Deal, what deal? it’s just another illusion in a broken world

We’re told it’s Palestinian intransigence that has denied them a state. It’s just a fairytale in an ocean of propaganda to justify ethnic cleansing and the commission of war crimes.

Image - Yasser Arafat (illustration/AFP)

PREFACE | PART ONE

I thought when I started researching the evolution of the Israeli genocide that I would be able to contain my thoughts in a series of episodes that would maybe take a week. The more I dig, the more I realise it would take months, which would be impractical in a world of soundbites and shrinking attention spans. What I think I can say is I may not be able to wrap it all up this week, but I should be done early next week. I hope you’ll forgive me for that, because I believe readers of my work will understand that the geopolitical complexity of the subject demands in-depth coverage that goes beyond a short, pithy summary.

I apologise in advance for this particular post being long, but it’s absolutely essential to gaining a better understanding of this conflict and why history plays such a role in this series of posts, and I promise this will be the exception rather than the rule.

The classic propaganda-fueled premise for Israel’s persistent and historic persecution of the Palestinian people is that time and time again they were offered a Palestinian state, but Palestinian leaders refused to accept. I had a comment attempting to insult my intelligence on a note today that was a classic cut-and-paste Israeli talking-point response. I’d like to thank the author for the opportunity and take a moment to address each claim, because the truth matters, right?

To quote the author: “There is a missing part 🤡”

Key Historical Rejections and Proposals

1937 – The Peel Commission: The British proposed dividing the land into separate Jewish and Arab states. Palestinian Arab leaders rejected the plan, demanding all of the territory and opposing a Jewish state. (Citing this reddit link).

My response:

Let’s assume your family had been living in California for generations and you had built a life there; yes, it had its challenges, but it was a place you called home. Then one day, a foreign government rocked up to town, held a meeting inviting state leaders and business stakeholders to announce that they had been tasked with the creation of an Israeli state that would become a homeland for the Jews.

The proposal is, those currently inhabiting the most fertile land in the state will be required to up sticks and move to the Mohave desert, handing their homes, land and businesses to the incoming Jews. What would your response be? I’ll wait. Oh, that was quick. Did you say ‘fuck off ’? I thought so.

That’s exactly what the 1937 Peel Commission proposed. To partition Palestine while at the same time denying Arab independence and transferring fertile lands occupied by Arabs and Arab-majority Galilee, to a new Jewish state. It also recommended the forced transfer of 250,000 Arabs who made up the majority of the population. Last but not least, it proposed the transfer of vital agricultural land owned by Arabs and worked on by generations of their families.

Of course they rejected the proposal; what would you have done? This was not an offer of a Palestinian state; it was a land grab and denial of Arab independence. If ANY Western nation had faced the same imposition, it would have been rejected out of hand and war would have ensued.

1947 – UN Partition Plan (Resolution 181): The United Nations proposed dividing British Mandatory Palestine into independent Jewish and Arab states. Jewish leaders accepted the plan, but Arab and Palestinian representatives rejected it, leading to the 1948 war. (Citing this UN link).

Of course Jewish leaders accepted the plan; they had no state at the time, so the suggestion that this was an act of benevolence is frankly ludicrous. Again I ask, if this was being attempted in the US, would the US go to war to protect its land? ABSOLUTELY it would.

The 1947 UN Partition Plan was yet another one-sided offering. At the time, the Jewish population made up around 33% of the population while owning just 10% of the private land. The plan sought to allocate between 50% and 55% of then Mandatory Palestine to a Jewish state. It granted the Jewish community the majority of the territory despite Arabs owning 94% of the private land and making up two-thirds of the population.

Arabs legitimately claimed that the plan violated the UN Charter and denied the Palestinian majority the right to govern their entire homeland. Again, I ask what you would do if you were the Arabs? It’s preposterous to suggest that the plan was a genuine attempt to offer Palestinians their own state and the right to self-determination. It was in truth a non-negotiable imposition of a Jewish state on the land they had inhabited and developed for four centuries. It’s not difficult to understand that this led to the 1948 Arab Israeli war.

I would once again remind you that prior to these repeated attempts at partition, Arabs and Jews had lived side by side in relative peace for centuries. Jews held dhimmi status, meaning they could worship freely. However, they had to pay a tax called ‘jizya’, and they did NOT have equal political status with Muslims. Was this fair, no it was not, but it was Ottoman rule at the time.

