By Raj Gonsalkorale

The geographic terms Israel” and Palestine” have a long history and specific connotations for Jews and Arabs with respect to their competing claims to the same land. The only way forward for Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs is to cease looking backwards. Dr Daniel Miller – https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/ australianoutlook/israel-and-palestine-where-should-history-begin-and-should-it-matter/

The article by Dr Daniel Miller, Where should history begin, and should it matter?originally published on 19 June 2021 and one of the top ten most read articles published inAustralian Outlook in 2021, sums up what all forward looking and those who are for a mutually beneficial solution to this conflict which has simmered and flared over centuries will welcome. Unfortunately, influential leaders of the world, and leaders and people in Israel seem to be of the opposite kind. The real cost of this conflict is the insecurity of modern Israel, which increases as they decimate Gaza, and the ongoing suffering of the ordinary people of Gaza and more broadly in all of Palestine.

Dr Daniel Miller is Chair of the Dept. of Religion, Society and Culture at Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke (Quebec), Canada and has a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan. His areas of academic interest are Canaanite-Israelite cultic practices, ancient West Semitic magic and, more recently, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. He has taught courses in Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), comparative world religions, politics and religion, ancient Near Eastern magic and divination, apocalypticism, New Religious Movements and Biblical Hebrew. Dr Daniel Miller is very well qualified to talk about this conflict, its history, and the futility of looking for solutions based on history.

As Dr Miller says, Israel and Palestine are one land, two names, where both Jews and Arabs have claimed it as theirs alone. From a purely historical perspective, Israel” predates Palestine” by more than a millennium. But, with the Jewish people then dispersed from their homeland, Palestine” became home to a substantial Arab population, again for more than a millennium. From a perspective of justice and equity, both peoples have a legitimate claim to the land”. Dr Miller goes onto say The wrongs and brutalities done by each side to the other have become too numerous to count. It does no good to try to assign blame for the latest war between Israel and Hamas. The war and the specific events that led up to it are just more entries in a ledger written in blood and tears. The stark fact is that there is now no act of vengeance or retribution that Jews and Arabs could do to the other party in the conflict that would allow them to say that accounts had been settled on their side”

Dr Miller quotes Jodi Rudoren, Editorial Director of Newsletters at The New York Times who says  Any hope of ending the conflict…requires Palestinians and Israeli Jews to either acknowledge each other’s versions of history without trying to determine which is more legitimate, or to just ignore them. The only possible peace agreement is one that looks forward.” In a reversal of the transformation of the Nile in Exodus 7, the rivers of blood spilled must, somehow, become water under the bridge”. In her 14 May Looking Forward” newsletter, Jodi Rudoren, New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief during the last two Israel-Hamas wars in 2012 and 2014 (there have been four since 2008), wrote: It does not, actually, help to examine what specifically started this conflagration, or the one before or the one before that, because it does, in so many ways, end up at ‘Abraham had two sons: there was Isaac, and there was Ishmael’”—a reference to the Genesis account that the Patriarch Abraham engendered one son said to be the ancestor of Arabs (Ishmael) and another considered to be the ancestor of Jews (Isaac)”.

Citing Dr Miller again on the background to the competing historical claims, he says that” investigating the particular events that culminated in the latest Israel-Hamas war can provide only an imperfect, fragmentary understanding of a conflict that began well over a century ago and is rooted in issues of territory that predate the Common Era. Still, given that one side claims fervently that the land is Israel” and the other equally passionately that it’s Palestine,” a potentially worthwhile avenue of enquiry for understanding the conflict, at least to some degree, is to look at what each of those terms has historically denoted with respect to geography.

Israel”

In the last decade of the 13th century BCE, Pharaoh Merneptah recorded that his military forces had decisively defeated an entity called Israel” in the central highlands of what was then known as Canaan.” A few centuries later, that region would be the location for two kingdoms: Israel” and a weaker sister kingdom called Judah,” the ultimate origin of the term Jew,” to its south. The biblical tradition holds that there had previously been a united monarchy, apparently under the name Israel.”

The kingdom of Israel was overthrown in ca. 722 BCE by the Neo-Assyrian empire, centred in what is now Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia), and Israel” ceased to be a geographic entity of the ancient Middle East.

Palestina”

In the sixth century BCE, Judah and its capital Jerusalem were conquered by the Neo-Babylonians, another Mesopotamian empire. Following the Babylonian Exile, the territory of the former kingdom would serve as the geographic centre of Jewish existence until 135 CE when, following a disastrous Jewish uprising, Roman emperor Hadrian expelled the Jews from Jerusalem and decreed that the territory surrounding the city be part of a larger entity called Syria-Palestina.” Thenceforth, it would be primarily Jews in the Diaspora who would carry the traditions of Judaism forward. Palestina” had as its ultimate referent the name and traditional territory of the Philistines, mortal enemies of the Israelites (forerunners of the Jews). As part of the Islamic conquest of the Middle East in the seventh century, Arab peoples began to settle in significant numbers in the land. Apart from a relatively brief period of Crusader control, Palestine remained under Muslim control for just under 12 centuries, its population overwhelmingly Arab.

