Raja Khalidi
Abstract: There have been no shortage of ‘Day After’ visions for the future of Palestinians, but they are often divorced from context, history, realities on the ground or the agency of most affected populations. Palestinians today must survive the onslaught, absorb its shocks, and work to ultimately impose their rights.
Introduction: Deja Vu
After a year-long war of catastrophic dimensions throughout the occupied Palestinian territory, the extreme degree of upheaval and vivid political and security failures of the past thirty years can only mean that a new formula is needed to understand the roots of, and possibly resolve, this renewed existential clash. Since the first months of the war, there has been no lack of international players floating their explanations for the October 7 attacks, how the conflict would play out, and what was needed in the aftermath. By month three of the war, US regime change experts had already begun spinning the first ideas about what the “Day-After” Gaza might, or in their views should, look like. Such visions are usually plagued by what may be termed “dayafterism,” akin to an affliction that engages experts, pundits, think-tanks and intelligence agencies in trying to shape reality through plans for post-conflict conditions in line with their own worldviews or strategic interests. Often external powers ’visions are divorced from context, history, realities on the ground or the agency of most affected populations.
We have been here before too many times over a century of struggle between the potent idea of “Palestine” and its people’s national rights, and that of the ever-expanding, increasingly aggressive, Zionist national project manifested in the State of Israel. Though one of the two sides in this asymmetric confrontation, the Palestinian people have always been considered the “poor cousin” in international relations, with their rights, freedom and security conditional on those of Israel’s. When contemplating a future “settlement” the international community has rarely taken its lead from the aspirations of Palestinians or from the legitimate concept of Palestinian nationhood. Even when the Palestinian people have been party to deliberations about their self-determination, their inclusion has not questioned the legitimacy of the State of Israel as it functions within itspre-1967 borders. The playing field has always been asymmetric, and the goalposts repeatedly shifted.
The high expectations that Israeli and US military officials had for a swift and total defeat of Hamas and quelling resistance in the West Bank largely informed the most recent schemes, with first projections envisaging a three- to six-month war, without major regional implications. Since then, as realities on the ground continue to confound predictions, and the region remains aflame, so has day-after planning shifted its assumptions. Schemes have become more complex to account for the growing number of players and their shifting positions. With most of the Israeli public still locked into the October 8 mentality of vengeance and total victory, any constituency that might have existed in Israel for peace seems to have disappeared. Stiff military resistance in the Gaza Strip and West Bank and an increasingly rabid anti-Palestinian Israeli government and public opinion have also changed calculations. Palestinian public opinion, split between solidarity with the resistance and the people of the Gaza Strip, and the dread of what Israel might still be capable of unleashing against Palestine and the enormous, incalculable cost this conflict has entailed. Who may remain standing on the battlefield and inside Israel, the reality of Palestinian public support for the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and other variables must now be factored into plotting the future. With Arab states increasingly implicated in possible post-war security arrangements between Palestine and Israel, their willingness and pre-conditions to join an international post-war effort, further complicate matters.
The Partition Principle: The Solution or the Problem?
Perhaps the earliest, and still effectively alive, version of a peaceful settlement between Arabs and Jews in Palestine was the two-state partition plan proposed by the British Mandate Administration in1937, through the Peel Commission. While this was purportedly the outcome of a colonial consultation process with the concerned communities in the wake of a three-year Arab revolt, Palestinian representatives largely boycotted what the saw as a process to justify a partisan imposition of a Jewish state in Palestine in line with the unjust Balfour Declaration. By 1947, on the eve of the outbreak of war in Palestine, the UN General Assembly resolution 181 decided anew map and constitutional basis for two-state partition – a formula again resisted by the now distinctly constituted Palestinian national movement, and rejected by the Arab states at the time. Of course, Israel has always had its own ideas about the Day After and began trying them out in 1948 on the 170,000Palestinian Arabs who remained within its borders. That population was subject to a harsh and discriminatory military rule that lasted 20 years, and within whose shadow some 1.8 million Palestinians in Israel still live today.
In 1967 the partition principle was partially upheld by UN Security Council resolutions 242/338, though on an even less equitable basis than before. The international community now simply demanded that Israel withdraw from territories occupied that year, without insisting or even suggesting that maybe it was time for the long-promised Arab state of Palestine to fill the vacuum. Needless to say, the PLO that had been established in 1964 was disregarded in these deliberations, and buy-in to this half-solution by the defeated Arab states was sufficient to legitimize this new framework for the next thirty years. By the late 1960s, 242 became the only game in town, the bedrock of the Madrid-Oslo peace process and still considered an essential, if not sole, pillar of any future settlement.
