What do the Palestinians Really Want?

A deceptively simple question that few of those outside the conflict with fervent views about it, have properly confronted.

Haidar Eid's excerpt from ‘Decolonising the Palestinian Mind,’ featured in the Sunday Times on 24 February 2024, serves as a useful insight, precisely because it sheds light on a critical, often overlooked aspect of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It compels us to confront a fundamental question: What is it that the Palestinians want? 

It’s a deceptively simple question that few of those outside the conflict with fervent views about it, have properly confronted. 

Professor Eid's thesis revolves around the Oslo Accords, contending that their failure stems from neglecting the Palestinians' ‘revolutionary consciousness.’ Before delving into this, we need a brief revisit of the historical context.

The Oslo Accords served simply as an interim agreement, delineating a framework for the gradual transfer of governing authority to the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Its mandate aimed to achieve a final status agreement, culminating in a two-state solution. The central principle of this solution involves establishing two states for two peoples—namely, a Jewish state (Israel) living side by side with an Arab state (Palestine).

To attribute the fundamental failure to reach peace to the Oslo Accords is to assert that the peace process concluded with them and that no final status talks, which were the goal, occurred. This is ahistorical.

In July 2000, Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, traveled to Camp David to meet with the head of the PLO, Yasser Arafat and then US President Bill Clinton. Barak, who was elected on a campaign of establishing peace based on the “land for peace” model, offered the Palestinians an unprecedented proposal that addressed all the obstacles to peace that Israelis had been told would see an end to the conflict.

Israel was told that the obstacle to peace was the military occupation: Palestinians wanted Israel’s military presence in the West Bank and Gaza to cease. The proposal offered the Palestinians a fully sovereign independent state in the West Bank and Gaza, thereby ending the occupation. 

What was the other obstacle to peace? Settlements. The proposal stated there would be no settlements in the State of Palestine. Settlements were to be removed or exchanged for land of equivalent value. As a result of this proposal, two obstacles have been eliminated.

Then, Israel was told that Jerusalem was the obstacle to peace. The Palestinians want a capital in Jerusalem. Jerusalem would need to be divided. The proposal included: The Jewish neighborhoods  to Israel. The Arab neighborhoods to Palestine. A split of the Old City with concessions of the holy sites and a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem. But Arafat walked away from the deal. 

It’s possible to explain that walking away was a negotiating strategy. As such the recipe advocated for was to tinker with the details. Unfortunately for those who arrived at such a conclusion, eight years later, in 2008, Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s heir, declined an even further-reaching proposal from Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Arafat and Abbas walked away from two proposals that would have created a sovereign independent Palestinian State with no occupation, no settlements and a capital in East Jerusalem.

While this was indeed misguided, many leaders have missed such opportunities, and the Palestinians are oddly not the worst offenders. What is particularly unique in the case of the Palestinians and what is willingly overlooked due to its lack of alignment with specific interests, is the absence of dissent at the time of the rejection. Not even a minority camp opposed the move, political opposition did not mobilize against leadership and there were no warnings against the potential consequences of rejecting peace. No organized protests were held among the people to demand their leadership return to the negotiating room to secure a state, and there was no outcry from the community of NGOs, activists, or intellectuals.

The question should now change: What do the Palestinians really want? They do not want a Palestinian state that ends the military occupation, has no settlements, and has its capital in East Jerusalem. Or, you could say that they want that, but there is something that they want more. Perhaps this is where Eid's concept of the Palestinian ‘revolutionary consciousness’ comes into play. 

Already in the late 1940s, the British Foreign Minister, Ernest Bevin—an avowed antisemite and no ally to the Jews—had a clear insight. He remarked, "There were two people on the ground, Jews and Arabs... For the Jews, the point of principle is establishing a state. For the Arabs, the point of principle is to prevent the Jews from establishing a state." Bevin's foresight goes beyond a mere territorial dispute; he pinpoints the essence of the conflict—the Jews aspire for a state, while the Arabs aim to thwart their statehood. 

Ignoring both Palestinian rhetoric and actions allows one to imagine that the Palestinian consciousness is one of national liberation. However, many liberation movements face difficult choices on the cusp of independence, including unanswered territorial demands, the loss of sites of historical and religious significance, and limitations on foreign and defense policy resulting from war. This holds true for the Armenians, Turks, Czechs, Bulgarians, Greeks, Poles, and Israelis, for that matter.

At the fall of the colonial empires and the birth of nation-states, around one hundred new countries were born, with Israel among them. None of these peoples rejected the option of independence entirely, and certainly not repeatedly, because their collective consciousness was not centred around undoing another people’s independence. When your cause is liberation, you make painful compromises because not being free is awful. When your cause is someone else’s elimination, any compromise that leaves them standing is a catastrophe. 

The Palestinian ‘revolutionary consciousness’ is expressed openly and honestly. It symbolizes a desire for what they perceive as absolute justice. They express very clearly what that means – "from the river to the sea" – no Jewish state in any borders. Haidar Eid is therefore correct; the Oslo Accords which sought a two-state solution failed to acknowledge the Palestinians' deepest desires. The problem with this desire is that in reality, there is no such thing as absolute justice - especially one that relies on the disappearance of another state. This singular commitment to the false absolutism of justice has led to the complete unwillingness to make concessions, which is precisely what is required for peace. 

Even today, everything can be divided: the land, resources, and various economic and security arrangements. The one difference that cannot be split, is the idea in the two people's minds, a century-old idea, where the Jews want a state and the Palestinians want the Jews not to have that state.