It is a waste of time to keep relitigating whether each decision, each rejected plan, each declared state, was right or wrong. What happened, happened. It is what it is.
Some of the best minds of the last century have tried and failed to find a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I want to suggest that the answer lies with a new historical perspective and a revised narrative. The aim this time would not be to solve the problem but to place it in the context of one of the darkest periods of modern history, roughly the first half of the 20th century. Both peoples are survivors of that period, not only aggressors against each other, and recognizing that is the reframing I am suggesting.
The events of Oct. 7 and its aftermath brought out the worst brutality in the region, and the conflict with Iran is ongoing and may get worse. Of the two sides in that confrontation, one led by the Gulf states wants peace, while the other led by Iran thrives on war. But Oct. 7 also pointed to the obvious conclusion that peace is the only choice left and that this has to be the final war. There is a heavy legacy to get over on all sides and they should simply get over it. The second half of the 20th century was not much better.
In his essay collection “The Politics of Dispossession,” the Palestinian American academic Edward Said discussed how Palestinians inevitably relate every aspect of their lives and history to the loss of Palestine.
Israeli New Historians, such as Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Shlomo Sand, and Benny Morris, have gone a long way toward criticizing and reevaluating the history of Zionism and the creation of Israel. They are a good example to follow. Many Palestinian and Arab intellectuals — the most radical of whom was the late Fouad Ajami — are moving in that direction, too. Historians of Palestine have also done detailed and often critical work, particularly of the Palestine Liberation Organization. But I want to suggest taking this a step further by taking a step back and looking at the global historical perspective.
Both Israelis and Palestinians are victims of various versions of nationalism that were the product of the late 19th century. The idea that nation states should have a certain degree of homogeneity of population and a uniform identity triggered tragic transformations. Four empires collapsed in this period, ending a more cosmopolitan order that had prevailed in cities such as Vienna and Istanbul. Three of these — Russian, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and German — fell during the First World War. The fourth, the British Empire, though victorious, took longer to fall, finishing the job after the Second World War with the withdrawal from India in 1947 and from Palestine in 1948. Palestine is not a separate story from India and Pakistan; it was the end of an era.
The forces were structural — ideas about nationhood, empires giving way, populations reshuffled to fit a new template. But the decisions inside that structure were made by fallible people, often in the heat of the moment, without a clear plan and without being able to see the consequences that followed. We now have the benefit of hindsight that none of those decision-makers had. That is why it is a waste of time to keep relitigating whether each decision, each rejected plan, each declared state, was right or wrong. What happened, happened. It is what it is.
Mass population movements took place so often in the first half of the 20th century that they almost became normal, and were even written into treaties. Jews escaped pogroms in the Russian empire; Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Kurds survived genocide in the Ottoman empire; Greece and Turkiye exchanged populations by treaty; and India and Pakistan did the same at even greater scale.
Zionism itself was mostly rejected by Jews when first proposed by Theodore Herzl in the late 19th century. The Arab inhabitants of Palestine were not originally hostile to Jewish immigration, but there was no way such numbers could be absorbed without friction. If the partition plan was a mistake, rejecting it may have been another. Palestinian nationalism did not even exist at the time; it emerged as a reaction to both Zionism and to the treatment of Palestinians by Arab regimes, and made its own mistakes, too, alienating Jordanians, Lebanese, Iraqis, Kuwaitis and Syrians along the way.
The expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and villages was one of the tragedies of that half-century, and no version of that story, the Nakba, makes it in any way acceptable or less tragic. It happened at the tail end of the same imperial unwinding — the collapse of the British Empire in both India and Palestine.
Perhaps the answer is simpler than it looks. So far, the approach has been to solve the problems first and reach peace at the end. This has proved impossible, and it makes the whole process easy for spoilers to sabotage. In a mutual-blame setup, you have to fix the problems — refugees, borders, Jerusalem, return — before you are allowed to make peace, and each of those is easily blocked. Reverse the order instead.
Recognize the problems as real, but as the legacy of ideas, circumstances, and choices particular to that period — not a debt one side owes the other. There is no ledger left to settle, only a shared history to get over together. It is the will for peace that is important, and once that is established the details become much easier to deal with.
History has no overall plan. The stage we are at is the result of an accumulation of choices made inside constraints that often left little room for anything else, not the unfolding of some design that was always going to end here. What matters now is recognizing that we are recovering from the consequences of an awful period of history in which there are nothing but victims, and moving on rather than relitigating how we got here. There is also a past to look forward to. The region knew coexistence for most of the Ottoman period — Jews, Christians, and Muslims living together, not as an aspiration but as a documented fact. The culture of the Levant before the importation of these ideas was cosmopolitan and tolerant of diversity, and that is the precedent worth reclaiming.
Nadim Shehadi is an economist and political adviser. X: @Confusezeus. Courtesy: Arab News