It was only over those decades of struggle for national liberation, that the PLO was finally recognized as the embodiment of the legitimate national and sovereign rights of the Palestinian people. In exchange it explicitly endorsed a two-state solution since declaring the independence of the State of Palestine in 1988. These outcomes were not a result of benevolent, belated humanity or wisdom on the part of Israel or its supporters in the West. The “achievements” in Palestinian nation-building enshrined by Oslo in 1993 only came after more bloody wars (1973, 1982, 1991Gulf war), popular uprisings (1987-1992), repeated waves of armed resistance from outside and inside Palestine, as well as terror attacks on targets globally, all underpinned by incessant diplomatic action by the PLO over the years. Well before Madrid and Oslo, as early as 1990 from exile in Tunis, the PLO was making the case for a viable Palestinian economy for the two-state solution.
While the Oslo Accords righted part of the imbalance involved in external powers conceiving a people’s future by including Palestinian engagement, the latter was conditional on the process actually leading to Palestinian independence within five years. Palestinian commitment to this endeavor was such that PLO experts worked alongside Israeli officials in designing a number of “Day-One” plans for two-state relations. For example, the joint “Economic Permanent Status” vision of 1998, and the PLO Statehood Plan of 2000, were predicated on peaceful relations with Israel recognized inside its pre-1967 borders and normalized state-to-state relations.
Israel has deftly avoided ever committing to Palestinian national self-determination and at best offered formulas at Camp David in 2000 and subsequently for non-sovereign or provisional statehood, without any pushback from its erstwhile supporters. From the Palestinian vantage point, Oslo now amounts more to a declaration of peace-loving principles by the PLO than the basis for the historic end of claims compromise between the two national movements. It succeeded for Israel, however, by locking the PLO into an asymmetric relation of “interim self-government” and a "peace process” that has dragged out for 25 years. Curiously perhaps, even today amid war, Palestinian officials and research institutions remain committed to re-envisioning Palestinian independence as part of a continued acceptance of the partition solution and a comprehensive peace.
The ongoing Israeli war against Gaza and the West Bank has blown away any remaining illusions about what Israel thinks about the ‘two-state solution’ peace process, and the very existence of “Palestine.” It can no longer be argued that Palestinians’ lack of commitment to creating a secure future for themselves and Israelis in their state next door, or their violent armed struggle for national liberation are, or ever were, the core obstacles to peace and justice in the region.
Planning for Palestinians’ Future from Peel to Dayton
The years preceding 2023 were marked by a distinct sense that the security, economic and political status quo of Israeli-Palestinian relations of the past decade would endure, on different bases between Gaza Strip under Hamas and the WestBank under the PA. Indeed, one year ago, there was no Palestinian day-after to plan for and global and regional strategic planning had migrated to other conflicts and hotspots. The magnitude of October 7th and its aftermath means it is only to be expected that the day-after syndrome would reassert itself, almost with a vengeance, in the form of several “Plans” and consultations, mainly by US, European, and Israeli research teams, former officials and wannabe peace-makers. Some are resurrected from past failed attempts, others assume they are able and entitled to redefine the playing field and the rules of the game, as if the past 85 years since Lord Peel departed Palestine never took place.
Some exercises are well-intentioned proposals, designed to be responsive to Palestinians’ experience of exclusion in determining their future by including Palestinian “experts” or influencers. But even these plans risk maintaining yesterday’s formulae (e.g. concepts such as “land for peace” or a “pathway to statehood”) or institutions (e.g. the PA, PLO and Hamas). Other international and Palestinian experts, also sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian quest for independence and cognizant of the failures of past formulas, have suggested moving to a phase of constituting (politically, legally and institutionally) the State of Palestine, even while Israel remains opposed to the very concept. Some of the latter proposals consider this approach as a way to accelerate global recognition of the State, while others focus on the need for Palestinian institutional renewal suitable to the new stage of the struggle.
A less benign Plan launched in May in DC by a cast of neoconservative hawks and AIPAC advisors was led by the US General Keith Dayton and offers a detailed blueprint for a multinational authority to govern Gaza separately from the rest of the oPt, and eventually hand it over toa de-radicalized, demilitarized “Gazan people” to govern themselves. This particular scheme resembles more of a Day Before Oslo, or Day Before Bremer-CPA experience of post-conflict imperial management, involving Arab states who have no real desire to clean up Israel’s mess. Most blatantly, the authors demonstrate no willingness to contemplate Palestinian rights, much less nationhood.