Zionism and Jewish return

In the second half of the 19^th century, Jews’ yearning to return to their ancestral land was given concrete expression in the form of the Jewish nationalistic movement Zionism. Zionism arose in response to mounting virulent Jew hatred in Europe and czarist Russia. As Jews began to trickle back into the land, they encountered a sizeable Arab population that had been there for centuries. Under the Turkish Ottoman empire, the land comprised three administrative regions, none of which bore the name Palestine”. World War I saw the collapse of the Ottomans, and in 1917 the land fell under British rule. Mandatory Palestine”—comprising also the current state of Jordan—came into existence in 1923. Until that time, the Arabs living there saw themselves primarily not as Palestinians” in the sense of a nationhood but as Arabs living in Palestine (or to be precise, Greater Syria”).

The founding of the modern state of Israel

During the era of Mandatory Palestine, the Zionist leadership in Palestine (the Yishuv) strove to increase Jewish numbers in the land to solidify Jewish claims to statehood, an initiative that was ultimately blocked by British limits placed upon Jewish immigration. It would be a horrified world reaction to the Holocaust that would push the Zionist project over the finish line.

In November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181, partitioning the territory into Independent Arab and Jewish States.” The Resolution received immediate Arab rejection, and Palestinian militias attacked Jewish settlements. On 14 May, 1948, the Yishuv declared the founding of the state of Israel, immediately recognised by the United States. On the morrow of Israel’s founding, the new Jewish state was invaded by a military force comprising multiple Arab armies plus Palestinian militia forces. By the time the fighting ended in 1949, the Palestinians had lost 78 percent of what the UN had allotted to them, and 700,000 Palestinians had been uprooted from their homes with no right of return to the present day. For Israelis, it was the War of Independence.” For Palestinians, it’s al-Nakba — the Catastrophe.”

Following decades of military and diplomatic setbacks, the Palestinian National Council issued a declaration of independence on 15 November, 1988, which was recognised a month later by the General Assembly as Resolution 43/177. Currently, about three quarters of the UN’s membership recognises the statehood of Palestine, which has non-member observer status” in the UN.

Since its founding and despite multiple wars with Arab states and non-state actors, Israel has flourished as a formidable Middle Eastern power. By contrast, the Palestinians have striven fruitlessly to establish a viable state and any real, sustained economic success.

The seizure by Israel of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza during its overwhelming victory in the Six-Day War of 1967—in which Israel faced a true existential threat to its existence from a combined Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian military force—has left the majority of Palestinians under various forms of Israeli occupation or control.

Since the 1990s, there have been several unsuccessful attempts to achieve a two-state solution. Under former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Jewish settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, considered illegal by much of the world, increased dramatically. Those Arabs who do have Israeli citizenship, about a fifth of Israel’s population, are far too often treated as second-class citizens within Israel. The 13 June ouster of Netanyahu from power could alleviate this somewhat—for the first time, an Arab Israeli party is part of a government coalition.

Jewish Israelis, meanwhile, have experienced the violent fury of two Palestinian Intifadas (1987–1993; 2001–2005), the second of which featured a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings and ambushes that killed over 1,000 Israelis and wounded about 3,000. This was the catalyst for Israel’s Security Barrier, which has further exacerbated Palestinian distress.

What is a possible way out of this ongoing insecurity and bloodshed?

The above account by Dr David Miller provides an account of the historical context to the Israeli/Palestine conflict. Neither the Israelis, who experienced the violent fury of two Palestinian Intifadas (1987–1993; 2001–2005), the second of which featured a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings and ambushes that killed over 1,000 Israelis and wounded about 3,000, nor the more recent 2023 October 7^th attack on Israeli settlements which killed more than 1200 Israelis and where more than 250 Israelis were taken hostage, would wish for more violence and insecurity for their people. But violence continues on a massive scale while the world watches on, with seeming indifference or impotence in the face of Israeli and US military and economic power.

Palestinians would not wish for more land to be lost like the 78 percent of what the UN had allotted to them in 1948, and whatever left of Palestinians particularly in Gaza, like the 700,000 Palestinians who had been uprooted from their homes with no right of return to the present day. Neither would they wish for a repetition of the present war where more than 60,000 Palestinian people have been killed, and more than two million who have lost their homes.

The Palestinian National Council declaration of independence on 15 November, 1988, which was recognised a month later by the General Assembly as Resolution 43/177, with about three quarters of the UN’s membership recognising the statehood of Palestine, which has non-member observer status” in the UN, it is extremely unlikely that this situation will go any further as long as Israel is backed by the US and the US has a veto power in the UN Security Council  to overturn any decision of the general assembly.  So, Palestinian full Statehood is just a mirage at present, unless a miracle happens.

