The UN Approach to the ‘Question of Palestine’ During the Cold War

Abstract

This chapter explores the first phase of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and its impact on identities in conflict by analyzing the period that starts with the Partition Plan and lasts during the Cold War, until the First Intifada (1947 to 1987). The Cold War period is considered a phase of its own as it marks an important moment in terms of the formulas for solving this conflict—the two-states solution—and the definition of actors that were deemed relevant for such solution. The argument developed is that the reinforcement of dehumanization processes in this period is connected with a defensive reaction of the two competing identities to developments in the international level related with the peace process, that was mainly restricted to elite-driven negotiations toward reaching an agreement regarding the governments and boundaries of the now partitioned territories.

This chapter explores the first phase of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and its impact on identities in conflict by analyzing the period that starts with the Partition Plan and lasts during the Cold War, until the First Intifada (1947 to 1987). Following the main reasoning of this book, I hereby propose that the panoply of actions taken after the end of the Second World War and the dismantling of the British Mandate to decide on the future of the region should be read as the beginning of what would become a protracted peace process. A systematic, planned and sustainable approach to peacemaking in the region was not in place at that time and, more importantly, not before the process that led to the Oslo Accords in the 1990s. However, the teleological approach taken in this book allows for a reframing of the episodic, reactive, but ever more constant attempts to mediate a solution to the so-called Question of Palestine during the Cold War as the first phase of the historiography of the Israeli-Palestinian protracted peace process.

The Cold War period is considered a phase of its own as it marks an important moment in terms of the formulas for solving this conflict—the two-states solution—and the (re)definition of actors that were deemed relevant for such solution. Moreover, this phase corresponds to a very specific type of peace architecture which was constrained in its repertoire by the latent conflict between the two political, ideological and military superpowers. To draw a complete overview of the peace process, avoiding anachronistic analyses that might obscure its long-term existence due to the differences in the interventionist paradigm at the moment, it is necessary to combine the study of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process with a contextual analysis that puts in perspective the limitations and possibilities that derived from the international world order during the Cold War.

Hence, this chapter situates the mandates, mechanisms and tools employed toward peacemaking in a period of bipolar confrontation in which direct international interventionism in any region was always a balance between frequently opposed interests and aims. Section 5.1 traces the long-term effects of the two-side politics that prevailed in this period, and which initiated with the Partition Plan that recognized the Jewish identity claims as opposed to ‘Arabic’ ones, analyzing how this has affected the already existing processes of dehumanization explored in the last chapter. Section 5.2 examines the approaches to political reconciliation that had dominated in the context of the bipolar world order and their consequences to peacemaking in Israel and Palestine in both the societal and the national level. Section 5.3 discusses how the reactive approach of the peace process at this moment impacted identities and the course of the conflict during the Cold War. This chapter concludes that the reinforcement of dehumanization processes in this period is connected with a defensive reaction of the two competing identities to developments in the international level related with the peace process, that was mainly restricted to elite-driven negotiations toward reaching an agreement regarding the governments and boundaries of the now partitioned territories.

1 Recognition and Denial from the Partition Plan to the First Intifada

There was no such thing as Palestinians, […] they did not exist. (Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, 1969)

There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. (Hamas Charter, 1988)

The above-cited quotations summarize the double paradigm of denial and conflict that has dominated the relationships between Israelis and Palestinians during the period of the Cold War. By the end of the Second World War, what is now widely known as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict started to develop in its current shape due to the end of the British Mandate and the insertion of the so-called Question of Palestine into the United Nations’ agenda. In fact, the conflict between these two identity groups with increasing national aspirations took its current shape only when the UNGA approved Resolution 181 that partitioned the land of Palestine into two states: one Jewish and the other one Arabic (UN 1947a). This decision deeply impacted both the formula for transforming this conflict up to today and the national claims of both peoples, whose very existence started to be connected with official international discourses about their identities—or, in the Palestinian case, its constantly argued inexistence (Pappé 2013: 2; Said 2001; Khalidi 2013: xviii).