It was not until the late 1800’s that European (Zionist) immigrants began arriving in the region, raising nationalist tensions leading each group to began to establish a tribal culture in the political discourse of the day. And so the seeds were sown for the fatal and brutal division that was to follow.

It should be noted that in 1947, there was no IDF. Israel did not exist; all that existed was Palestine, ‘from the river to the sea ’. It was not a political slogan, but rather a statement of fact. The influx of European Zionists led to decades of preparation for statehood. While there was no IDF, there was the Haganah, a clandestine defence force, and the Palmach, its muscle. There were also smaller militia organisations, such as Irgun and Lehi, that operated independently.

In short, by the time of the 1947 Partition Plan, Zionists had already created the foundations for the birth of the Israeli state. The writing was on the wall; it was no longer if an Israeli state would exist but rather when.

Charles Glass, reviewing 2 books in 2001, ‘One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate’ and Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine 1917-48, noted:

The British army occupied Jerusalem on Sunday, 9 December 1917, and withdrew on 14 May 1948. During its brief imperium in the promised land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in the Declaration that bears his name, “to favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. While nurturing the ‘national home’, a term as deliberately vague as Palestinian ‘autonomy’ is today, Britain neglected to observe the Declaration’s final clause: “that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”.

He went on to add:

Britain erected and for thirty years maintained the scaffolding that the Zionists happily tore down when their house of Israel was ready. Despite the objections of some British military commanders and civil servants in Palestine, His Majesty’s Government protected Jewish immigration, encouraged Jewish settlement, subsidised Jewish defence and protected the Yishuv, as Palestine’s minority Jewish community called itself, from the native population. Without Great Britain, there would not have been an Israel for the Yishuv, or a catastrophe – nakba in Arabic – for Palestine’s Arab majority. It is not surprising that each year Balfour Day is celebrated by the friends of Israel and mourned by Palestine’s Arabs.

Image - Getty Images

Political Zionism, founded by Theodor Herzl, worked on the understanding that an Israeli state could only exist by the legitimacy conferred upon it by the major powers. On May 14 1948, Zionist leadership was confident enough to declare statehood independently. It had already established the infrastructure for government and simply had to bring together already established militias to give rise to the Israeli Defence Force, the IDF.

Before statehood had even been declared, between December of 1947 and April 1948, the forced displacement of between 250,000 and 350,000 Palestinians had already begun, led by Israeli militias; this was the civil war phase preceding the declaration of statehood. In March 1948, Zionist leadership adopted what was known as ‘Plan Dalet ’, also known as ‘Plan D’. If you’d like a more detailed insight into the plan, I highly recommend this piece by The Institute for Middle East Understanding. This was the blueprint for the systematic depopulation and destruction of Palestinian villages. Sound familiar in 2026?

Officially adopted on March 10th 1948 it called for:

“Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously… “Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.”

Now you understand where the destruction of Gaza and Southern Lenbanon came from, they already had the blueprints, they just had to dig them out of the cupboard and brush off the dust. The IME report continues:

Three quarters of all Palestinians, about 750,000 people, were forced from their homes and made refugees during Israel’s establishment. Their homes, land, and other belongings were systematically destroyed or taken over by Israelis, while they were denied the right to return or any sort of compensation. More than 400 Palestinian towns and villages, including vibrant urban centers, were destroyed or repopulated with Jewish Israelis.

While the mass expulsion, better known as the Nakba is commemorated on May 15th, it actually spanned from late 1947 to 1949. During that time, between 13,000 and 15,000 Palestinians were killed and over 500 villages burned to the ground in an orgy of hate and destruction. There were dozens of documented massacres by Israeli forces. Thousands of these deaths occurred across dozens of documented sites, including at Deir Yassin, Tantura, and Al-Dawayima. At the conclusion of this ethnic cleansing exercise, to add insult to injury, around 80% of those that remained in what was now the state of Israel (150,000) were granted Israeli citizenship but stripped of most of their land and governed by violent, undemocratic military rule until 1966. If you would like a deeper insight into the consequences of the Nakba, take a moment to read this piece, again by the Institute for Middle East Understanding.

