Ask Haviv Anything - 136: Why not two states from the start?

Episode Date: August 2, 2026

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Okay, on to the next subscriber question. It seems very difficult to establish two states now. Sometimes when I think about it, I almost despair. Why didn't they just establish two states at the very beginning? This is such an excellent and important and fundamental question, and it takes us to the moment where indeed there was a vote. I mean, the simple answer, there's a simple answer, and then there's a much more complicated answer.

The simple answer is the UN did absolutely vote in 1947 in the partition resolution to establish two states from the very beginning. And it was a plan, the partition plan, developed by the UN Special Committee on Palestine, unskopp, was deeply problematic and nobody liked it. It created two states that were each patches of land divided by the other state. So you would have a section here and a section here, and they were the Jewish state, and they were intersected by a section here and a section here of the Arab state and in the intersection both shrank into a point. And so it was two states side by side.

By the way, for both of them, the crucible of identity is Jerusalem. In the Unscab recommendation for the partition plan, Jerusalem was not in any of them. It was a special international city so that they wouldn't fight over them. The Arabs were absolutely opposed to pointed out that the Jews, even though they're not a majority of the population, they're roughly, give or take a third, maybe a little more than a third of the population, they got 55% of the land in this plan. And the Jews pointed out that actually they got less arable land, less land you can actually live on or farm or build cities or towns on, because most of the land given to the Jews was desolate Negev desert in the south. And so you ended up having a plan where everybody

felt as though they were given an almost impossible to defend rump of what it is that they would actually need for their people. And the most holy central core of identity, Jerusalem, was not in either. And these would be two states. The Jews, by the way, noticed at the partition plan, at the partition discussions at the UN, one Arab representative after another saying that the plan was illegal, they didn't recognize it, and they would actually make sure that that Jewish state did not survive. And so it mattered that the Jewish state had in defense borders and was subdivided by an Arab state. It mattered because that kind of a state, if it was attacked, literally wouldn't survive.

It's important to remember that this is a period when, for example, Marshall, before the American Secretary of State, before the 48 Declaration of Independence, told Moshe Sharate, the Zionist leader, who would be the Israeli foreign minister, that the U.S. believes that the Jews won't survive the war, that the Arabs declare if they declare independence. and he warned the U.S. won't come to defend them. And in fact, in the 48 war, Israel was under an arms embargo from the U.S. Everybody looks at this and says it's not fair, it's not defensible, it's not serious, but it's two states. The Jewish leadership looked around.

It looked around in a world two years after the Holocaust, in which the Holocaust changed nothing at all. The doors to the West were closed. There were immigration quotas everywhere. And there were therefore hundreds of thousands, a quarter million maybe more, Holocaust survivors, death camp survivors from Eastern Europe, slave labor camp survivors from German soil, who had, after the war, stumbled and hitchhiked and come starving and it's often sick into the displaced persons camps

in the American and British occupied zones of Germany. And these camps were usually, were often, former concentration camps like Bergen-Belsen, like Dijsin, like Dachau. So the Jews are living still, the survivors of the Holocaust, in the concentration camps on the soil of their murderers and no one on earth will take them in and nothing changed because of the Holocaust. And everybody knew from 43 roughly, everybody had an idea and kind of slowly, but by 44, everybody knows everything about what's happening at Auschwitz. And Eisenhower, so that nobody ever denies it ever in the future, takes photographs of himself.

visiting the death camps. Long story short, the Jewish leadership looks around at a world and says, the Jews need a place under the sun, and they're out of options. And if this for the first time in 2000 years gives the Jews a place to stand on their own two feet in a world that literally cannot allow them to live, refuses to allow them to survive in it, then we accept it, whatever it is. And if we have to fight, we fight. After what just happened to European jury, it's not like we have options after the threats being made at the partition talks by Arab leaders who said, if you vote to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, they said this to the UN, the Syrian representative, for example, said this explicitly.

