Why palestinians should have israel

Tensions between the two peoples grew when the international community gave Britain the task of establishing a "national home" in Palestine for Jewish people. For Jews it was their ancestral home, but Palestinian Arabs also claimed the land and opposed the move.

Between the s and s, the number of Jews arriving there grew, with many fleeing from persecution in Europe and seeking a homeland after the Holocaust of World War Two.

Violence between Jews and Arabs, and against British rule, also grew. In , the UN voted for Palestine to be split into separate Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem becoming an international city. That plan was accepted by Jewish leaders but rejected by the Arab side and never implemented.

In , unable to solve the problem, British rulers left and Jewish leaders declared the creation of the state of Israel. Many Palestinians objected and a war followed.

Troops from neighbouring Arab countries invaded. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced out of their homes in what they call Al Nakba, or the "Catastrophe".

By the time the fighting ended in a ceasefire the following year, Israel controlled most of the territory. Jordan occupied land which became known as the West Bank, and Egypt occupied Gaza. Jerusalem was divided between Israeli forces in the West, and Jordanian forces in the East. Because there was never a peace agreement - with each side blaming the other - there were more wars and fighting in the following decades.

Neither they nor their descendants have been allowed by Israel to return to their homes - Israel says this would overwhelm the country and threaten its existence as a Jewish state. Israel still occupies the West Bank, and although it pulled out of Gaza the UN still regards that piece of land as occupied territory. Israel claims the whole of Jerusalem as its capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.

The US is one of only a handful of countries to recognise the city as Israel's capital. In the past 50 years Israel has built settlements in these areas, where more than , Jews now live. Palestinians say these are illegal under international law and are obstacles to peace, but Israel denies this. Gaza is ruled by the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which has fought Israel many times.

Israel and Egypt tightly control Gaza's borders to stop weapons getting to Hamas. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank say they are suffering because of Israeli actions and restrictions.

Abunimah, Ali. New York: Metropolitan Books. Azoulay, Ariella and Adi Ophir. Avishai, Bernard. Avishai, Bernard and Sam Bahour. Beauchamp, Zack. Greenberg, Joel. Haklai, Oded. Human Rights Watch. International Crisis Group. Kelman, Herbert C. Krieger, Zvika. Lustick, Ian. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Munayyer, Yousef. Olesker, Ronni.

Pressman, Jeremy. Sasley, Brent and Mira Sucharov. Scheindlin, Dahlia. Scheindlin, Dahlia and Dov Waxman. Jeremy Pressman is an associate professor of political science and director of Middle East Studies at the University of Connecticut.

His most recent book is The sword is not enough: Arabs, Israelis, and the limits of military force Manchester University Press, He has also written a short, open-access history of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Twitter djpressman. Before you download your free e-book, please consider donating to support open access publishing. E-IR is an independent non-profit publisher run by an all volunteer team. Your donations allow us to invest in new open access titles and pay our bandwidth bills to ensure we keep our existing titles free to view. Any amount, in any currency, is appreciated. Many thanks! Donations are voluntary and not required to download the e-book - your link to download is below.

A one-state solution A one-state solution means there would be a single country made up of pre Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank Abunimah ; Azoulay and Ophir ; Lustick ; Munayyer ; and Tilley A two-state solution A two-state solution means there would be two states, a State of Israel and a State of Palestine located alongside each other Beauchamp Weighing the options On four criteria for comparing the two options, a two-state solution probably does better on these four metrics, but neither option looks especially promising or easier to achieve.

Clarity of blueprint — The two-state solution has more major, unresolved issues. For the two-state solution, where exactly would the border be drawn? Which Israeli settlements would be withdrawn? What restrictions would be placed on Palestinian military and police forces? For a one-state solution, the main question is whether Jewish privilege would be fully eliminated or transformed into Jewish communal rights. Popular support among Israelis and Palestinians — Polling suggests a two-state solution is more popular than a one-state solution among Palestinians and Israelis, but the levels of support vary significantly among polls PCPSR ; Palestinian-Israeli Pulse In , it is uncertain whether any solution definitively has majority support.

Moreover, respondents in the same survey may have different ideas about what exactly one- and two-state solutions entail. Political feasibility — Neither option seems politically feasible by which I mean it is hard to see how a plan would overcome existing political opponents in the government and public sphere.

A one-state solution has to overcome widespread Israeli Jewish opposition. And since Israel holds the territorial cards, that widespread Israeli Jewish opposition cannot be ignored. The exact form of one state would determine the level of Palestinian opposition. A two-state solution faces opposition from major actors and their supporters in both societies Likud and the Israeli right; Hamas.

Israeli settlers and Palestinians refugees both have reasons that they might strongly oppose two states. International support — A one-state solution has little international support. A two-state solution has extensive international support, but no actor has been willing to use disincentives, e. The United States has been willing to press Palestinian actors in material terms.

References Abu-Sitta, Salman. Sucharov, Mira. Tilley, Virginia. The One State Solution. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. About The Author s. Any one-state solution would also include some version of the right of return, in which Palestinians displaced in and their descendants are permitted to move back to the new binational state.

In a one-state arrangement, Arabs would outnumber Jews by a significant margin. The result would be the end of Zionism, the vision of a specifically Jewish state that exists to protect Jews in a hostile world.

This is more than unacceptable to Israeli Jewish political leaders and citizens: It would, in their minds, amount to total defeat. A poll found that a scant 10 percent of Jewish Israelis supported a one-state solution in which Palestinians and Jewish Israelis are equal citizens. By contrast, 42 percent of Jewish Israelis and 59 percent of Arab Israelis supported two states — with much of the opposition among Jews stemming from a sense that two states were not currently achievable rather than a principled unwillingness to compromise.

The Israeli commitment to Zionism creates an insuperable political problem for a one-state solution. While evacuating settlements will be challenging for Israel, it has the capacity to do so.

Daniel Seidemann, a leading expert on Jerusalem and the geography of the conflict, told me that Israel would have to withdraw and rehome about , settlers to make a two-state solution viable. This is a logistical challenge but hardly an impossibility: Seidemann points out that, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Israel successfully absorbed roughly a million Jews seeking a new home in Israel.

The politics of evacuating Israelis from settlements are much harder than integrating Jewish immigrants from abroad. And yet they are infinitely easier than those of asking Israel to commit what Jewish citizens see as national suicide. If forced to choose between withdrawal and destruction by some kind of pressure campaign, Israel would have both the power and the will to choose the former.

Since the split, there have been repeated negotiations between the two sides and several interim agreements on power-sharing. These agreements, of course, broke down. But part of the problem is that the Palestinians were working with limited international support.

Support for a one-state solution is born of a justified sense that the two-state paradigm is failing to deliver. 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.