In order to draw a genealogy of dehumanization, it is important first to put into context the construction and transformation of the Israeli and the Palestinian national identities in light of the peace process that has developed in this region during the period of the Cold War. The end of the Second World War operated a paradigm shift in the International Relations. The creation of the UN and the simultaneous development of a bipolar system during the Cold War were both responsible for the appearance of new approaches to conflicts and the promotion of peace (Ramsbotham et al. 2011: 42–49; Wiberg 2005). On the one hand, the failure of the League of Nations, and the dimension of the war that followed it, urged for the construction of diplomatic conflict resolution mechanisms that could substitute the resource on armed conflicts. On the other hand, the need to avoid an escalation in the debuting conflict between the two superpowers (with nuclear weapons capabilities) that emerged with the beginning of the Cold War led to the consolidation of a praxis of proxy wars in recently decolonized territories, as well as in the context of several self-determination conflicts that developed as a result of the collapse of former empires (Richmond 2008: 50).

It was in this very specific environment that the United Nations was established, as an organization whose mandate included the task of maintaining international peace and security, as well as intervening diplomatically in any situation that could undermine the established international world order (UN 1945). At the systemic level, the Cold War and the bipolar world order created the context for the development of specific mechanisms for dealing with conflict and limited to the idea of managing them, as translated into policies such as conflict management and peacekeeping (Bellamy et al. 2010: 170–175). Fearing the escalation of conflict between the superpowers that sought for spheres of ideological influence, international interventionism at this time was mainly restricted to observer missions and diplomatic efforts at the level of political elites (Weiss et al. 2014: 49–52). The societal level was not taken into serious account as this phase is marked by negotiations between states, also as a way to legitimize the nation state system that triumphed after the Second World War, and thus reflecting in practice a narrow and state-centric definition of peace as the absence of direct violence (Richmond 2008: 50–51).

In the case of Israel and Palestine, in which one of the main actors is not widely—and, in fact, was not at all by then—recognized as a sovereign, legitimate and consolidated nation state, this meant that negotiations on behalf of the Palestinians were made by proxy.¹ Palestinians were not recognized as an identity group fighting for self-determination as they were inserted in the greater Arabic identity, especially in the context of Pan-Arabism movements that were strong due to the liberation wars that had been fought in that region. In this context, Palestinians were denied identity and singularity by the international community, their neighbors and the peace process alike (Khalidi 1997).

Last chapter highlighted that the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is deeply connected to that of the international environment in which it has developed. Even more so, since it was one of the first topics in the United Nations’ agenda, having been discussed in its first and second especial meetings of the General Assembly. Moreover, the aftermath of the First Arab-Israeli War of 1948 created the first peacekeeping experiences of the United Nations, having deployed an observer team within the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) following the order of cease-fire under Chapter VII of the UN Charter (Weiss et al. 2014: 49). Although the conflict was not created by the decolonization process that had initiated with the resume of the British Mandate for Palestine, it is quite evident that its current configuration and existing approaches to resolving the conflict are directly linked to November 29, 1947, the day of the approval of the Partition Plan. For this reason, and as per what was explained in the previous chapter, although many authors (Pappé 2013; Said 2001: 7; Khalidi 2009) refer to the origins of the conflict as dating back to the eighteenth century or the beginning of the nineteenth century, this book places a stronger focus on the period from 1947 onward. Therefore, the main goal of this work is to analyze the impact of the peace process initiated through the UN in 1947 on the conflict, and particularly its protracted nature. Whereas more than 70 years have passed since that moment, it is relevant to investigate the reasons why what can now be called a protracted peace process has not succeeded and, more importantly, what it has achieved and how it has impacted the conflict and efforts toward its transformation.

First, it is worth noting that the idea of partitioning the land of Palestine dates back to a decade before its actual implementation. As discussed in the last chapter, this proposal first appears in the Report of the Palestine Royal Commission, headed by Lord Peel in July 1937,² which reached the conclusion that “the grievances and claims of Arabs and Jews (…) cannot be reconciled”. Although the British Government had changed this position later due to the strong and violent opposition of the Arab leadership, issuing a Policy Statement Against Partition in November of the next year (Alatout 2009: 379), this proposal would become relevant again in light of the events of the Second World War, namely the Holocaust. The shocking genocide of the Jewish people reinforced the idea that the Jewish problem would only reach a definitive resolution if their national aspirations were to be met in a land of their own (Pappé 2010: 179–181). However, while for the Israelis the approval of the Partition Plan meant independence and self-determination, for the Palestinians the beginning of the UN-sponsored peace process had only initiated the Nakba (catastrophe in Arabic). It was at the end of August 1947 that the Summary Report of the UN Special Committee on Palestine was published with two recommendations, being one approved by the majority of its 11 members and the other one by the remaining three members. The former was a plan of partition with an economic union while the latter would be the establishment of an independent federal state comprised of an Arab State and a Jewish State enjoying “full powers of local self-government” (UN 1947b). Despite the doubtful and uncritical methodology applied by the members of the commission,³ the proposal of the majority was approved on November 29, 1947, during the 128th plenary meeting of the UNGA, thus creating the Resolution on the Future Government of Palestine (UN 1947a), also known as the Partition Resolution or the Partition Plan.

