Palestine Arab Rejectionism

A very early example of the ongoing until this very day the preference of Arabs promoting "Palestine" to adopt rejectionism:

HL Deb 27 March 1923 vol 53 cc639-69

LORD ISLINGTON had placed the following Notice on the Paper:—

Legislative Council just concluded in Palestine it is not a fact that the whole Arab electorate refrained from voting in protest against the new Constitution...

Islington moved to cancel Britain's Mandate over Palestine the following year. He initiated several anti-Zionist debates in the House of Lords. He was one of a group of Lords that included Lamington, Sydenham, Curzon, Northcliffe and Beaverbrook who were unfavorably disposed to Jews and exhibited anti-Zionist positions and opinions.

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Palestine Arab Rejectionism: The Beginning

The Arabs who resided in the area to become the Mandate of Palestine, intended originally to become, through the historic connection of the Jewish people to that country, the Jewish national home, adopted from the very beginning a diplomatic pose and policy of rejectionism. In essence, the later 1967 Khartoum Resolution adopted by the Arab League, of "no recognition", no peace" and "no negotiations", was the consistent framework of Arabs in their response to Zionism for the past century.

Already in late 1919, April 1920, May 1921 and November 1921, they were agitating, demonstrating, rioting and, of course, employing murderous terrorism, to further their political goals.

In those early years, these were the most prominent examples of that rejectionism.

1922: 

When the League of Nations awarded Great Britain the Mandate to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in Palestine, Article 25 separated from the territory the Zionist presumed they would be permitted to settle in in accordance with previous discussions. All the area east of the Jordan River would become an apartheid state for Jews.

Despite a loss of 75% of the land, the Arabs, instead of accepting that first partition, which had excluded much of the area of historic Palestine, denying Jews the right to purchase land there and creating a fake monarchy, instead, they insisted they wanted all the remaining territory west of the Jordan River also to be transformed solely into an Arab state.

The Arabs of Palestine, who preferred to be termed Southern Syrians and demanded that "Palestine" be joined to the French Mandate over Syria, rejected any "territorial compromise" and were unsatisfied with a possible "two-state solution". They wanted the Jews to completely "withdraw".

1923: 

Herbert Samuel, the first High Commissioner, following the Mandate decision to  foster the "development of self-governing institutions", proposed in August 1922 the establishment of a legislative council. It was to be made up of 23 members: 11 British, all appointed, and twelve elected members — eight Muslims, two Christians and two Jews. Despite the fact that this make-up would have doomed Jews to a permanent minority status in any future government, Arabs declared participation in the council as acceptance of the British mandate and Balfour policy as well as considering they should be granted further limitations on Jewish immigration. 

A boycott campaign of the council elections, scheduled for February 1923, was launched. The Jews, by the way, had accepted the proposal. The very low turnout dashed the proposal.

The Arabs rejected a possible political resolution of the conflict, based on democratic values.

1926: 

A dampening of the religious element of the focus was possible, one that could have avoided the later 1929 riots, when serious attempts were made to purchase or lease the Western Wall courtyard area. In fact, already in 1919, an offer was made.

As sourced here:

In 1919 Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann approached the British Military Governor of Jerusalem, Colonel Sir Ronald Storrs, and offered...approx. £5m in modern terms to purchase the area at the foot of the Wall and rehouse the occupants. Storrs was enthusiastic about the idea because he hoped some of the money would be used to improve Muslim education. Although they appeared promising at first, negotiations broke down after strong Muslim opposition. Storrs wrote two decades later:

"The acceptance of the proposals, had it been practicable, would have obviated years of wretched humiliations, including the befouling of the Wall and pavement and the unmannerly braying of the tragi-comic Arab band during Jewish prayer, and culminating in the horrible outrages of 1929"

In early 1920, the first Jewish-Arab dispute over the Wall occurred when the Muslim authorities were carrying out minor repair works to the Wall's upper courses...In 1926 an effort was made to lease the Maghrebi waqf, which included the wall, with the plan of eventually buying it. Negotiations were begun in secret by the Jewish judge Gad Frumkin, with financial backing from American millionaire Nathan Straus...However, Straus withdrew when the price became excessive and the plan came to nothing. The Va'ad Leumi, against the advice of the Palestine Zionist Executive, demanded that the British expropriate the wall and give it to the Jews, but the British refused

The Arabs leaders and their followers preferred to run a zero-sum game.  All rejection. No compromise.

They lost.

