"The idea that Israel is going to be able to sustain itself for the long-term without accommodating the Palestinian question... It’s not going to happen.” This was one of the last messages outgoing president Joe Biden offered on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
President Biden’s assumption that Israel’s sustainability is dependent on Palestinians is an antiquated idea that is inconsistent with both reality and Zionist values. Israel’s success isn’t dependent on any people other than the Jewish people.
When the early Zionists set their sights on returning the Jewish people to their historic homeland, they were aware of the small population of Arabs living on the neglected and desolate Palestinian region of the Ottoman Empire. The Zionists didn’t focus on the Arab population, but rather on bringing Jews to the land and improving the land’s infrastructure.
When addressing the topic of Arabs in Israel, founding prime minister David Ben-Gurion said, “In our state there will be non-Jews as well – and all of them will be equal citizens; equal in everything without any exception – that is: the state will be their state as well.... The attitude of the Jewish State to its Arab citizens will be an important factor – though not the only one – in building good neighborly relations with the Arab States.”
In the years that followed the establishment of the Jewish state, Israel was faced with Arab enemies, both foreign and domestic. Arab countries that surrounded Israel such as Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq attacked it in wars in 1948, 1967, and 1973. In between the wars, these countries sponsored a steady stream of cross-border Fedayeen attacks on Israeli towns, buses, and even schools.
Israeli-Palestinian relations
In 1964, the Palestinian Liberation Organization was formed. Although it called itself a resistance group whose goal was to free Palestine from Israeli occupation, the PLO was a terrorist organization who aimed to kill Jews all over the world. Arab attacks against Jews began in the 1920 “Nebi Musa” riots in and around the Old City of Jerusalem, in which several Jews were killed and several hundred injured. Palestinian terrorism has targeted tens of thousands of Israelis and killed thousands of people.
WITH ALL the wars, Arab cross border attacks, and Palestinian terrorism, Israel and its Zionists stayed loyal to its values of reaching out to its Arab neighbors. When the British Peel Commission came out with its recommendation to partition Palestine between the Jews and Arabs in 1937, the Jews compromised and agreed to give up over half of their historic homeland. In 1947, when the United Nations made the same offer, the Jews again agreed to compromise for the sake of peace. Israel had already been forced to swallow the bitter pill of the British White Paper limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine as an accommodation to Arabs there.
After Israel defeated its Arab enemies in the 1948 War of Independence, it reached out in peace to its Arab neighbors. After its victory in the 1967 Six Day War, Israel again reached out in peace. In the Madrid Summit, Oslo Accords, Camp David Summit, Wye River Accords, its agreement to a two-state solution, and on and on, the Jewish state has made accommodations to Palestinian demands in the hopes of peace. Every single one of these offers were either immediately or eventually rejected by the Palestinians. No amount of compromise by Israel was ever good enough for them.
In 2020, the Abraham Accords brought normalization and peace between Israel and four Arab countries. The first country to agree to normalization was the United Arab Emirates. In June of 2020, UAE Ambassador to America Yousef Al Otaiba penned this op-ed in the Israeli paper Yediot Aharonot where he demanded Israel compromise for the Palestinians to make peace with the United Arab Emirates. “Annexation will certainly and immediately upend Israeli aspirations for improved security, economic and cultural ties with the Arab world and with UAE,” he wrote.
BEFORE ENDING his time in government, former secretary of state Antony Blinken wrote, “Israelis must decide what relationship they want with Palestinians. That cannot be the illusion that Palestinians will accept being a non-people without national rights.” Blinken’s message was inconsistent with early Zionist values of the Jewish people settling their historic homeland. The Jewish people’s settling the land is done by the Jewish people.
Many criticize the notion that Israel should carry on without a “Palestinian Doctrine” that would set out Israeli policies towards Palestinians. They look at the last 100 years of Israel’s dealing with the Palestinians as a laissez faire policy. They demand Israel take a position on Palestinians as soon as possible. They complain that today’s non-policy keeps Palestinians and Israelis in legal limbo – Israel hasn’t annexed Judea and Samaria, nor have they created a Palestinian State.
Palestinians aren’t given Israeli citizenship but they aren’t allowed their own state. Israelis living in Judea and Samaria are given Israeli citizenship, but they are governed by different laws than Israelis living in mainland Israel.
Israelis don’t have to accommodate or make decisions about their relationship with the Palestinians. Israelis have a century-long history of reaching out to the Palestinians, making compromises for them, and accommodating their extremist demands. In response, Palestinians have nurtured a culture of violence and chosen to commit acts of terror against Israelis.
Instead of Israelis being forced to decide about their relationship with Palestinians it is time the world pushed Palestinians to modify the way they think about their relationship with Israel.
The writer is a Zionist educator at institutions around the world. He recently published his book, Zionism Today.