Toward Peace in the Holy Land

Walid Khalidi

From Foreign Affairs, Spring 1988

Summary:  Palestinian critique of US and Israeli policy concludes that "a Palestinian state in the occupied territories within the 1967 frontiers in peaceful coexistence alongside Israel is the only 'conceptual' candidate for a historical compromise". For French version see 'Vers la paix en Terre Sainte' Politique Etrangère 53/2 Summer 1988 pp349-364, 1 ref.

Walid Khalidi was born in Jerusalem in 1925. Since 1982 he has been a Research Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His latest publication is Before Their Diaspora (1985).

The uprising that began in December 1987 in the territories Israel has occupied for over twenty years ranks as the fourth major attempt by the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine to stem the Zionist colonization of the country. First was the rebellion of 1936-39 against Britain?s policy, exercised under its League of Nations mandate, for a Jewish National Home; then came the resistance to the 1947 U.N. General Assembly resolution to partition Palestine, which developed into a civil war before the regular war that broke out when the British left on May 15, 1948. Third, from 1964-65 onward, came the rise among the Palestinian diaspora of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and guerrilla movements against the status quo.

Today, in contrast to the three earlier instances, the Palestinians on the West Bank of the Jordan River and in the Gaza Strip are face-to-face with their perceived dispossessors, with no third party or geographic distance intervening. While the Israelis wield all state powers, the chief weapons of the Palestinians are the stones of the countryside. If the areas of Israel proper and those in the occupied territories already colonized, requisitioned or annexed are subtracted from the total area of Mandatory Palestine, the Palestinians in the occupied territories today stand on no more than 15 percent of the soil of the country.

In a statement read out at a Jerusalem hotel on January 14, 1988, which might be called the Jerusalem Program, leading representatives of the uprising outlined their aspirations and demands for lifting the oppression of the occupation and achieving "real peace" between Israel and the Palestinian people.

A certain Masada-like poignancy attaches to this latest manifestation of the Palestinian collective will, and with it a legitimate claim to the attention and concern of the outside world.

II

The Palestinian national identity had already begun to take shape at the beginning of World War I. It crystallized during the British Mandate (1918-48) in the resistance to Zionism. The notion that the Palestinians were a people, and merited a national state of their own, was evident to those members of the United Nations, including the United States, that voted in 1947 for the partition of Palestine. Since the beginning of the Palestinian diaspora in 1948 the sense of Palestinian nationality has been vastly strengthened; the rise of the PLO only gave expression to an existing reality.

For four decades since the establishment of Israel, the Palestinians have been pushed and pulled together by a multitude of shared experiences which have created a sense of national community rare in the Middle East and the Third World: it has transcended geographic dispersion, village, clan and sectarian loyalties, as well as the pressures of Arab host governments and Israeli occupiers. Endowed with skills surpassing those of most Arab peoples, the Palestinians long ago crossed the threshold of nationhood, and, like so many other peoples in history, are irreconcilable to living in a limbo of permanent statelessness. It is this, rather than any brilliance in the leadership of Yasir Arafat, which has frustrated all attempts to foist an illegitimate leadership upon the Palestinians or fob them off with substitutes for a sovereign place under the sun. It is this which constitutes the umbilical cord between the Palestinians of the occupied territories and the diaspora.

The Palestinians have more than tripled in number, from 1,300,000 in 1948 to 4,500,000 today, and their rate of increase is not declining. In the Gaza Strip alone they number some 600,000 and are destined there to reach 900,000 by the end of the century. All the psychological and physical pressures bearing down on them the last twenty years to leave the occupied territories have failed. The Palestinians under occupation have drawn the obvious lesson from the fate of their countrymen who left in 1948 and 1967. Even for those who want to leave, the absorptive capacity for Palestinians in the Arab countries has been strained to the limit: Lebanon and Syria no longer qualify as havens for Palestinians; Jordan?s King Hussein is already obsessed with the nightmare of a massive Palestinian influx into his country. Egypt hardly has standing room for its own people, and opportunities in the countries of the Persian Gulf have been circumscribed.

Some Israeli leaders contemplate a policy of thinning out or expelling the Palestinians. But to where? Northward into the Shi?ite heartland of Lebanon or across the Golan Heights toward Damascus? Southward into Sinai? Eastward across the Jordan River? Even hard-liners in Israel might balk at the first two suggestions, and the third is also problematic. It was one thing to drive out a civilian population amid the confusion of large-scale military operations, as happened in 1948; it would be another to do so in an environment where no fighting by regular armies was taking place. It was one thing to drive refugees across the river from their camps in the Jordan Valley in the wake of the retreating Jordanian army, as happened in 1967; it would be another to uproot the inhabitants of the towns and villages of the highlands. Even before the recent events in the occupied territories, Palestinian conduct in Lebanon in the face of siege and bombardment showed that Palestinian civilians do not panic as readily as they did in 1948.

The extraordinary courage displayed in the occupied territories since December, especially by Palestinian youth, is but one indicator of the resistance an Israeli policy of mass expulsion would face. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the bulk of the Palestinians in the occupied territories will remain in situ, and that they will increase in number, even as the acreage at their disposal continues to dwindle with Israeli foreclosures and their political frustrations mount in the absence of a general settlement. Given the resonance between the Palestinians inside and outside the occupied territories, continued denial of Palestinian nationhood is unlikely to lead to the diminution of its intensity or the moderation of its expression. It would therefore seem that, just as Israel is a reality which the Palestinians and the PLO must accept, Palestinian nationhood is a reality which Israel must accept. As Israel is here to stay, the Palestinians are here to stay, too.