THIS week marks the 70th anniversary of Israel’s proclamation of independence, and recalls the Nakba (“catastrophe”) that displaced 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from Israeli territory.
Despite the extraordinarily successful achievement of Israeli state-building since the promise of a Jewish homeland was first issued by imperial Britain during the Great War, that achievement must be measured against the heavy price paid by the roughly 5.3 million Arab Palestinians who remain under Israeli occupation or blockaded in Gaza.
The elaborate 1947 United Nations-sponsored plan for a Jewish state to coexist alongside a Palestinian state was shattered by Israel’s sensational victory in the six-day war of 1967. Despite repeated international endorsement of the “two-state solution”, we can now fairly confidently conclude that it will not materialise.
Furthermore, recent realignments of power in the Middle East, with Iran now posing an immediate threat to Israeli territory from its footholds in Lebanon and Syria and Saudi Arabia unexpectedly talking peace with Israel, the plight of Palestinians has probably slipped down the radar of international concern.
Although the prospects for establishment of a Palestinian state had been receding for several years, the advent of the Trump administration in the United States probably sounded its death knell.
Read the opinion piece by Peter Boyce in The Mercury.
[Peter Boyce is adjunct professor in the University of Tasmania’s Politics and International Relations Program and immediate past president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, Tasmania.]