Be in no doubt that the massacres that took place during the mass expulsion of the Palestinians weren’t carried out by rogue elements of the militia:

dozens of children, women, and elderly people, massacred in the Palestinian town of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem on April 9, 1948, by Zionist militias led by future Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. The massacre at Deir Yassin was one of the worst atrocities committed during the Nakba and a pivotal moment in Israel’s establishment as a Jewish-majority state, triggering the flight of Palestinians from their homes in and around Jerusalem and beyond. The Deir Yassin massacre is commemorated annually by Palestinians around the world

It’s not until you study the history that you understand the context of the current episode of attempted ethnic cleansing and genocide; I’m afraid it’s in the DNA of Zionism as documented in the history of the atrocities perpetrated almost 80 years ago. This was a group of people from Europe whose people had suffered unspeakable crimes at the hands of fellow Europeans, NOT Palestinians or Muslims, but so-called Christians, and here they were with no problem massacring women and children less than three years after the fall of Nazi Germany. That takes a special kind of hate, one that has clearly raised its head 80 years later behind a fig leaf of ‘self-defence ’. Make it make sense, because I’m really struggling. How much suffering does one people have to endure before enough is enough for governments to not be complicit in this perpetual cycle of genocidal persecution?

2000 – Camp David Summit: U.S. President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat a Palestinian state comprising Gaza and most of the West Bank, with parts of East Jerusalem. Arafat turned down the proposal without making a counteroffer. (Citing this reddit link)

Yet another myth; it’s becoming frightfully tiresome to read the endless propaganda openly supported by mainstream media that should and do know better. I would point you to this article by Seth Ackerman for fair.org from July 1st 2002. He noted that this is how the media at the time reported it, much as the author of the above statement paints it.

The Camp David meeting ended without agreement on July 25, 2000. At this point, according to conventional wisdom, the Palestinian leader’s “response to the Camp David proposals was not a counteroffer but an assault” (Oregonian editorial, 8/15/01). “Arafat figured he could push one more time to get one more batch of concessions. The talks collapsed. Violence erupted again” (E.J. Dionne, Washington Post, 12/4/01). He “used the uprising to obtain through violence…what he couldn’t get at the Camp David bargaining table” (Chicago Sun-Times, 12/21/00).

In reality it was another one sided proposal as Ackerman noted:

Because of the geographic placement of Israel’s proposed West Bank annexations, Palestinians living in their new “independent state” would be forced to cross Israeli territory every time they traveled or shipped goods from one section of the West Bank to another, and Israel could close those routes at will. Israel would also retain a network of so-called “bypass roads” that would crisscross the Palestinian state while remaining sovereign Israeli territory, further dividing the West Bank.

Israel was also to have kept “security control” for an indefinite period of time over the Jordan Valley, the strip of territory that forms the border between the West Bank and neighboring Jordan. Palestine would not have free access to its own international borders with Jordan and Egypt—putting Palestinian trade, and therefore its economy, at the mercy of the Israeli military.

2008 – The Olmert Offer: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas a state on roughly 93–94% of the West Bank, land swaps, and a shared administration of Jerusalem. Abbas did not accept the offer and walked away without a counterproposal. (Citing this reddit link)

This is the only statement that holds any weight in my mind and I believe is the closest offer that should have been up for further discussion. I believe Ehud Olmert to be a man with honourable intent and he impresses me to this day by his preparedness to speak up against Netanyahu’s attacks on innocent civilians in Gaza.

I believe this was the closest the world came to an offer that had legs. However, I believe that even if the deal had been sealed, Olmert was a lame duck, and there is no question that Netanyahu would have walked away from any such deal.

I think this piece by Lazar Berman in the Jerusalem Times encapsulates part of my thinking regarding the possibility of a two-state solution and the near miss.

2020 – The Trump Peace Plan: The United States proposed a conditional, demilitarized Palestinian state with economic aid and a capital in outer East Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority rejected the plan immediately and refused to negotiate. (Citing this reddit link)

I’m not going to dignify this with a response, because it’s an unserious proposition from a very unserious man at a time when Netanyahu has absolutely no intention of agreeing ANY peace deal.

If you managed to stick with me to this point, I applaud your commitment to a better understanding. History plays an important role in understanding how we arrived here and why finding a solution seems so elusive. In the next episode, we’ll fast forward to 2023 and the day of the attack by Hamas. The day the propaganda war began to justify an act of genocide.

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