Vastly outnumbering the Jews, Palestinian Arabs during the period after the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate always refused anything that would compromise their dominance˳ It’s unfair to berate the Palestinians retrospectively for not accepting partition in 1947˳ Until 1948, Jews held only about 7 percent of the land˳ Why, the Arabs said when the partition resolution was proposed, should we concede 55 percent of Palestine to the Jews, who were a minority in Palestine? Neither the Balfour Declaration nor the mandate ever specifically conceded that Palestinians had political, as opposed to civil and religious, rights in Palestine˳ The idea of inequality between Jews and Arabs was therefore built into British, and subsequently Israeli and United States, policy from the start˳
The conflict appears intractable because it is a contest over the same land by two peoples who always believed they had valid title to it and who hoped that the other side would in time give up or go away˳ One side won the war, the other lost, but the contest is as alive as ever˳ We Palestinians ask why a Jew born in Warsaw or New York has the right to settle here (according to Israel’s Law of Return), whereas we, the people who lived here for centuries, cannot˳ After 1967, the conflict between us was exacerbated˳ Years of military occupation have created in the weaker party anger, humiliation and hostility˳
To its discredit, Oslo did little to change the situation˳ Arafat and his dwindling number of supporters were turned into enforcers of Israeli security, while Palestinians were made to endure the humiliation of dreadful and noncontiguous ”homelands” that make up about 10 percent of the West Bank and 60 percent of Gaza˳ Oslo required us to forget and renounce our history of loss, dispossessed by the very people who taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past˳ Thus we are the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees˳
Israel’s raison d’etre as a state has always been that there should be a separate country, a refuge, exclusively for Jews˳ Oslo itself was based on the principle of separation between Jews and others, as Yitzhak Rabin tirelessly repeated˳ Yet over the past 50 years, especially since Israeli settlements were first implanted on the occupied territories in 1967, the lives of Jews have become more and more enmeshed with those of non-Jews˳
The effort to separate has occurred simultaneously and paradoxically with the effort to take more and more land, which has in turn meant that Israel has acquired more and more Palestinians˳ In Israel proper, Palestinians number about one million, almost 20 percent of the population˳ Among Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which is where settlements are the thickest, there are almost 2˳5 million Palestinians˳ Israel has built an entire system of ”bypassing” roads, designed to go around Palestinian towns and villages, connecting settlements and avoiding Arabs˳ But so tiny is the land area of historical Palestine, so closely intertwined are Israelis and Palestinians, despite their inequality and antipathy, that clean separation simply won’t, can’t really, occur or work˳ It is estimated that by 2010 there will be demographic parity˳ What then?