To say that a solution that is respectful of both sides to the conflict is almost impossible is an absolute understatement. The festering wound is too deep and too spread, with ancient history continuously exacerbating the wound, finding a genuine long-lasting solution almost a miracle. Palestinians should not provide any encouragement to extreme elements amongst them to perpetuate this conflict by not giving any recognition to the historical context of this conflict, the right of Israel to exist as a State, and the fears of the people of Isreal. Equally, Isreal people too should not allow their own leaders who do not recognise the historical claims of Palestinians, their dignity and their right to live safely and securely as equal citizens, to dictate the direction of Israel.

The power of Isreal, thanks mainly to the rich and influential Jews who wield enormous power in the US and who keep the US as its main ally, politically and militarily, gives Isreal a near cart blanche support to further their claim that  the entire Palestinian region is Jewish territory, and on the other hand, the opposite of this, the impotency of the Arab nations to offer any genuine redress to the Palestinians and their cause, makes the miracle the mother of all miracles. This makes the task easier for Isael as they can and as the world has witnessed, to proceed with their final solution which is to conquer” the only bit of resistance that Palestinians have been able to muster to at least slow the Israeli violence. The direction being taken now by Israel is to totally disregard the status, wishes and above all the dignity and self-respect of the Palestinians, and usher a one-sided Jewish” solution.

In the medium, to longer term, this will not be a solution, and neither the long-term security of Israel nor the dignity and rights of the Palestinians will be addressed through a one-sided solution. A genuine long-term solution will require compromise from both sies and as Dr Miller and Jodi Rudoren have said, a look to the future as a solution and not an ever-festering, challenged version of history as a path towards a solution.

Insecurity of Israel will not be just its insecurity, but that of the region as has been witnessed in Lebanon and very recently in Iran. Impermanence of everything, including a solution based on anger and vengeance will not last as the status quo that resulted in a one-sided solution will change and the defeated Palestinians may rise from the ashes, so to speak, with support and assistance from those who did not provide that support on this occasion. Such a situation will not be one to be welcomed as more insecurity for Israel and more suffering for Palestinians and their supporters will not be what the people of Isreal or Palestine wish for or deserve.

A federal model as a solution?

Although unthinkable for those who are focused only on history, a possible futuristic conceptual solution might be to have a one State, federal union model where, Isreal and Palestine operate as semi-autonomous regions with a federal government comprising both Israeli and Palestinians in equal share being elected as members of a federal parliament and regions within the federal State having their own elected assemblies with Israeli and Palestinian members based on their populations.

Defence, foreign affairs and other ministry subjects that needs to be managed centrally, could be the responsibility of the Federal government, while subjects such as education and health etc, would be devolved to the regions. In terms of compromise, it may be necessary for Palestinians to accept some Israeli settlements as part of Israel and for Isreal to withdraw from some settlements and restore the lands back to Palestine. The opening of new Israeli settlements in mutually agreed areas to house the inhabitants of settlements being handed back to the Palestinians may be a contentious but a necessary arrangement for the long-term peace between both communities.

A model of this nature will have to contend with many of the problems and challenges faced by Israelis and Palestinians, and history that weighs on both sides will be one of the major challenges. However, considering the inevitability of change and the impermanence of everyone and everything, it could be a very difficult but worthwhile proposition to think of a solution that looks towards the future and not the past.

What is the alternative? More military spending to keep Israelis secure? According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the world’s military expenditure reached $2.7 Trillion in 2024, an increase of 9.4 per cent in real terms from 2023. The World Bank says this represents approximately 2.5% of the global GDP (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS). Military spending increased in all world regions, with particularly rapid growth in both Europe and the Middle East. The top five military spenders—the United States, China, Russia, Germany and India—accounted for 60 per cent of the global total, with combined spending of $1635 billion (https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2025/unprecedented-rise-global-military-expenditure-european-and-middle-east-spending-surges). Recently, the NATO countries agreed to raise this spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. The US has asked its other allies to increase spending to these levels as well. If the global average should increase to 5%, the expenditure will exceed USD 5.5 Trillion per annum.

While the world is moving towards equipping itself to eliminate or deter its enemies” with military spending exceeding USD 5 Trillion by 2035, the World Bank reports thatalmost 700 million people (8.5 percent of the global population) live in extreme poverty – on less than $2.15 per day. In 2024, Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 16 percent of the world’s population, but 67 percent of the people living in extreme poverty. About 72 percent of the world’s population in extreme poverty live in countries that are eligible to receive assistance from the International Development Association (IDA). The World Bank reports also says that a surge in global malnutrition – State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report had found that up to 733 million people globally suffered from malnutrition in 2023, an increase of 152 million since 2019.

If few people continue to have their way and orchestrate conflicts in various parts of the world, and they are led to spending more and more on military expenditure, the beneficiaries are not the people of such countries but the select few who created the conflicts in the first place. People of all countries should give this reality their careful thought and turn to leaders who opt to resolve conflicts through negotiation and compromise, rather than allowing them to become conflicts that end in military interventions, death and destruction.

The Israeli Palestine conflict is such an instance. However, if people in Israel and Palestine take a step back and resolve to negotiate and come up with a political solution, consider options including the one proposed here, the longer term benefit will be peace and security in their countries and in the region, and equality and equity for both communities.