By Peter Wertheim
6 June 2017

A lesser known but no less important date is July 7, the 80^th anniversary of the pub­lic­a­tion of the report of the Palestine Royal Com­mis­sion, estab­lished by Britain under the chair­man­ship of Lord William Peel.

It was this report in 1937, not the UN report on which the General Assembly based its famous res­ol­u­tion a decade later, that contained the first official recommen­dation in favour of partition based on the principle of two states for two peoples.

Far from being an obscure footnote of history, the Peel Com­mis­sion inquiry repays close study today. The tran­script of its pro­ceed­ings and the brilliant summary of its findings by historian Reginald Coupland, one of the com­mis­sion­ers, lay bare the clash of claims, griev­ances and aspir­a­tions that lurk beneath what we now call the Israeli-Palestini­an conflict, and explain precisely why anything other than a two-state solution would result in far worse bloodshed than the conflict has produced to date.

Here is Coupland’s summary, as apposite today as when it was first published: “An irre­press­ible conflict has arisen between two national com­munit­ies within the narrow bounds of one small country. There is no common ground between them. Their national aspir­a­tions are incom­pat­ible. The Arabs desire to revive the tra­di­tions of the Arab golden age. The Jews desire to show what they can achieve when restored to the land in which the Jewish nation was born. Neither of the two national ideals permits of com­bin­a­tion in the service of a single state … But, while neither race can justly rule all Palestine, we see no reason why each race should not rule part of it … If (partition) offers neither party all it wants, it offers each what it wants most, namely freedom and security.”

The Palestine Royal Com­mis­sion was estab­lished in August 1936 to invest­ig­ate the causes of the six-month-long Arab revolt in what was then the British Mandate territory of Palestine. Its hearings across several months included a memorable session with the Palestini­an national leader at the time, the mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini.

Husseini shocked the com­mis­sion­ers with his extremism when he suggested that most of the existing Jewish pop­u­la­tion of Palestine should be forced to leave the country or be exterm­in­ated. When asked whether he thought the 400,000 Jews already living in Palestine could be assim­il­ated into the country, he gave a one-word answer: “No.”

When pressed whether he meant that some of the Jews “would have to be removed by a process kindly or painful, as the case may be”, he replied: “We must leave all this to the future.” Husseini’s answer takes on an espe­cially sinister con­nota­tion in light of the fact he was soon to become one of Nazi Germany’s most fanatical and devoted allies.

Following the mufti’s evidence, the com­mis­sion noted iron­ic­ally, “We are not ques­tion­ing the mufti’s inten­tions … but we cannot forget what recently happened, despite treaty pro­vi­sions and explicit assur­ances, to the Assyrian (Christian) minority in Iraq; nor can we forget that the hatred of the Arab politi­cian for the (Jewish) National Home has never been concealed and that it has now permeated the Arab pop­u­la­tion as a whole.”

The Peel Com­mis­sion recom­men­ded par­ti­tion­ing the land into separate Arab and Jewish states, and creating an inter­na­tion­al zone from Jaffa on the coast up to and including Jerusalem.

The plan was never imple­men­ted. The Arab leaders met in Damascus and resolved that partition would be rejected outright and that the British would have to choose “between our friend­ship and the Jews”. Although Jewish leaders took issue with some of the details of the plan, they were willing to accept the principle of partition and the rationale for it.

On May 17, 1939, as the Arab riots ended, the British issued a white paper severely limiting Jewish immig­ra­tion into Palestine and land purchases. Published on the eve of World War II and the Holocaust, the white paper tore up the Balfour Declaration’s com­mit­ment to foster the Jewish national home and effect­ively signed the death warrant for tens of thousands of European Jews who otherwise might have found refuge from the approach­ing Nazi genocide. The existing Jewish pop­u­la­tion in Palestine would be relegated to permanent minority status in a future majority-Arab state.

Yet, incred­ibly, this too was rejected by Husseini and his followers. As Husseini’s evidence to the com­mis­sion had revealed, they were resolved to expel or kill off most of the Jews already living in Palestine.

This rejec­tion­ist attitude sadly persists and remains at the core of the conflict.

A recent exam­in­a­tion of the results of 400 surveys carried out by five Palestini­an research centres in regular polls in the West Bank and Gaza has shown that during the past 20 years 70 per cent of Palestini­ans have continued to seek an immediate end of the State of Israel, or to see a two-state solution as merely a stepping stone towards that goal rather than as the basis of a permanent peace.

No peace ini­ti­at­ive can succeed until this attitude changes fun­da­ment­ally, and a majority of Palestini­ans is prepared to accept a declar­a­tion from its leaders similar to the memorable words uttered by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in his speech to the Israeli Knesset in 1977: “We used to reject you … Yet today I tell you, and declare it to the whole world, that we accept to live with you in permanent peace based on justice.”

Peter Wertheim is executive director of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry.

This article was ori­gin­ally published in The Aus­trali­an