The so-called two-state solution remains today, as of February 2024, the main plan on the table to resolve the eternal conflict between Israel and Palestine. History has amply demonstrated that the coexistence of the two peoples in a single multiethnic State seems impossible: it has never been at the root of the Zionist project, nor did the Arab leaders want it when they had it within their reach (with some exceptions in both sides, it must be said).
The remedy of partition is still the one officially defended by a good part of the international community, even when the reality on the ground does not exactly facilitate the creation of a Palestinian State. Leaving aside the current invasion of Gaza, the occupation of a good part of the West Bank by Israel and the poor control that the Palestinian National Authority has of the territory are more than enough reasons not to trust in this solution either.
But if the idea of the two-state solution is still valid, it is because its legitimacy lies in the United Nations plan for the partition of Palestine in 1947. As is well known, the General Assembly established in resolution 181 borders for the two communities, Arab and Jewish, based on the greater settlement of each other. It also established that Jerusalem and Bethlehem would remain under international control. The British refusal to carry out the plan, as well as the Arab rejection, ruined the operation.
What is not so remembered is that the UN partition plan had an immediate precedent: the Peel Commission proposal of 1937. Or what is the same, the first serious attempt to divide the Palestinian territory - at that time under British mandate—in two States with the objective of resolving a conflict that was already growing and with clear signs of stagnating, as has happened subsequently.
There is another way to explain what the Peel Commission is, although it may sound crude: the first attempt by the British to fix the mess they themselves had caused. But to do this, we must go back to the First World War, when the United Kingdom, in order to weaken the already very wounded Ottoman Empire, promised both parties to fulfill their territorial aspirations.
Almost simultaneously, the British gained the favor of the Arabs in exchange for supporting their independence from the Turks and a future great Arab state—albeit with uncertain borders—; They also committed themselves to Zionism to protect a "Jewish national home" in Palestine through the well-known Balfour Declaration, and, deceiving everyone and secretly, they divided the territories of the Middle East with France in the Sykes-Picot agreements, leaving for itself Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq - and thus be able to control the strategic Suez canal -, and leaving Lebanon and Syria to the French.
After the war, the deception was discovered. The Arabs saw how promises of sovereignty fell on deaf ears. The great powers claimed the Ottoman cake, while the Jewish minority in Palestine already had a document that supported its dream of achieving a Jewish State. The Palestinian territory was thus unified for the first time in centuries under the British mandate, which began to definitively administer the region from 1921, maintaining its promises to both communities, although gradually favoring the Zionists more.
From the beginning it was foreseen that the mandate would be a minefield. That same year, serious clashes between Muslims and Jews took place in the city of Jaffa, which would be the precedent for the riots of the following decade. However, the 1920s were relatively peaceful, although the conflicts to come were simmering. In part, demographics explain this tense calm: the majority remained overwhelmingly Arab-Muslim and Jewish immigration did not yet represent a real danger to the Arabs. The Hebrews, according to the British census of 1922, numbered just under 50,000 people, with more than 550,000 Muslims and about 80,000 Christians. Furthermore, the hand of the British had been felt: the region experienced a period of relative modernization.
The Arab elites experienced a process of politicization towards a nationalism that loosely combined pan-Arab ideals and the conception of their own Palestinian nation. However, the lack of leadership, the old clan structures and the enormous differences between countryside and city prevented it from being organized as a movement solid enough to set the agenda of the British. On the other hand, Zionism had the support of the money of the entire foreign Jewish community and was building parastatal structures that were increasingly solid and comparable to the Western world. The growing immigration promoted by Zionism, then still scarce but incessant, would increasingly complicate cohabitation.
Several factors contributed to the situation worsening at the end of the decade. To begin with, new disturbances. In 1929, a minor incident at the Western Wall in Jerusalem ended with an outbreak of violence that spread throughout the country. About 600 deaths were counted, 300 on each side. They were still spontaneous outbreaks, outside the elites of both communities, but they would soon escalate. Consequently, the Jewish community created the Haganah, that is, a paramilitary force that would be the embryo of the army of the future Israel. Likewise, the Arabs tried to organize themselves better politically and even militarily.
But the key that best explains the deterioration of coexistence is economic. The Palestinian countryside experienced a serious crisis as a result of a drought. But in addition, the progressive purchase of land by Zionism from Arab landowners – many of them foreigners – took away many Palestinians from their main economic support, generating new pockets of poverty in the cities.
