The missing ingredient for peace
Arab countries must acknowledge Israel’s existence to end Palestinian suffering.
The guns in the Middle East fell silent yesterday as a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas brought a halt to almost 500 days of fighting. Some of the Israeli hostages seized during the October 7 terrorist attack are being released, as are Palestinian prisoners, while the people of Gaza can return to their homes and begin to rebuild.
Most people on both sides have welcomed the reprieve, which is due to last for six weeks. Now their leaders face the difficult task of definitively ending the hostilities and, more elusive still, finding a lasting settlement that will allow Israelis to live without fear of attack and Palestinians to have a state.
Peace in the Middle East can seem impossible. Successive presidents of the United States, the most powerful office in the world, have exhausted themselves trying and failing to achieve it. But there may now be a window of opportunity because of changes in the Arab world, whose leaders have done more than anyone to block a resolution – and to prolong Palestinian suffering.
Most Arab countries refuse to recognise Israel. They vilify it – or sometimes, more straightforwardly, Jews – in state media and in their education systems. They have conducted three formal wars against Israel, while non-state actors such as Hezbollah have fought countless more. All failed miserably but military success was never the point: By maintaining a state of hostility with the region’s only non-Muslim state, dictators and religious fanatics alike earn legitimacy with their own populations.
Right to Remain
The principal victims of these policies are the Palestinians – not only through the indirect effect of justifying Israel’s heavy-handed occupation, but through direct oppression at the hands of Arab governments, who keep them miserable to bolster the anti-Israel narrative.
Of the roughly 1 million Palestinians who fled their homes between 1948 and 1967, almost 6 million remain. The Palestinian refugee population across the Middle East has ballooned with successive generations, but governments have refused to integrate them. Millions of Palestinians have been born as refugees and millions have died as refugees, many of them in 58 squalid but permanent camps run – and thus, shamefully, legitimised – by the United Nations.
Activists in the West like to accuse Israel of ‘apartheid’, but the term is far better suited to Arabs’ treatment of Palestinians. Across the Middle East, people of Palestinian refugee origin have unequal access to schooling, healthcare, employment and more. Even in Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinians with ancestry in what is now Israel are second-class citizens and their children are doomed forever to be treated as refugees.
The stated reason for refusing to integrate Palestinian refugees is the Right of Return, by which the descendants of displaced Palestinians should one day return to their ancestral homes. This is plainly impossible. Besides the logistics of moving 6 million people into a densely populated country of 10 million, this would make Jews a minority in Israel, exposing them to an unacceptably high risk of pogroms and genocide (Jews in the Arab world, as well as in Europe, have been subject to organised violence throughout history). Consequently, insisting on a full Right of Return is tantamount to denying Israel’s right to exist and the Jewish people’s right to live there safely.
If the Right of Return is impossible in practice, the sacrifices imposed on Palestinians by Arab governments and the UN are in vain. If they truly had Palestinians’ interests at heart, they would integrate them into their countries of birth and allow them to live normal lives. Call it the Right to Remain.
This would likely be welcomed by most Palestinians. Many years ago, as a student of the region and its languages, I volunteered as an English teacher at two refugee camps in the West Bank. I later researched a dissertation on Palestinian refugee perspectives on the Right of Return, finding that most Palestinians would give up their claims on ancestral land in exchange for citizenship of a recognised country – whether Palestine itself or one of its neighbours.
History is full of precedents for people successfully moving on after losing part of their land. Other countries that lost wars in the 1940s – Germany, Japan, Finland – all ceded territory that has still not been returned, and their ethnic populations were displaced by the millions. These countries are now some of the world’s richest and happiest.
A way forward
A realistic solution to the refugee question would give the Palestinians a credible platform for negotiation. Israel might, for example, be persuaded to pay Palestinian refugee families in compensation for seizing their ancestral land, which could help them build normal lives in their countries of birth.
From there, a framework for peace exists. The Oslo Accords of 1993 establish the principle of a Palestinian nation based on the 1967 borders, with a few minor land swaps to account for facts on the ground; the West Bank and Gaza would form a Palestinian nation state free of Israeli occupation.
At the time, powerful factions on both sides opposed the Oslo Accords. Negotiations failed to make progress and collapsed entirely in 2000, leading to a renewed wave of violence and repression. Bill Clinton, the US president who oversaw the talks, places the blame primarily on Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader at the time.
There are too many people in the Arab and broader Muslim world who, like Hamas and Hezbollah, object to the very principle of a Jewish state existing in lands that were once Muslim. For as long as those people have a sizeable influence over politics, the conflict will continue and Palestinians will suffer its worst effects.
But in recent months, those who deny Israel’s right to exist have been weakened. Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator who cynically exploited popular hatred of Israel, has been ousted. Israel has killed most of the leadership of Hezbollah, a group of implacable Islamists who held the Lebanese state hostage. The theocratic regime in Iran, which sponsors many such militias, looks weak after firing a salvo of rockets at Israel last year that did much less damage than many had feared.
In the longer term, power in the Arab world has shifted from populous, hard-to-govern countries like Egypt and Iraq to the small but wealthy Gulf monarchies, whose leaders have a freer hand. The UAE has officially recognised Israel since 2020. Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, has taken tentative steps towards normalisation.
Besides lending their voice to the cause of peace, these countries could play a practical role in implementing a deal. They could lead an Arab peacekeeping force in Gaza and possibly the West Bank while the Palestinians establish state and security institutions; this would be much less provocative than Israeli or Western-led forces. They could also contribute funds towards the normalisation of Palestinian refugees in other Arab countries.
Israel’s Arab neighbours would also have to come on board. Egypt should end its blockade of Gaza, allowing Palestinians there to travel and trade – much as those in the West Bank do through Jordan. Syria is likely to be ruled by Islamists of one sort or another, but diplomatic pressure could persuade them to recognise Israel in exchange for relations with the West. Lebanon must complete the destruction of Hezbollah and, perhaps with the help of Gulf money, form a stable government that recognises its southern neighbour.
All of this will be unpalatable to many in the region and to their supporters in the West, but by now it should be clear to them that the status quo is intolerable and that their preferred alternative – the destruction of Israel – isn’t going to happen. All that’s left is to let go of some principles in exchange for peace, prosperity, and a long overdue end to the Palestinian people’s suffering.