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Arab Rejectionism; Jewish Illogic

Rick Richman, writing in the blog section Contentions of Commentary Magazine, contends:

In the National Interest, Benny Morris​ succinctly summarizes the peace process, writing that there can be disagreement about tactical mistakes made over the years, but that:

[T]here can be no serious argument about what transpired in July and December 2000, when Arafat sequentially rejected comprehensive Israeli and Israeli-American proposals for a two-state solution which would have given the Palestinians (“the Clinton Parameters”) sovereignty and independence in 95% of the West Bank, all of the Gaza Strip, and half of Jerusalem (including half or three-quarters of the Old City).

And further that:

[T]here can be no serious argument either about Abbas’s rejection of the similar, perhaps even slightly better deal, offered by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. (Indeed, these rejections of a two-state solution were already a tradition set in stone: The Palestinians’ leaders had rejected two-state compromises in 1937 (the Peel proposals), 1947 (the UN General Assembly partition resolution) and (implicitly) in 1978 (when Arafat rejected the Sadat-Begin Camp David agreement, which provided for “autonomy” in the Palestinan territories).

That is six Palestinian rejections of a Palestinian state: 1937, 1947, 1978, 2000 (twice), 2008.

Actually, the correct number is seven, since Morris omitted the first one: in 1919, Chaim Weizmann​, president of the World Zionist Organization, and Emir Feisal Ibn al-Hussein al-Hashemi signed an agreement providing for Arab recognition of the Balfour Declaration, Arab retention of the Muslim holy sites, and WZO agreement to the establishment of an Arab state. Later that year, the Arabs repudiated the agreement.

Well, I would add the Woodhead Commission partition plan, even though it is a development of the Peel Partition plan which recommended

the exchange of populations between the Jewish
territory and the Arab territory: “If Partition is to be effective in promoting a final settlement it must mean more than drawing a frontier and establishing two States. Sooner or later there should be a transfer of land and, as far as possible, an exchange of population.”

The Commission envisioned a population exchange of approximately 225,000 Arabs and 1,250 Jews. The Commission asserted that partition would benefit the Arabs because it would grant them their independence, free them from the fear of Jewish domination, guarantee the protection of the Muslim holy places, and prevent their own impoverishment. The benefit for the Jews was that partition established a Jewish state free from Arab domination in which Jews constituted the majority, and with no restrictions on immigration...This plan also failed. The Supreme Muslim Council rejected the plan immediately. There would be no concession to the Jews. Palestine was Arab land and the Jews were colonizers who were unwelcome...Source. pgs. 89-90

The Woodhead Commission came to Mandate Palestine late the spring of 1938 and published its report in November. It suggested two alternatives to the Peel Partition. Plan B would have reduced the size of the Jewish State by the addition of Galilee to the permanently mandated area and of the southern part of the region south of Jaffa to the Arab State. Plan C would have limited the Jewish State to the coastal region between Zichron Yaakov and Rehovot while in the northern Palestine, including Emek Yizrael, and all the semi-arid region of the Negev would have been placed under separate mandate.

And there is also the Arab rejection at the St. James Conference in 1939.

The Arabs didn't campaign for that either.

Now, as for the Jews, it seems that there was a choice in the face of this consistent Arab intransigence but the academics and intellectuals thought they knew better, thought they were more rational and logical:

Magnes first voiced ideas on Arab–Jewish cooperation in his presidential address at Hebrew University in 1925...Magnes contrasted his position on Arab–Jewish relations in the aftermath of violence at the wall with that of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the Union of Zionist Revisionists, who advocated the establishment of a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan River, encompassing the land in both the mandates for Palestine and Transjordan.

Jabotinsky and Magnes occupied the poles of Zionist belief, from militarism at the one extreme to pacifism at the other. Magnes wrote to Chaim Weizmann, then chair of the Jewish Agency Executive:

I think the time has come when the Jewish policy as to Palestine must be very clear, and that now only one of two policies is possible. Either the logical policy outlined by Jabotinsky . . . basing our Jewish life in Palestine on militarism and imperialism; Or a pacific policy that treats as entirely secondary such things as a “Jewish State” or a Jewish majority, or even “The Jewish National Home,” and as primary the development of a Jewish spiritual, educational, moral, and religious center in Palestine.

A pacific policy would be based in Jewish values and would take full consideration of Arab claims. The binational state – a state neither Jewish nor Arab – was Magnes’s pacific policy.  Source here, pgs. 67-68.

Magnes lives on - in J Street, in Meretz, in Jews for Justice, et al.

Arab rejectionism goes hand-in-hand with Jewish radicalism, the blind leading the blind but bumping into all us rationalists and realists.

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