The income differences between both communities increased exponentially. The yishuv (Jewish community) continued to expand and this time it did so thanks to new waves of immigrants expelled by the rise of Nazism. The majority of these new Jewish inhabitants, arriving from Western Europe but also from the United States, had greater purchasing power than their predecessors. All of this ended up contributing to the Palestinian economy no longer being shared by both communities and becoming segregated. The Zionist mission of making the Jewish proto-state self-sufficient had been accomplished. And the United Kingdom looked the other way.
Until it exploded. Fed up with the poor conditions of the Palestinian population and British passivity in the face of pleas to stop Jewish immigration, the Arabs organized themselves. The Arab High Committee, the first unitary body of Arab nationalism, decided to take the reins and call for a general strike and protests throughout the country in May 1936. Led by the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al Husseini, they were first peaceful protests but soon hardened, forcing the British police to open fire, for example, on protesters in Jaffa, or even with the arrest of Arab leaders at the hands of the British.
The United Kingdom realized that the situation was unsustainable and decided to commission William Peel, a lord of noble lineage and impeccable political career, with a report that would clarify the state of the matter and go further: provide solutions to the mess. The commission traveled to Palestinian lands and investigated on the ground the causes of the unrest and the increase in tension between both communities.
In July 1937 the mission issued its verdict in a report that, seen in perspective, was balanced and tried to give an even-handed response to both parties, even singing the mea culpa in the British management. Peel stressed that the causes of the Arab revolt were the same as in 1921 or 1929: the Palestinians' desire for independence. At the same time, he indicated that Arabs' "hatred and fear" of the construction of the "Jewish national home" promised in the Balfour declaration was another reason for the uprising.
Peel was clear about the incompatibility of both national (or, rather, nationalist) projects. The commission understood that "the compulsory conversion of Palestine to a Jewish State against the will of the Arabs would clearly violate the spirit of the Mandate System", in reference to the fact that the mission that the international community had entrusted to the United Kingdom was to guarantee that peoples can exercise their right to free self-determination.
Thus, he confirmed that the Jewish community had managed to organize "a State within a State", highlighted the enormous economic contrast between both communities, as well as between "the modern and European nature of the Jewish national home" and the Arab world, and insisted on that the Arabs would never accept being integrated into a Jewish state nor had the Zionists structured it to assimilate the Arabs. "A national home cannot be semi-national," he stated.
Since the two positions were irreconcilable, the only solution was to divide the territory into two separate entities, one Jewish and one Arab. The report included the borders of both states drawn according to the largest settlement of each, although it implied notable population movements. Broadly speaking, the new Jewish State would comprise the north and mid-west of the territory, with its epicenter in the city of Tel Aviv, founded by Jewish settlers in 1909, while the rest would correspond to the Arabs. This was a larger portion that included Gaza, the entire desert south of the country, and areas in eastern Judea and Samaria, and the commission further recommended that it be integrated into the future state of Transjordan, then also under British control. Finally, Peel's proposed map established a kind of neutral zone under British rule, a corridor in the center of the country drawn between the coastal city of Jaffa to Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
Peel's plan failed from the beginning. The Arabs rejected it outright: it meant a defeat for them, the confirmation of the success of the Zionist objective of taking part of their territory. At a pan-Arab meeting chaired by King Abdullah of Transjordan in the Syrian town of Bloudan, both the Palestinian leaders and the Arab states around them declared the sole objective was "to liberate the country and establish an Arab Government."
For their part, the Zionists adopted a more ambivalent position. Led then by Labor's David Ben-Gurion, the future prime minister of Israel; They celebrated that the British proposal recognized a Jewish State for the first time, so they half accepted the Peel plan. But for them it was not the final goal, but only a first step because they aspired to more territory. In some way, they took advantage of the Palestinians' more categorical refusal to communicate a less accentuated rejection and continue working discreetly on their objectives. Furthermore, the anticipation of more Jewish immigrants from Nazi Germany called for caution.
The United Kingdom kept trying. In vain. In October 1938, he sent a second commission to determine Peel's borders on the spot, but the new report concluded that partition was impossible. While the unrest continued in Palestine, London was the scene of new negotiations between the parties, which only served to seal the failure, so that the United Kingdom ended up changing its way of managing the Mandate. The so-called White Paper of 1939, at the height of the Nazi boom and on the verge of World War II, prohibited Jewish immigration to Palestine and left the creation of a single state for 1949.
The new measures appeased the Arabs and, of course, irritated the Zionists. The British now needed calm and chose to throw the ball forward. Only once the great conflict was over would the United Nations try to recover the idea of Peel's partition, this time drawing new borders with the goal of peace. But this would be the story of another failure.
