The following article has been published in Fathom Journal by Alex Ryvchin.

Alex Ryvchin, co-Chief Executive Officer of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry (ECAJ) and author of Zionism – The Concise History, argues in the British journal, Fathom, that the Trump Plan is the Palestini­ans’ latest shot at statehood and their flat rejection of it, without making a counter-offer, is a cata­stroph­ic strategic mistake, the latest in a long line.

The latest US proposal to end the Israeli-Palestini­an conflict has been pre­dict­ably rejected by the Palestini­an side. In fact, it was rejected before it was even tabled. Palestini­an Authority (PA) Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh announced the day before the plan was released, ‘We reject it and we demand the inter­na­tion­al community not be a partner to it…’ despite not quite knowing what he was rejecting.

To be sure, it is the Palestini­ans who have the most to gain from securing a deal. The Jewish people have their national home – a stable, suc­cess­ful, innov­at­ive, liberal-demo­crat­ic state that despite facing incom­par­able threats and chal­lenges, and despite having virtually no natural resources compared to its neigh­bours, has matured into an economic and military power in just 71 years.

But the Palestini­ans remain stateless and stricken by all the con­sequences of such a condition. Not only did the Palestini­an lead­er­ship reject Trump’s offer, they declined to counter-offer, or to even consider it a starting point for returning to nego­ti­ations, instead calling the plan a ‘hoax’ and a ‘fraud’ and summoning their people to a new ‘day of rage’.

Conflict res­ol­u­tion requires com­prom­ise. Com­prom­ise means accepting less than one’s optimum outcome. This is something Jewish leaders in pre-state Israel always under­stood. In 1937, a British Royal Com­mis­sion, which for the first time offered partition of the land and a two-state solution, concluded that ‘half a loaf is better than no bread’, and while ‘partition mean[s] that neither will get what it wants … both parties will come to realise that the drawbacks of partition are out­weighed by its advant­ages’. The ‘advantage’ offered to the Jews at that time was a Jewish state, in which the Jewish people could organise according to their own ideals, a place to ingather their exiles, grant refuge to those needing it, and enlarge Jewish cultural and sci­entif­ic achieve­ments for the good of the world. This oppor­tun­ity was too mean­ing­ful to reject, even if at that time the Jewish state offered was on a mere four per cent of the ori­gin­ally mandated territory and would exclude the ancient Jewish capital of Jerusalem.

The question of partition was rejected out of hand by the Arab side, which instead pledged at the Bloudan Con­fer­ence in Syria to pursue the ‘lib­er­a­tion of the country and estab­lish­ment of an Arab gov­ern­ment’. Transjordan’s King Abdullah stood apart as the lone voice calling for the partition plan to be con­sidered, warning that if it were rejected, Palestine would even­tu­ally pass wholly into Jewish hands.

Partition and a two-state solution was again offered in 1947 following a lengthy exam­in­a­tion of the origins of the conflict and a determ­in­a­tion by a majority of the UN Special Committee on Palestine, that ‘only by means of partition can these con­flict­ing national aspir­a­tions find sub­stan­tial expres­sion and qualify both peoples to take their places as inde­pend­ent nations’. Israel declared inde­pend­ence pursuant to the UN’s partition plan and set about defending its territory (losing one per cent of its pop­u­la­tion in the ensuing War of Inde­pend­ence) and creating a state worthy of the sacrifice.

The Arab side chose ‘lib­er­a­tion’, and ‘armed struggle’, bland euphem­isms that quickly gave way to explicit calls to ‘… pave the Arab roads with the skulls of Jews, and to saturate this earth with blood and to throw the Jews into the sea,’ as expressed in the somewhat florid style of Hafez Al-Assad, father of the current Syrian dictator (who evidently taught his son a thing or two).

In rejecting Trump’s offer of peace, PA Prime Minister Shtayyeh, delivered a strik­ingly candid explan­a­tion, perhaps unwit­tingly, for why the Palestini­ans, who claim to seek inde­pend­ence above all else, are rejecting a proposal to give them just that. ‘It is nothing but a plan to finish off the Palestini­an cause,’ he said.

Herein lies the answer to the vexing question of why a people that claims they want nothing more than a home of their own and an end to the conflict, have rejected five com­pre­hens­ive offers of statehood and have now taken to rejecting new offers before they are even presented.

The conflict is not a ter­rit­ori­al dispute to be settled by delin­eat­ing borders and agreeing land swaps. It is a clash between the Jewish national movement which des­per­ately craved a scrap of land to call their own so that they and their con­tri­bu­tions to humanity should not vanish from this Earth, and the ‘Palestini­an cause,’ which seeks no precise outcome beyond thwarting its rival, and holding out, digging in, strug­gling on, resisting. What they are resisting, no one can quite artic­u­late without des­cend­ing into pseudo-political babble about fighting imper­i­al­ism and Zionist greed. But so shameful to this ‘cause’ is the notion of com­prom­ise, so incon­ceiv­able is a life beyond conflict and grievance, that it is impossible to con­tem­plate any offer (other than perhaps that of Al-Assad senior), that the Palestini­an lead­er­ship and its boosters in the West, might actually consider. We hear how unbear­able life is under ‘Israeli occu­pa­tion,’ and yet the idea of reaching a fair bargain to change that condition is evidently more unbear­able still.

Meanwhile, the Kurds, the Assyrians, the Tibetans, all stateless peoples with unim­peach­able claims to their ancestral lands, whose eman­cip­a­tion movements have never quite taken off as a ‘cause’, and who don’t benefit from dedicated UN agencies or more than $31bn of foreign aid since 1993, would do anything for a single shot at statehood let alone a perpetual flow of White House peace proposals to scoff at.

One analysis of the Trump proposal, published in the Wash­ing­ton Post, describes the latest approach as ‘asking Palestini­an leaders to negotiate for part of a loaf rather than watch the whole loaf disappear’. The Jewish lead­er­ship grudgingly accepted in 1937 that ‘half a loaf is better than no bread’. Perhaps soon the Palestini­ans will be blessed with leaders that can elevate the future of their people above the contrived import­ance of an ignoble cause.

Alex Ryvchin is the Co-Chief Executive Officer of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry and the author of Zionism – The Concise History