This resolution can be considered the birth certificate of this conflict and the first action taken in the context of the peace process that had affected identities by reinforcing previous narratives and dynamics of dehumanization of the ‘other’ in the national and societal levels. As already mentioned, the UNGA Resolution 181 (II) not only inaugurated the actual widespread formula for solving this conflict (the two-states solution), it also partitioned the land of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. On the one hand, this decision legitimated, and ultimately made possible, Jewish claims for an ethnically based state. On the other hand, it deliberately ignored the existence of Palestinian identity claims and downplayed the importance of their feelings of attachment to that land. Rashid Khalidi (2006: 125) affirms that “they [the Palestinians] were either not consulted, or were effectively ignored by the various international efforts that culminated in this resolution”. According to Ilan Pappé, “this is a pattern we will see recur frequently in the history of peacemaking in Palestine […] [in which] ‘bringing peace to Palestine’ has always meant […] [acting] without any serious consultations with, let alone regard for, the Palestinians” (Pappé 2006: 32). In addition, the resolution was approved mainly by external actors that represented political elites, many of them lacking legitimacy and recognition at the societal level for representing their populations.

This top-down model of promoting statebuilding artificially conveyed practical implications. First, the Partition Plan—boycotted by the Arab leadership—was drawn without serious consideration for the real situation on the ground, dividing the region in a disproportionate way.⁴ And second, the geographical representation of Palestine proposed by the partition created two states with somewhat intertwined territories due to the discontinuousness of borders and with Jerusalem as a permanent trusteeship that should have been administered by the UN.⁵ In the words of Charles D. Smith, data from 1946 estimated that there were

1.269 million Arabs in Palestine and 608,000 Jews, a two-to-one ratio. Jews owned approximately […] slightly over 6 percent of the total land area (…). [For this reason], few Palestinians were probably willing to agree to partition. They occupied most of the area and were still a sizable majority in their homeland. (Smith 2010: 190)

What can be considered an exercise of social engineering had its costs. According to Ilan Pappé, although there were already documented intentions manifested by Zionist leaders to enforce eviction of the local Palestinian population regardless of their acceptance of the UN resolution,⁶ the Arab refusal of the Partition Plan “provided a pretext for implementing a systematic expulsion of the local population within the areas allocated for a Jewish state” (Pappé 2010: 123–124), contributing to the beginning of the refugee problem.⁷ Reactions to this Resolution, contradictorily to the UN’s intentions of implementing a peace plan, also culminated in the First Arab-Israeli War, following the State of Israel’s Proclamation of Independence. Correctly fearing what was about to become a civil war due to the already perceived escalation of violence between Jews, Palestinians and Arabs from the neighboring countries, the British Mandate delivered on its promise to leave the region in the shortest period possible without any arrangement for a transitional period or a provisional government, thus creating a vacuum of power that was going to be filled by the Zionist political leadership.

The Israeli Proclamation of Independence, published on May 14, 1948,⁸ was strongly marked by a will to gain international endorsement for the national claims of the Jewish people. This document is interesting to the argument developed here since it is a reaction by Jewish political elites to the first decision within the Israeli-Palestinian protracted peace process, that is deeply connected with the making and consolidation of the Jewish national identity at the international level. This document’s narrative on the definition of the Jewish identity is one great example of how the peace process has impacted the construction of identities and how this impact has been reflected in the negative dimension of identity building, being the relationship with the ‘other’ or the differences from the ‘other’.⁹ As argued by Shlomo Sand, it is an ambivalent document since it meets the UN requirements regarding the democratic character of the state by promising “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants” but embodies the Zionist view of its founders (Sand 2010: 281–283). Without any explicit mention of the existence of any other population or identity group that inhabited Palestine, following the praxis of denying their existence, the document begins with a strong statement that consists in an attempt to counteract the Palestinian position and undermine their claims to the region based on the Jewish people’s previous attachments to the land of Palestine or, in the document’s terms, Israel: “The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here, their spiritual, religious and national identity was formed. Here they achieved independence and created a culture of national and universal significance” [the italic is mine]. It goes further by proclaiming “the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country […] [through] the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel”. As per what is stated in the document, this decision was grounded in the adoption by the UN General Assembly of “a Resolution requiring the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine […] [since] this recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their independent State is unassailable” [the italic is mine]. The beginning of the peace process thus provided the pretext, legitimacy and justification for the actions that were about to come from both sides.