We will be unable to defend the rage that will be directed at the Jewish communities of the Arab world. And that is exactly what happened. By the way, that rage had begun long before the Declaration of Independence of 19. The great massacre of the Jews of Baghdad called the Farhood was 1941 in a period where Iraq had a huge pro-Nazi movement in it. Just people can look up the Ali Rashid regime and the youth movement in Baghdad, the biggest youth movement in the city run out of the Nazi embassy. And so this sense that the Jews are also unstable in the Arab world, that the Jewish situation is as precarious there, delayed a couple decades from what happened in Europe, but not fundamentally different. different. After 48, the Arab world would go on to empty itself of its Jews to the last man,

woman, and child pretty much. The biggest surviving community is Morocco where only 99% left, fled. And Morocco had pogroms. Morocco had violence. It had oppressive laws. All those things, and that's one of the best stories was Morocco. One of the least brutal, one of the least frightening stories was Morocco. And so this is the Zionist. leadership that in 1947 says, we'll take it. We'll take it. Jews of 1947 in the Eastern hemisphere are kind of out of options. On the Arab side, there was a completely different debate, a radically different debate. And it's important to lay out Arab thinking, because the Arab thinking that totally rejected the plan, totally rejected an Arab state

in Palestine next to a Jewish state in Palestine. It wasn't obviously wrong. There were arguments. But those arguments, even if you can justify each one along the way, led to where things went, led to the failure to establish an Arab-Palestinian state. And so it's really, really important to walk through those arguments in order to understand why, even though the UN did actually vote from the beginning to go on the two-state path against the wishes of everyone, Jews and Arabs, it didn't happen. In Unscap, there were two proposals. One proposal was the partition plan. It ended up becoming the partition vote of 47. There was a second proposal, and this was a proposal of you could call it the non-aligned world.

It was proposed by Iran, India, and Yugoslavia. It was not an Arab proposal. And the idea was you can't separate the land. It can't be done. Now, by the way, in the partition plan, there's a great deal of integration between the Jewish and Arab state. The idea was you can't separate their economies. The Jews will control the major port that the Arabs will need, but the Arabs will control the arable land that the Jews need for food. I'm simplifying and exaggerating, but just to convey the kind of thinking at Unscop, they would be economically dependent on each other, was the concept. And then they had a second minority opinion in the committee, which was basically federalism.

In other words, there would be one state in Palestine. This is the Iranian-Yugoslav Indian proposal. There would be a single state in Palestine. And that state would have a Jewish autonomous polity and an Arab autonomous polity. And they would have a shared joint life together in some kind of a federalized system. Sometimes it's called a Cantonist system, which is to say there would be an Arab area, Jewish area, an Arab area, Jewish area, and this kind of quilt. These are all different proposals. The Arab leadership didn't just reject partition into two full states.

The Arab leadership of the Arab world, not just Palestinian leadership, totally rejected, out of hand, the federalist concept. And that's amazing because in the federalist concept, that federal government would control immigration, which is to say the two-thirds Arab majority at a time when the Arabs are also having more kids, their fertility rate is high. higher, would have ended the story. It would have been, you know, 20 years of a third to two-thirds. And then 20 years after that, and for all time, the Jews are 15%, 20%, what the Israeli Arab population is today in Israel, which is to say a large minority, but very much a minority that doesn't define the state. You want to demolish the Jewish state? That federalist concept would have done the job because Jewish immigration would not have worked. Now, it is arguable that immigration

was the only issue that really burned, not arguable, they said this out loud. Immigration was the only issue that would have set the Jewish polity on fire and they would have fought for tooth and nail to the death. And so, you know, that would not have gone down with the Jewish side, but the Arabs rejected it before the Jewish side had a chance to. Why would they reject this? And that's when you get into the partition discussions, and you can read the minutes at the UN, and they're totally accessible.

They're all published, and I recommend doing it as a thought exercise, just as a learning exercise about Arab thinking at the time. Because when you do read it, you discover essentially three Arab arguments against partition, against this plan that established both a Jewish state and an Arab state. And you discover why it is the Arabs who refused after 48 to establish an Arab state. If you remember, the 48 war comes and goes, the Jewish territory, controlled territory expands. The Arab-held territory is shrinks by about half from the partition plan to the ceasefire lines of 1949.

