Gaza’s devastation echoes a history of betrayals

On August 19, Hamas said it accepted the new ceasefire proposal presented two days earlier by Qatar and Egypt to renew talks ahead of the planned major Israeli assault on Gaza City. This was mostly based on US President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff’s plan, to which Israel had reportedly agreed. Consequent to this, Qatar and Egypt put pressure on Hamas to accept the proposal. However, a day after Hamas accepted peace, Israel bombed Gaza City and seemed to be going ahead with its threat of a large-scale offensive. This move by Israel leaves the outcome of the Qatar-Egypt peace plan uncertain.

The latest peace proposal, put together by Qatar and Egypt, envisages the release of 10 living Israeli hostages and 18 deceased hostages in exchange for 140 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences and 60 serving sentences of more than 15 years. Israel will also release all Palestinian minors and female prisoners. A ceasefire will be effective during which Israeli forces would redeploy to the lines specified in the Witkoff proposal, and humanitarian aid would flow to the Gaza population.

The peace bids coincided with a massive demonstration of nearly 400,000 Israelis on August 17 in Tel Aviv, supported by a grassroots strike by nearly one million in the country. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had heard about the Qatar-Egypt proposal, hardliners like Itamar Ben-Gvir opposed the idea. However, former defence minister Benny Gantz, who was earlier the Chief of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), recommended that Netanyahu accept the proposal.

Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians worsened after Netanyahu’s Likud party aligned with the ultranationalists in 2022. His opponents had then said that Netanyahu was forced to go with hardline parties as his erstwhile liberal allies refused to participate in his government since he was on trial on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust.

His present allies are United Torah Judaism, Shas, Otzma Yehudit, Religious Zionist Party, and New Hope, who believe that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the land of Israel.” This includes portions given to the Palestinian Arabs by the UN Palestine Partition Plan, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1947 as Resolution 181 (II), which created the Jewish State of Israel within the then Arab Palestinian State.

Netanyahu and his ultranationalist supporters disregard the fact that the Jewish nation could be achieved only with British help first and later through the Americans, especially President Harry S. Truman.

Chaim Weizmann, a British research scientist of Russian-Jewish origin who later became Israel’s first president, also played an important role. Weizmann had helped the British government with acetone supplies during the First World War. It was on his request that the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917 when the Jewish population in Palestine was only 18,000 (3%) out of 6,00,000.

National home, not National State

On November 2, 1917, Sir Arthur Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, conveyed to Lord Lionel Walter Rothchild the British government’s “declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations” for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” provided that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.

Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre wrote in O Jerusalem, an international best-seller, that Weizmann had said in 1925: “Palestine is not Rhodesia, and 600,000 Arabs live there who... have exactly the same rights to their homes as we have to our National Home”. Leaders like Netanyahu ignored this, giving rise to the perennial Israel-Palestinian problem.

The Truman papers indicate that Britain clarified, in the wake of Arab protests, that a “national home” did not mean a “Jewish national state”. The Arabs protested when migration increased Jewish numbers to 83,790 by 1922. To this, Winston Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, gave an assurance that there was no intention to turn Palestine into a Jewish State. By 1939, Jewish numbers reached 4,45,457, which was one-third of Palestine’s population.

On April 5, 1945, US President FD Roosevelt, while writing to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, assured him that no action would be taken in Palestine by America “which might prove hostile to the Arab people”. However, his successor, Truman, altered this policy due to domestic considerations.

Truman, according to American journalist James Reston, was influenced by local political considerations that wanted British Prime Minister Clement Attlee to permit a huge migration of 1,00,000 Jews to Palestine on August 31, 1945. But he also agreed to participate in the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry to find a solution to Palestine. The Committee in its ‘Report to the United States Government and His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom’ (April 20, 1946) inter alia said: “Jew will not dominate Arab and Vice versa; that Palestine shall be neither a Jewish state nor an Arab state; That the form of government ultimately to be established, shall, under international guarantees, fully protect and preserve the interests in the Holy Land of Christendom and of the Moslem and Jewish faiths”.

On April 2, 1947, Britain moved the UN General Assembly on the future of Palestine. UNGA appointed a special committee of 11 members, including India, to recommend a solution. On September 1, 1947, the Committee recommended two options: the majority plan was to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish areas with Jerusalem under international control, while the minority plan, proposed by India, etc., was to have a federated State of Palestine, comprising two autonomous states.

The US State Department, which preferred the minority plan, was overruled by President Truman to pass Resolution 181 (II), creating the new Jewish State of Israel within the then Arab Palestinian State. Later, Israel breached this UN plan in 1967 by forcibly wresting East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. Since then, Israel has been developing illegal Jewish settlements on Arab lands, forcibly evicting Palestinians who are rendered refugees.

(The writer is a former special secretary, Cabinet Secretariat; Syndicate: The Billion Press)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.