It is worth noting that this phase of the peace process can be associated with more than the increase of cultural violence, expressed in the abovementioned references of absence, inexistence or denial of the ‘other’. Data from that period shows an outburst of direct violence ever since 1947, connected to widespread popular knowledge of the UN arrangements of the UNSCOP committee and to the posterior decision of the General Assembly (Khalidi 2010: 177–179; Darweish and Rigby 2015: 21–22). The war that was initiated in 1948 by the Arab neighbors against Israel, as well as the latter’s actions against the local population in the form of an ethnic cleansing¹⁰ and forced displacement, is also linked to the decisions taken by an unexperienced UN in the first years of its existence.¹¹ The famous Israeli historian Ilan Pappé connects the elite-driven character of the peace process to its consequences. He considers that “partitioning the country—overwhelmingly Palestinian—into two equal parts has proven so disastrous because it was carried out against the will of the indigenous majority population” and that “instead of calming the atmosphere, as it was meant to do, the resolution only heightened tensions and directly caused the country to deteriorate into one of the most violent phases in its history” (Pappé 2006: 32–33) According to him, those tensions were directly connected to the developments of the peace process since

as it was unclear which way the UN would go, life continued more or less as normal, but the moment the die was cast and people learned that the UN had voted overwhelmingly in favor of partitioning Palestine, law and order collapsed and a sense of foreboding descended of the final showdown that partition spelled. (Pappé 2006: 33)

The Arab decision to boycott the UN proceedings and their first move toward war are depicted to this day in Jewish propaganda as a proof of their unwillingness for peace.¹² Differing narratives regarding those events (e.g., in the Israeli side they are related to independence while in the Palestinian side they are characterized as a catastrophe) also created long-lasting myths in the political and cultural imaginaries of those peoples. Some have even served as ammunition for disqualifying the ‘other’s’ narratives and claims, hence creating discursive and political legitimacy for the continuation of actions of direct, structural and cultural violence toward one another.¹³ As a matter of example, according to Peretz Kidron,

Israeli propaganda has largely relinquished the claim that the Palestinian exodus of 1948 was ‘self-inspired’. […] Even though the historical record has been set straight, the Israeli establishment still refuses to accept moral or political responsibility for the refugee problem it—or its predecessors—actively generated. (Kidron 2001: 94–95)

The UN response to this was paramount in considering that those people should have the status of refugees. Nevertheless, the United Nations Resolution 194 (III), of December 11, 1948, that became famous especially due to Article 11, in which the UN “resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date” (UN 1948), never got into effect.

Charles D. Smith characterizes the period from the conclusion of the 1949 armistice agreements between Israel and its neighbors as an era of “no war—no peace”, since belligerency still existed but the success of the Israeli leadership to secure the newly acquired borders of the recently created state led to a situation in which the status quo was maintained and a permanent state of latent conflict became the norm (Smith 2010: 222–223). During this period from 1948 to 1967, there was a drastic separation of the territories of the historical Palestine and their societies. This situation generated an almost absolute lack of contact between Israelis in their newly acquired territories and Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, that had been controlled respectively by Jordan and Egypt (Kelman 1999: 584). Thusly, it created the perfect environment for cultural violence to develop and flourish, henceforth contributing to the development of discourses and practices of dehumanization on both sides. This can be seen in documents such as political declarations and the constitution of new representative organizations that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, and it culminated in the Six-Day War, in 1967. In the Israeli side, discourses about ‘security’ and ‘defense’ became the norm (White 2009: 1–2), thus reinforcing an atmosphere of fear at the societal level, as well as the image of the enemy. On the Palestinian side, after a period of relative political apathy, increasing radicalization in terms of both discourses and actions marked the development of a new, restructured national movement.

