(Jerusalem Post) Efraim Karsh - The Zionist leadership accepted the two-state solution as early as 1937 when it was first raised by a British commission of inquiry headed by Lord Peel. It was the Zionist leadership that 10 years later spearheaded the international campaign for the two-state solution that culminated in the UN partition resolution of November 1947. By contrast, the Palestinian Arab leadership invariably rejected the two-state solution from the start. Had the Palestinians accepted the two-state solution in the 1930s or 1940s, they would have had their independent state over a substantial part of mandate Palestine by 1948, if not a decade earlier, and would have been spared the traumatic experience of dispersal and exile. Had Arafat set the PLO on the path to peace and reconciliation instead of turning it into one of the most murderous and corrupt terrorist organizations in modern times, a Palestinian state could have been established in the late 1960s or the early 1970s; in 1979, as a corollary to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty; by May 1999, as part of the Oslo process; or at the very latest, with the Camp David summit of July 2000. Had Abbas abandoned his predecessors' rejectionist path, a Palestinian state could have been established after the Annapolis summit, or during Obama's presidency. The writer, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, is emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College London.
2017-11-24 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive