it needed to sacrifice land for peace.

Thinking of the available options as a binary between the traditional approach and a one-state solution is a mistake. There are other, more realistic possibilities — ones that do not involve wishing away the fundamental facts of Israeli military dominance, strong Jewish attachment to Zionism, and the Palestinian quest for independent statehood.

No one should be too hopeful about the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.

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