The following article has been published in Spectator by ECAJ co-CEO Alex Ryvchin.

It’s only taken a hundred and one years to correct one scribbled note

In January 1919, nearly three decades before the creation of the state of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, who would become the first president of the Jewish state signed an agreement with Amir Faisal, who would rule Syria and Iraq. The Weizmann-Faisal Agreement pledged Arab support for the estab­lish­ment of a new Jewish homeland in Palestine nearly two millennia after the conquest and exile of the Jews from the land by the Romans. The Agreement was signed on the eve of the Paris Peace Con­fer­ence at which the victors of World War I would determine how to admin­is­ter the former colonies of the Ottoman Empire until such time as their native peoples could form viable inde­pend­ent states.

As he signed the Agreement, Faisal appended a hand-written note in Arabic that stip­u­lated that his entering into the Agreement and support for Zionist aspir­a­tions was entirely con­di­tion­al on the Allied Powers granting the Arabs the new states they craved across the region. Faisal’s agreement with Weizmann is sig­ni­fic­ant for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it is a crucial recog­ni­tion by an Arab leader of the legit­im­acy of Jewish claims to a state in Palestine. Faisal’s father, the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein had earlier called Palestine ‘the sacred and beloved homeland of its original sons (the Jews),’ and welcomed the return of the Jewish exiles.

Secondly, it showed that far from being a prize in the Islamic world, Palestine could be conceded to the Jews so long as far greater ter­rit­ori­al aspir­a­tions in the region were met.

Thirdly, and perhaps most sig­ni­fic­antly, the Weizmann-Faisal Agreement, and more precisely, Faisal’s hand-written after­thought, bound up the future of a Jewish state in Palestine in broader regional affairs. Whereas the original agreement dealt with Palestine as a discrete issue, the edited version expli­citly connected any recog­ni­tion of a Jewish state to the ful­fil­ment of Arab demands elsewhere.

This framing of the Palestini­an issue not as a dispute over a small, long-neglected tract of land but as something insep­ar­able from wider regional interests would remain a permanent, seemingly immutable reality for over a century.

As the spectre of the second world war loomed, Arab leaders were able to skilfully use the growing strategic import­ance of the Middle East to extract con­ces­sions from the British on Palestine that effect­ively reversed British promises to facil­it­ate Jewish migration and inde­pend­ence in Palestine. Again demon­strat­ing how Palestine was no longer treated as the localised clash of Arabs and Jews in the land that it truly was and had taken on an overblown role in global strategic con­sid­er­a­tions, British PM Neville Cham­ber­lain told his cabinet in April 1939, ‘we are now compelled to consider the Palestine problem mainly from the point of view of its effect on the inter­na­tion­al situation… if we must offend one side, let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs.’

This inter­na­tion­al­isa­tion of the Palestini­an issue of course suited the Palestini­an lead­er­ship. The con­ver­sion of a local feud into a matter of pan-Arab pride and Islamic duty, enhanced the global standing of the Palestini­an cause, rallied the Arab world to impose boycotts of companies that traded with Israel, led to the invasion of the Jewish state in 1948, 1967 and 1973 in the name of Palestini­an lib­er­a­tion, and united the Arab world into a for­mid­able voting bloc in mul­tina­tion­al forums to seek Israel’s isolation. But this has merely exacer­bated the conflict, strengthened Israel through its ensuing victories and hampered the devel­op­ment of Arab nations.

In more recent years, the Arab Peace Ini­ti­at­ive, tabled in 2002 under Saudi patronage, offered nor­m­al­isa­tion of relations between Israel and the Arab world in exchange for Israel meeting Palestini­an ter­rit­ori­al and political demands. While con­sti­tut­ing a welcome softening of Arab oppos­i­tion to Israel, the Ini­ti­at­ive non­ethe­less rein­forced the belief that peace between Israel and Arab states could only be achieved with Palestini­an sat­is­fac­tion.

The idea that nor­m­al­isa­tion of relations between Israel and the Arab states was insep­ar­able from the Israeli-Palestini­an peace process had become so entrenched that to challenge it raised immediate derision and scorn in foreign policy circles. Mara Rudman, a foreign policy advisor in the Clinton and Obama admin­is­tra­tions dismissed Trump’s approach to regional peace­mak­ing as ‘a textbook on how to fail on Middle East peace’, asserting that ‘the conflict between Palestini­ans and Israelis must be resolved to fully realize the cooper­a­tion possible between Israel and Arab states.’ John Kerry was even more explicit and cocksure that a wider Arab-Israeli peace was irre­voc­ably bound up in the Israeli-Palestini­an issue, saying in 2016: ‘There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world. I want to make that very clear to all of you. There will be no advance and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestini­an process and Palestini­an peace. Everybody needs to under­stand that.’ Kerry hoped to reinforce a situation that he favoured through the sheer force of his asser­tions. The pos­sib­il­ity that the Arab world might be fatigued with the Palestini­an issue was not one Kerry was willing to entertain. To do so would upend con­ven­tion­al wisdom in the Wash­ing­ton and European foreign policy estab­lish­ments that placed the Palestini­an issue not only at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict but, for decades, con­sidered it to be a leading source of Islamic rad­ic­al­isa­tion and terrorism through­out the world. In November 2015, after Isis terror attacks in Paris killed 130 people, the Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström went so far as to attribute the attack to the plight of the Palestini­ans which, she asserted, compels Muslim sym­path­isers to ‘resort to violence.’

But the Abraham Accord has shown unequi­voc­ally that the Palestini­an issue, while still meriting a solution for its own sake, can be severed from global and regional affairs. The failure of the Palestini­ans to extract a con­dem­na­tion of the Abraham Accord by the Arab League has further evidenced the with­draw­al of the Arab world from the conflict with Israel restoring it to an Israeli-Palestini­an feud rather than an Arab-Israeli one.

The signing of the Abraham Accord and the reframing of the Arab-Israeli conflict as a localised dispute between Israelis and Palestini­ans has shattered a policy paralysis and a cycle of failed mediation and nego­ti­ations that has lasted for a century. Faisal had unwit­tingly bound the world into a hopeless paradigm that inflated the Palestini­an issue by linking it to the fate of the Middle East as a whole. Now a new Jewish-Arab agreement has finally corrected Faisal’s amendment, detaching the Palestini­an issue from wider regional interests by embarking on the peace between Jews and Arabs that Faisal and Weizmann ori­gin­ally envisaged.