The Foreign Service Journal, May 2003

I n “Palestine: The Problem and the Prospect” (October 2002 FSJ ), Terrell E. Arnold calls for the United States to lead the process toward peace between Israel and the Palestinians. His objective is com- mendable, but because his approach distorts the roots and nature of the conflict, it will not contribute to achieving the peace we seek. Mr. Arnold begins his account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the 1917 Balfour Declaration, but its origins actually go back some three thousand years. Archeologists tell us that the ancient Hebrew tribes date back to the period between the 9th and 12th centuries BCE, and that at no time since that period has the area been without some Jewish inhabi- tants. As reflected in the Old Testament, this allegiance to the area is deeply rooted in the Jewish religion itself. During that early period, the area was also at different times occu- pied by tribes that were the antecedents of the modern Arab peo- ples. Thus, there can be no doubt that Jews and Arabs both have histor- ical claims to the land now known as Palestine — a reality that cannot be ignored if we are to deal with the cur- rent crisis. For hundreds of years prior to World War I, the Ottoman Empire was the governing entity for most of the Middle East. After the war, the League of Nations, with the explicit understanding that it was establish- ing the basis for a Jewish homeland, assigned a portion of the territory, encompassing what is now Jordan, the West Bank and Israel, to Great Britain as the mandated power. The British carved out a major part of the territory east of the Jordan river — then known as Transjordan and now, simply, as Jordan — and pre- sented it, in appreciation for assis- tance during the war, to the Hashemite family. This was to be the homeland for the Arabs in the territory alongside the approximate- ly 20 other neighboring countries in the area serving as homelands for the Arab peoples. As Mr. Arnold correctly notes, Lord Balfour, the British foreign minister, then issued a policy statement that his govern- ment also viewed “with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish peo- ple.” During the early period, some Arab leaders welcomed the plan to establish a Jewish national home- land. Sherrif Hussein, recognized as the leader of the Arab world dur- ing the First World War, publicly said so. His son, Emir Feisal, who represented the Arabs at the Paris Peace Conference, said in a letter on March 2, 1919: “We Arabs, espe- cially the educated among us, look with deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement … our two move- ments complement one another … indeed, I think that neither can be a success without the other.” This spirit was, regrettably, not universal- ly shared. At that time, there were approx- imately 50,000 Jews living in the area, but other Jews throughout the world were eager to join or assist and raised funds in order to pur- chase property in Palestine from the Arabs. My own parents, in spite of their relative poverty, con- tributed small change weekly to that purpose. The purchases were done legally and were obviously welcome by those Arabs who sold the property. The Zionist movement gained urgency once the Nazis came to power in the 1930s and launched the programs that would lead to the deaths of at least five million European Jews in the Holocaust. Those who managed to escape and reach Palestine did so even though the British — who were in the midst of a war for survival and did not wish to alienate the Arab states — refused to allow them to enter Palestine legally, despite the Balfour Toward a True Israeli-Palestinian Peace B Y M AX M. K AMPELMAN M A Y 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 15 S PEAKING O UT The origins of the Israel-Palestinian conflict go back some three thousand years.