And that part, controlled still by Arabs, is controlled by, at the end of the war, the Egyptian army in Gaza and the Jordanian army in the West Bank. And they proceed to refuse for 19 years until 1967 when they lose those territories to the Israelis, to establish. an Arab-Palestinian state. In Egypt, they refuse because they don't want to legitimize the Green Line. They don't want to legitimize the Israeli control of the other side of the border, so they refuse to establish a Palestinian state in this side of the border. But in Jordan, which is the vast majority of still Arab-held territory in Palestine, the West Bank is 16 times the size of Gaza. In Jordan, they don't refuse out of some theoretical demand to hold out for Palestinian independence. Jordan annexes, declares the West Bank Jordanian, gives

citizenship to the Palestinians living there. They are now subjects of the Jordanian king. Jordan is now the steward at Al-Axa. Jordan is the West Bank. By the way, it will host a conference called a Jericho conference very early on in its annexation of the territory in which Palestinian elites come to Jericho and declare their allegiance to the king. Incidentally, it loses, control of that territory in the 1967 war, but it does not give up its claim to it as sovereign Jordanian territory until 1988 as a kind of Jordanian concession to the Palestinian national cause because the first intifada is already underway. And if you want to put pressure on the Israelis, the Jordanians can't officially declare that they don't believe there should be a Palestinian state.

that future we don't yet know in 47 but listen to the 47 arguments understanding that that's how the Arabs will relate to this Arab state that is to be founded in the partition plan if they could do that then understand what it is their thinking earlier three arguments the Arabs bring forward at the UN against the partition plan one is that it's a violation of the principle of self-determination What does that mean? The land has a majority of Arabs. The land historically for certainly recent centuries as a majority of Arabs. And therefore, according to the principle of self-determination, the majority population gets to decide whether or not this land is a nation state or shared with another people or not.

And so the very fact that the UN whose charter enshrines the principle of self-determination, the very fact that the UN thinks it has the right. to vote on a people giving up its self-determined nation-state land is a violation of the principle of self-determination. The UN doesn't get to split up Palestine unless the Arab population, which is the majority there, agrees, and the Arab population doesn't agree. And so just in principle, who the hell is the UN to say that Palestine can be split to two states? The second is that legally the UN has no authority to partition a country. Here the principle is very simple. What grants the UN that right? What law? And if the UN is not legally granted that right, for example, if a maritime treaty, okay, it has certain stipulations that it demands that nations adhere to,

it can only make the demand of nations that sign onto it, of nations that willingly accept its authority. The ICC only has jurisdiction over nations that signed the realm statute and join the international criminal court. The vast majority of Arab nations are not members of the International Criminal Court. The United States isn't, India isn't, Russia isn't, China isn't. In fact, roughly 80 to 90 percent of the military is actually engaged in conflict in the world are not members of the International Criminal Court. And that's a basic principle of international law. International law can demand of you only standards and requirements that you've signed up for.

Palestinians never signed up for the UN to be allowed to partition their country. And so the whole concept is null and void legally, never mind politically, never mind, you know, morally in the principle of self-determination, legally it's null and void. And finally, and the Arab representative said this explicitly, the attempt to impose a Jewish nation state on an Arab land, they said out loud, was an act of aggression that will be met by an act of aggression in response. They will declare war. it did not seem to occur to them that the declaration that they will destroy any Jewish state that is declared. They're warning that Arabs will turn on the Jewish communities of the Arab world if that state is declared. In other words, their statement that the position of the Jews in the Arab world is fragile. They're vulnerable.

They depend on the goodwill of Arabs willing to turn on them if other Jews somewhere else do something bad. was a kind of justification for the Jews, for the need for Jewish self-defense and self-determination. It made the Jewish argument. In fact, UN voting countries were not keen on partition. All the problems that the Jews came with and the Palestinians came with, it all made sense these countries. There was a serious questioning of the partition plan until the Arabs rejected even the federalist idea. And once you can't have federalism and you can't have it, you know, nothing can happen. and the Jews are threatened with war

and the Jews in the Arab countries, many of whom are not Zionist, are threatened with oppression if the Jews over in Palestine establish a nation state, well, that's an argument that the Jews need a nation state because they might have to run away from Iraq, right?

