The pursuit of peace in Gaza

On August 19, 20225 Hamas said that it had accepted the new ceasefire proposal presented on the 17th by Qatar and Egypt to renew talks ahead of the planned major Israeli assault on Gaza City. This is 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, on August 20, a day after Hamas accepted peace, Israel bombed Gaza City and seemed to be going ahead with its threat of a largescale 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 Steve Witkoff proposal, on which the Qatar-Egypt plan is modelled. Following this, 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 whole 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 chief of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) recommended that Netanyahu accept the proposal.

Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians had worsened after Netanyahu’s Likud party teamed up with ultra-nationalist and ultra-Orthodox parties in December 2022. His opponents had then said that Netanyahu was forced to sign deals with hard-line 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, The 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 the land portions given to the Palestinian Arabs by the UN Palestine Partition Plan which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on November 29, 1947 as Resolution 181 (II), which created the new Jewish state of Israel within the then existing Arab Palestinian state.

Netanyahu and his ultra-nationalist 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, who agreed to the UN partition of Palestine. This is because earlier efforts by Theodor Herzl, father of modern Zionism, to enlist support from Kaiser Wilhelm II, emperor of Germany in 1898 and with the Ottoman Sultan in 1901 to grant a ‘homeland’ to the Jews were in vain.

Chaim Weizmann, a British research scientist of Russian Jewish origin who later became the first president of Israel had also played an important role. It was on his request that the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917 when the Jewish population in Palestine was only 18,000 (3 per cent) out of 6,00,000.

On November 2, 1917, British foreign secretary Sir Arthur Balfour conveyed to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild 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’ 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”. After 1947 leaders like Netanyahu ignored this giving rise to the perennial Israel-Palestinian problem.

The Truman papers also indicate that Britain clarified, in the wake of Arab protests that a ‘national home’ did not mean a “Jewish national state”. The papers say that Italy, France and America accepted the Balfour Declaration as an integral part of British policy by agreeing on the Treaty of Sevres (1920) and the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) on the fate of Ottoman Empire.

The Arabs protested when migration increased Jewish numbers to 83,790 by 1922. To this the then colonial secretary Winston Churchill 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 political considerations.

However, Truman 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. The UNGA appointed a special committee of 11 members, including India, to recommend a solution. On September 1, 1947, the panel 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 of two autonomous states.

The US state department, which had preferred the minority plan and not partition, was over-ruled by Truman to pass Resolution 181 (II), creating the new Jewish state of Israel within the then existing Arab Palestinian state. Later Israel breached this UN plan in 1967 by forcibly wresting East Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza. Since then, Israel has been developing illegal Jewish settlements on Arab lands, forcibly evicting Palestinians who are rendered refugees.

The Billion Press

(Vappala Balachandran  is a former special secretary, Cabinet Secretariat.)