"His Majesty's Government have thus been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles... For the Jews the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine".
- Ernest Bevin(1), British Foreign Minister, February 1947, explaining to the House of Commons why Britain decided to terminate the Mandate for Palestine(2) and refer the matter to the United Nations.
I recently learned of this statement for the first time watching a Podcast by Fleur Hassan-Nahoum(3) in which she interviews Israeli politician Einat Wilf. I've been able to confirm the accuracy of the quote and the exact language.
The first 6 minutes of the podcast are invaluable because it provides a succinct explanation of the reason for the conflict, though I recommend listening to the entire thing.
Einat Wolf is a former Labor Party politician, serving as an advisor to Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres in the 1990s and later as a member of the Knesset. In 2011 she left Labor and is now unaffiliated politically, though she opposes Benjamin Netanyahu. In 2012 I attended a talk by Wilf at Yale University.
The reason I found the first part of the podcast particularly interesting is her discussion of how, as she describes it, her "hypothesis" of how to achieve a two-state solution proved to be incorrect, and what she now believes the correct hypothesis to be which, as she states, is encapsulated in Bevin's 1947 statement, from a time before Israel existed and before there were any refugees.
Her original hypothesis led her to support the Oslo Accords and the Camp David peace proposal and other two state peace proposals, which were ultimately rejected by the Palestinians. The events of the 21st century have led her to conclude that the Palestinian cause is based on the total negation of Israel, rather than being willing to accept a two-state solution, refusing to allow Israel to exist as a Jewish state, under any terms.
Wilf's point has only been reinforced since October 7, 2023. The Western academic, progressive, and NGO mob supporting Hamas are not doing so in support of a two-state solution. They want Israel eliminated. They are not hiding it.
Her transformation since the 90s is similar to mine. Realizing the risks of Oslo but optimistic that the peace process would succeed. In retrospect, Oslo was a disaster for Israel because it got the peace process backwards, believing that small "confidence-building" measures would lead to peace, rather than insisting that the big and fundamental disputes be resolved before proceeding to confidence building measures that would eventually allow a full and lasting settlement to be implemented.
Nonetheless, the 2000 Camp David talks, the unilateral withdrawal from South Lebanon the same year, and in 2005 from Gaza, along with Prime Minister's 2008 peace proposal, were all attempts to reach peace. All were rejected and instead there was the Second Intifada from 2001-3 in which 1,000 Israelis were killed and the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2006.
The result was the political destruction of what was once a political powerful Israeli peace camp. At this point there is not much difference between Israeli parties regarding national security. While there is much internal disagreement over how to bring the current war in Gaza to a close, virtually no one in Israel thinks a two-state solution along the lines proposed at Camp David is practical any more. I'll add that I have no idea what the right strategy is regarding Gaza at this point. My only observation is that Netanyahu's strategy seems increasingly more focused on maintaining his political coalition than in ending this phase of the conflict.
Wilf's argument in her recent book, The War Of Return, is that the actions of the United Nations, and of Western Nations, and the peculiar nature of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has led to the inability to resolve the conflict. UNRWA created a unique category of refugee for Palestinians, unlike that of the tens of millions of other refugees around the world created in the wake of WW2. UNRWA has become a facilitator of Palestinian rejectionism.
The only way to create even a chance, however slim, for a peaceful solution is to dissolve UNRWA, and for the Western nations to stop trying to solve the conflict and leave it to the Israelis and Arabs to work it out if they can.
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(1) Ernest Bevin was a socialist and became foreign minister in the first Labour cabinet at the end of WW2. A fervent anti-communist he was instrumental in the establishment of the Marshall Plan and in the creation of NATO. He was also an anti-Zionist.
(2) The Mandate for Palestine was granted to Britain at the peace conference after WW1. It encompassed the territories of today's Jordan, Israel, West Bank, and Gaza. In 1922, Britain split the Mandate into two sections. One, constituting the bulk of the territory, became Jordan and the British installed a Hashemite Arab monarch. Jews were forbidden from living in this portion of the mandate. The other parcel was what is known as Palestine. During the period between the establishment of the mandate and 1948, Jews living in this region referred to themselves as Palestinians or Palestinian Jews, while the non-Jews referred to themselves as Arabs. In his 1947 speech Bevin refers to Arabs, not Palestinians.
(3) Fleur Hassan-Nahoum is a Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem. She is descended from a Moroccan Jewish family and is an opponent of Benjamin Netanyahu.
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