All of those things put together, the UN defaulted to the partition plan because the Arabs accepted nothing. If the Arabs accepted the federal plan, it probably would have been hard to turn to the partition plan. The Jews would have had to campaign alone for the partition plan. But the Arabs in rejecting everything ended up helping in the campaign for the partition plan.

And finally, it's really important to understand that when the UN various representatives at the UN asked the Arabs, Arab representatives from Arab countries and Arab representatives from Palestine, what they plan to do with the Jews. The Arab plan is a very simple plan. unitary Arab state, self-defined Arab state. And like the vast majority of Arab states, constitutionally it presumably would be Muslim, constitutionally it would be Arab, the Jews would be an ethnic minority, and the Arab representatives at the UN said they would be a protected minority. And so UN representatives of various countries said, what do you mean they'd be a protected minority?

That sounds really great. What are you referring to? and the Arab representatives explained that Jews who came under Ottoman rule, so roughly up to 1917 when the Balfour Declaration comes out, but also the British take the territory from the Ottomans. Jews who came up until 1917 would be allowed to stay as citizens. And that's a few tens of thousands of Jews. Everyone who came after 1917 is going to be treated as an illegal immigrant and removed.

Folks, until 1921, the vast majority of Jewish flight out of Europe, because of the mass pogroms, because hundreds of thousands are dying, because of discriminatory laws that are being passed everywhere from Romania, the Russian Empire, Poland, all over the place. Until 1921, 24, 28, the vast majority of Jews are headed west. When do large numbers of Jews begin to come to Palestine? when to the tens of thousands a year and ultimately hundreds of thousands come to Palestine, after everyone in the West closes their doors. Britain and Canada and Australia and America, America is the big one, they close their doors. Two years after the Holocaust, when the doors to the West are still closed and a quarter million Jews are still in D.P. camps in Europe,

the only proposal the Arab states, including the Arab leadership of Palestine, are willing to entertain at the UN is hundreds of thousands more Jewish refugees. And that's it, nothing more. And so the UN looks at that and says, you know, the Americans and the British are paying to feed hundreds of thousands of DPs. And they're desperate to solve this problem,

but their own policies, their own politics, their own parliaments, won't let these Jews into those countries. So this is a solution for them. They're pressuring everyone to go forward with this. and the only answer the Arabs have is to add to the Jewish refugee community nobody wants hundreds of thousands more

that's literally the only option anyone is willing to entertain and that's when the UN the votes are found and everyone goes for partition and the Jews declare independence and the Arab armies flood into the land and there's a war there'd already been a civil war from the partition vote itself in November 47 there was already violence between Jews and Arabs in the land, Palestinians and Jews, not yet Israelis, in the land.

Six months in, May 1948, Israel declares independence the moment after the British mandate is over and the last British governor, you know, gets on a boat and leaves. And then the Arab states declare war and invade. And the results of that invasion, nobody knew how it would go. You know, the Americans and British have the Israelis under a military embargo. go. They won't sell them weapons. So the Jews end up buying weapons from the checks, apparently at the direct order of Kamrad Stalin. The Soviets look at the Arab world. They see an Arab world still dominated by the British. So the Arab world is coded for them as Western imperialist. And the Jews are all Marxists. The dominant political faction among the Jews,

Ben-Gurion himself, is deep socialist. And the crack fighting forces of the Palmaq, the sort of strike teams of the Haganah, are part of a party that's called Mapam, which is an even more left-wing, more communist party than Mapai of Ben-Gurian. And so this is a polity dominated by East European communists. And Stalin thinks to himself, they're the vanguard in the Middle East of anti-imperialism. They put massive pressure on the British to kick them out, and they are a potential Soviet satellite. And so Stalin arms the Jews. when the Americans refuse in the most desperate existential war. And also beginning in May 1948, the DP camps start emptying out en masse

within a few short months, 150,000, something like that. DPs, displaced persons, refugees, Holocaust refugees stuck on German soil for three years when no one on earth would take them in, begin to land in the land and are added to the population. And almost immediately, now that there's somewhere to run away to, the Jews of the Arab world begin to flee, sometimes because of direct immediate violence and pressure, sometimes because of discriminatory laws passed against them, but just the fact that there's somewhere that will definitely take them in. The Jews of 1948 face a catastrophic economic collapse. The country has no industrial base. The country has massive problem of trade. The currency is worthless,