We cannot ignore that the Israeli national religious right envisions a Gaza cleansed of its people, re-settled by Israel and – as in the Trump-Kushner Deal of the Century’ vision – a piece of prime beach front real estate. Meanwhile, rumor has it that even the prestigious RAND corporation soon will weigh in with its own technocratic visions for Palestine, presumably less divorced from reality and rights than those of some of its competitors.
A significant takeaway from a Palestinian perspective about the growing raft of plans for Palestine is not the changing goal posts of the end-game. This is something which no longer surprises Palestinians who occupy a world that remains decidedly partisan towards Israel’s rights over theirs, and that allows it to pursue a destructive war with impunity. Nor do Palestinians find it ludicrous that old ideas rolled outby old minds rooted in yesterday’s understanding of the roots of the struggle and in their imperial designs for the region can gain traction in mainstream media and Beltway “think-tanks.” However, what is especially dehumanizing is that in the wake of this year’s monumental Palestinian cry for justice, 75years after Peel, their political representatives (be they from “legitimate” or “outlaw” factions) remain excluded from deliberations except as eventual subjects of another sovereign. Their right to national self-determination is still in limbo while their occupiers and their neo-colonial sponsors again believe they must step in to decide what lies in store for their people.
Palestinian Agency?
This dismal horizon would look less bleak if the shattered Palestinian polity were able to reunite in the face of such threats to its nationhood. External powers, including Israel and Arab rivals, certainly stoked and enabled Palestinian political division for the past decades, but ultimately Palestinians cannot hold others responsible for their own governance predicament. The stakes are no longer confined to the thorny matter of the blocked pathway to a Palestinian state alongside Israel or to the material interests of five million increasingly impoverished Palestinians under Israeli occupation. Any viable tomorrow must also account for the over five million registered Palestinian Nakba survivors in Arab countries and beyond, many stateless, who await justice for their people and the right to return to Palestine, their national home.
Friendly external actors viewing the Palestinian scene cannot be blamed for not knowing how to reassemble these fragments of a once-united Palestinian people, or for not believing they can be put together again. Both hostile plotters and Arab states seeking to escape any concrete commitment to Palestine will again cite Palestinian disunity and dehumanization in the wake of October 7 as a new pretext for conceiving plans that override their inalienable right, and proven ability, to govern themselves, again postponing statehood to an indeterminate future. Even if such intentions are dressed up to reflect current balances and strategic interests with lip service to the fact that they concern the lives of millions of Palestinians, they cannot mask the generally unrealistic and essentially colonial mindset from which they emerge.
For Palestinians to usefully engage with the flurry of discussions about their future, several essential prerequisites are needed that are missing from mainstream dayafterism. These include above all the long-delayed Palestinian political unity and geographic re-articulation, and constitutional planning for their State: a process that has begun to play out behind Palestinian closed doors, but with the people not privy to factional plotting. Also absent is a concrete international commitment, and urgent, effective steps to, realizing Palestinian statehood. Recent international recognition of the State has been an affirmation of a right, rather than a step towards making it a reality or considering the State the representative of the people.
Above all, without Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and ending its aggressive settlement activity in the West Bank, i.e. a sea-change in Israeli politics, there is no Day After. Notably, Netanyahu’s latest conditions on a ceasefire deal require a continued military presence in the Philadephi and Netzarim corridors that he justifies for strategic political, rather than operational military, considerations. This takes us back to well before Oslo, with Israel’s complete occupation of Palestine re-established and the inalienable right to Palestinian national self-determination revealed as the chimera it has always been.
A more likely scenario is that Palestine and Israel will remain locked in a downward spiral of the day before anything else. This surely will only bring more bloodshed, death, destruction and injustice, but from a Palestinian perspective Israel is no less wounded. In the meantime, Palestinians have little to add to what they have already put on the table back in 1988 and can at best hope to get some of their own housekeeping done in this terrible interregnum between an unsustainable status quo and the next phase of the century-old struggle. Their only credible plan, as a people if not as a coherent leadership, is to survive the onslaught, absorb its shocks and work to ultimately impose their rights.
Raja Khalidi is a development economist and Director General of the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS)
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