Why Palestinian leaders keep saying no to statehood |
The roots of Palestinian rejectionism reach back far more than the establishment of the State of Israel. It has hovered at the centre of Middle Eastern politics for more than a century, been invoked in countless speeches at the United Nations, debated in every Western capital, and often framed by the more naive of politicians and influencers as the key to regional peace. And yet, what is frequently forgotten – or perhaps deliberately overlooked – is that Palestinian leaders have been offered statehood on multiple occasions, even before their supposed ‘apartheid’ that began with the birth of the Jewish state in 1948, back in the 1930s.
Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Jerusalem Mufti and leading figure of the Palestinian Arabs from the early 1920s to the late 1940s, left little doubt to be had about his intentions: testifying before the British Peel Commission in 1937, which had been estalished that very January to search for a way forward for Arabs and Jews in Palestine, he declared that ‘most residents of Jewish lands will not be awarded citizenship in our future country.’ Essentially, he would expunge the Jews. Rejecting outright the very notion of a Jewish state, he promised that if such a state were ever established, every last Jew would be expelled from a state run by the Palestinian Arabs.
This continued for decades, with the same Mufti refusing to adopt the UN partition plan that offered two states – one Jewish, one Arab – in November 1947. Until the day he died in 1974, he rejected any two-state solution. Had he agreed to the UN plan, Palestinians would have gained a state far larger than what has ever been on offer since.
His successor, Yasser Arafat, carried this rejectionist tradition forward: for decades, Arafat refused to........