and because the government is spending so much on the war, and because it's taken. taking in people who had left all their assets behind in the Arab world and people who had no asset left because their entire civilization was burned to the ground. The population of Israel doubles in three years. Between 1948, when there are 650,000 roughly Israelis, the moment Israel is founded, there are 1.3, 1.4 million by 1951.52. And in that situation, with a collapsed currency and a collapsed economy and literal hunger, the children are, they declare an austerity plan where people get coupons that you exchange for food to ration the food to make sure everyone has food. Because if you leave it to the open market, people will starve. And children are fed powdered eggs as a source of protein. Those are the conditions under which Israel embarks on its great journey and the beginning of its attempt to survive.

And at the end of 1948-49 war, Egypt finds itself in control of the last piece of Palestine in the south, not dominated by the Israelis, not under the Israeli rule. And Jordan, in the much larger area, the center of the country, it shrinks Israel down to nine miles wide at the middle. it's the highlands overlooking, you know, the coastal plain, the major population centers of the Jews, and Jordan then annexes it and declares it not Palestine, but Jordan. So why aren't there two states? The UN wanted two states. The UN, by the way, was willing to have one state, and the Arabs rejected that out of hand before it ever got to the Jews.

And then they rejected even a federalist system with the Jewish autonomy. And then they rejected even just the Jews remaining in the land. And so what options were there for the Jews but the founding of Israel? What options were there for the Jews but the fight against the invading armies? What options were there for the Jews? People want to have a big relitigation of the Nakba of the 1948 mass displacement of Palestinians. Most fled, a great many were also forcibly pushed out. All of those things happened.

But they happened between two sides that correctly understood their situation to be existential. And everything that the Arabs around them did to Palestinians and to Jews cause greater harm, greater suffering, and limiting of options for both Palestinians and Jews, to the point of literally refusing to establish a Palestinian state, That was an Arab refusal, both at the UN, and then when there is Arab held parts of Palestine, the Arabs literally claim it for themselves, and there should not be a Palestine, it's theirs. In 1964, at Cairo at the Arab League Summit, the group of activists backed by Egypt, backed by Nasser, backed by the Soviet Union, established a PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, modeled on the FLN-R rebels,

of Algeria who kicked out the French colonists, colonialists in Algeria. And their concept is the Jews are colonialists here. They're European colonialists, and we will do to them what the FL ended to the French, which mainly is terrorized them for eight years in the Algerian case, and then they will all get up in leave. They never noticed that the Jews are actually refugees with no mother country to go back to. This was not part of the discussion. But when the PLO is established in Cairo in 1964, it is explicitly forbidden from campaigning for the liberation of Gaza. It is explicitly forbidden.

It is in its founding documents from campaigning for a Palestinian state in the West Bank because it exists at the pleasure of the Arab League. And so it doesn't get to take territory away from Jordan, even if it's Palestine. It doesn't get to take territory out of the control. Egypt, by the way, rules Gaza with an oppressive military rule. It didn't give citizenship as Jordan did in the West Bank.

And the PLO is not allowed to fight them. And so the PLO embarks on a war to kick the Jews out of Israel and is not allowed to fight against any other ruler and any other part of historic Palestine. The PLO only turns to the question of occupation in 67 when Israel, in a war, kicks the Egyptians out of Gaza and the Jordanians out of the West Bank. No matter how self-serving it sounds and propagandistic it sounds today, if you go to the actual Arab arguments and the actual minutes and they're all available online. They're at the UN website. They're extremely accessible. You go to the minutes of UNSKOP, of the partition vote, of the discussions. At no point did the Arab world understand that they're dealing with refugees who have no other options and who will behave as though they have no other options. And so the Arab world pushed those

refugees into the only option left to them. And in Israel was founded and a Palestine was not. And that's why there wasn't a two-state solution established from the very beginning, despite the fact that most of the international community did actually vote for it. Thanks for asking.