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Competing Forms of State
For most of the ninety years since the end of Ottoman rule in 1917, the inhabitants of Palestine have been sharply divided about the most appropriate state structure, or structures, for governing the country. Today, despite the near-universal international legitimacy accorded to the Israeli nation-state, and apparent international unanimity as to the desirability of creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel, the question of what state structure or structures are appropriate for this small country is still undecided. Indeed, this is a deeply fraught issue, a source of existential anxieties among both the Palestinian and Israeli peoples, although those anxieties have entirely different roots, whatever their superficial similarities.
As I have discussed here and elsewhere, like most peoples in the Arab world, the Palestinians gradually developed a sense of modern national identity rooted in a defined nation-state in the first few decades of the twentieth century.1 This sense of common identity of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine was then cemented by the shared mass trauma of the destruction of Arab Palestine in 1948, which profoundly affected virtually all Palestinians in one way or another, and affects them still. In spite of their vigorous sense of collective national identity, the Palestinians have never succeeded in creating an independent state of their own, and have no sure prospect in the future of ever having a truly sovereign state, or of possessing a contiguous, clearly demarcated territory on which to establish it. Beyond this, for their entire modern history-since 1917-they have suffered from a series of traumatic impositions. These included the denial of their very existence and of their legitimacy as a national entity by Great Britain, the Zionist movement, and much of the rest of the world; domination and repression by a range of foreign powers; repeated expulsions from their homes, including the expulsion of over half their number in 1948; and over two generations of harsh, alien military occupation for many of them. In consequence of the lived experience of their own recent past over several generations, the Palestinians are thus understandably prey to profound, justified, and realistic fears of being destroyed and dispersed as a people.
By contrast, the Israeli people today have a very powerful state, one that has been...