New Delhi: Earlier this week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a call with his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu, assuring the latter of New Delhi’s support in the ongoing war with Hamas, the Palestinian militant group in control of Gaza. While Modi made no mention of a two-state solution, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) later said that India’s position on the Israel-Palestine conflict had always been “consistent” — that of resumption of negotiations and a two-state solution.
“Our position on Palestine has been long-standing and consistent. India has always advocated the resumption of direct negotiations towards a sovereign, independent and viable state of Palestine, living within secure and recognised borders, side by side and at peace with Israel. That position remains the same,” Arindam Bagchi, spokesperson for the MEA, said at a press briefing Thursday.
The question regarding a two-state solution for the conflict between Israel and Palestine has once again come to the forefront as Hamas launched an unprecedented aerial and ground attack on Israel on 7 October, killing over 1,300 Israelis and leaving at least 3,200 injured, according to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). In response, Israel launched retaliatory strikes that have killed at least 2,200 Palestinians, according to media reports.
War against Hamas—operational update day 7. pic.twitter.com/1XYn4ri6qQ
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) October 13, 2023
The Israel Defense Forces have amassed tanks and troops on the border with Gaza as they prepares for a ground assault on the territory and called on over 10 lakh Palestinians to evacuate to the south of the strip. But this raises the question of the solutions that have been discussed in the past between Palestine and Israel to resolve the conflict.
The two-state solution envisions the existence of two countries — Israel and Palestine — in the areas that once constituted the British Mandate of Palestine. The proposal for partitioning the Mandate of Palestine into two states was first made in 1947 by the United Nations, when it passed UNGA resolution 181 (II). In the UN’s proposed partition, the future Jewish state would be given around 55 percent of the land that made up the British Mandate, while the Arab state would be given the remaining 45 percent.
However, the conflict over the issue has continued to rage 75 years after the establishment of Israel in 1948.
The Palestinian ambassador to India, Adnan Abu Al Haija, has told ThePrint that Ramallah is even willing to accept “…a one-state solution. We are ready to live in a democratic state with the Israelis if they accept that.”
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Netanyahu & two-state solution
In public, Netanyahu has often acknowledged the two-state solution as the path towards ending the crisis. However, his position has caveats in how the actual implementation of the partition would occur.
In an interview with CNN in February this year, Netanyahu said he wasopen to a two-state solution, giving Palestinians the powers necessary to govern their territories but not ‘security’ powers, such as the right to build a military or policing. He made it clear that Israel would have the right to maintain security west of the Jordan river – in essence, all of the West Bank. This setup has no modern parallel, where a state has the right to govern itself but not to manage its own security.
But his current government’s basic principles assert that the “Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel”. These principles were stated in a document that was announced before the government was sworn in and has no legal backing but highlights its agenda and priorities.
There are others, including Palestinians, who have called for a one-state solution as a federation with rights given to both Jews and Arabs. In 2004, the then prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Ahmed Qurei, had said, “We will go for a one-state solution…there’s no other solution,” in reaction to Israel’s promise to redraw the borders of the region unilaterally during the Second Intifada.
However, any solution for a common Jewish and Arab state has been fraught with difficulty over the establishment of principles of governance. And some politicians on the Israeli Right have argued for another kind of one-state solution — that of Israel as a Jewish country with recognised minorities or as Naftali Bennett, who would later become prime minister, publicly stated in 2013, the existence of only Israel and no Palestine.
Evolution of two-state solution
The genesis of the modern two-state solution lies with the Camp David Accords, a treaty of peace signed between Egypt and Israel in 1978, that had portions on self-rule for the Palestinians, according to a brief by the US Congressional Research Service.
In December 1988, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) recognised the right of Israel to exist, thereby indicating its willingness to agree to a two-state solution. Finally, between 1993 and 1995, Tel Aviv worked with Yasser Arafat’s PLO to sign the Oslo Accords I and II, giving the Palestinians limited self-government and promised a sovereign Palestinian nation within five years, as reported by ThePrint earlier.
The Oslo Accords was quickly replaced by the Roadmap for Peace, which was announced in 2003, between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. The agreement outlined a three-phase roadmap to settle the Israel-Palestine conflict, along with mutual recognition of one another and the acceptance of a two-state solution.
However, further negotiations failed and Hamas, in control of the Gaza strip since 2007 and one of the largest organisations in the Palestinian national movement, rejected the two-state solution till at least 2017, as reported by ThePrint earlier.
India & 1947 partition plan
The UN partition plan of 1947 was the first to propose two states in what was then the British Mandate. While it was accepted by Jewish organisations in the region, the Arabs rejected it. India, a member of the UN at the time, voted against the proposal.
India’s position, according to media reports and the MEA website, was against the UN partition plan. As early as 1936, Jawaharlal Nehru released a statement decrying the situation in Palestine as a result of ‘British Imperialism.’ In 1947, India preferred a single federal state with both the Jews and Arabs being given autonomy and Jerusalem given a special status.
Nehru’s government did officially recognise the state of Israel in 1950 but India did not have full diplomatic relations with it until 42 years later, in 1992, according to a brief by the MEA.
At the start of 1948, historian Rashid Khalidi writes in his book ‘The Iron Cage’, of the 2 million people living in the Mandate of Palestine, Arabs accounted for roughly 1.4 million and owned almost 90 percent of privately held land.
However by the end of that year 7,50,000 Arabs were either expelled or fled from the region, with Israel controlling 78 percent of the territory of the former mandate. At the end of the First Arab-Israeli War in 1948, around 1,50,000 Palestinians remained in the newly established state of Israel. The remaining lived within the regions of the mandate controlled by Jordan or Egypt — the West Bank and the Gaza Strip respectively, Khalidi notes in his book.
An armistice signed in 1949 between the warring parties created a border between the territories controlled by Jordan, Egypt, Israel and Syria — commonly known as the ‘green line’. The green line is often considered as the starting point for negotiations for the two-state solution by Palestine — also known as the pre-1967 borders.
The question that arose in the original partition plan proposed by the UN mentioned earlier was the control of the city of Jerusalem. The city is considered to be sacred to people from both religions — Jews and Muslims. In 1947, the UN proposed that the city be brought under international governance with a separate status.
However, as the UN noted, by the end of the 1948 war, 80 percent of Jerusalem had come under the control of Israel.
After the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel was able to expel Jordan and Egypt from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip respectively and occupy the remaining territories of the British Mandate of Palestine. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in 1967 passed Resolution 242 (1967), calling for a ‘just and lasting peace’ in the region. The resolution also called for the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from the territories occupied during the 1967 war.
In 1980, Israel declared Jerusalem, complete and united, as the capital of Israel after its parliament passed the Jerusalem Law.
(Edited by Richa Mishra)