Regarding the latter, the consequences of the war they started alongside their neighbors and allies were disastrous for the Palestinians. The years that followed the First Arab-Israeli War—that can also be called the War of Independence or the Nakba (catastrophe), depending on who the interlocutor is¹⁴—are depicted in the Palestinian historiography as “lost years” due to the almost disappearance of popular (re)action (Khalidi 2010: 178–179). Marwan Darweish and Andrew Rigby point to the characterization of this period as one of apathy in the societal level due to the demobilization of the Palestinian population that was dispersed, dispossessed and divided by the war between Israel, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and other Arab countries. As they put it, “between the disaster of 1948 and the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964 there was virtually no significant public manifestation of Palestinian resistance of any sort” (Darweish and Rigby 2015: 53–57).

Geographical, national and political separation were the rule in this period, being the Israelis directly accountable in the Palestinian narratives and collective memory for such situation. Demobilized, Palestinians started to regroup in neighboring countries, enjoying different legal and social status, taking almost two decades until their national movement was fully reconstructed. This period is also marked by attempts of assimilation faced by this people in the context of Pan-Arabism. From the end of the 1948 war and the beginning of the 1950s, the Israeli position of power in the region got consolidated and the State of Israel became “a status quo power” (Shlaim 2000: 54). Therefore, clashes between the State of Israel and its neighbors were frequent, culminating in the 1956 Suez Crisis or the Second Arab-Israeli War and, as a result, the feelings of injustice and revolt were kept alive by the narratives that formed the Arabic collective memory and thus influenced the (re)construction of the Palestinian identity.

In this context, the reorganization of the Palestinian national movement that marked what Rashid Khalidi (2010: 177) called the “reemergence of Palestinian identity” started to be marked by strong opposition to the ‘other’, now depicted as colonizer and invader.¹⁵ Counting on the support of the Egyptian leadership, the Palestine Liberation Organization published in 1963 its Draft Constitution calling for the “liberation of their [Palestinians] homeland”. The creation of the PLO was an attempt at establishing a united and cohesive front against Israel, bringing together the dispersed Palestinian people under the auspices of the Pan-Arabic movement. The Organization declared that its Assembly should gather representatives of “all Palestinian factions, emigrants and residents, including organizations, societies, unions, trade unions and representatives of (Palestinian) public opinions of various ideological trends” and, in a state-like fashion, established, among others, the collection of “fixed taxes levied on Palestinians” as a source of funding. The Palestinian National Charter, also known as the PLO Charter,¹⁶ was adopted in the next year during the First Palestinian Conference. It defines the Palestinians as “those Arab citizens who were living normally in Palestine up to 1947, whether they remained or were expelled” and their children (Article 6). This characterization bounds the Palestinian national identity to both the UN decision of partitioning the land and the relationship with Israel connected to the events of the Nakba.

Put differently, the Charter was written in direct opposition to Zionism—and ultimately, to the State of Israel—hence defining the Palestinian identity, its union and cohesion, in terms of the (negative) relationship with the ‘other’, now clearly depicted as the enemy.¹⁷ The Palestinian national narrative became so interdependent of the Israeli that asserting their identity implied negating the ‘other’s’ (Kelman 1999). This relationship is mentioned and characterized in the first lines of the document, where it can be read that the Palestinians “faced the forces of evil, injustice and aggression, against whom the forces of international Zionism and colonialism conspire and worked to displace it, dispossess it from its homeland and property (…)” [the italic is mine]. It considers that “Judaism, because it is a divine religion, is not a nationality with independent existence. Furthermore, the Jews are not one people with an independent personality because they are citizens to their states” [the italic is mine] (Article 18). Article 19 goes even further in defining Zionism as “a colonialist movement in its inception, aggressive and expansionist in its goal, racist in its configurations, and fascist in its means and aims”.

From this period on, the resistance to the ‘other’ also became one of the words used to define the Palestinians, their national movement and their historical collective memory, both internally and internationally: “in spite of all this [we, the Palestinian Arab people] refused to weaken or submit” (PNC 1968). But this period is also marked by a violent narrative that also got entrenched in the Palestinian political discourses ever since, focusing on the struggle for liberation. The Charter calls upon the people of Palestine “to amass its forces and mobilize its efforts and capabilities in order to continue its struggle and to move forward on the path of holy war (al-jihad) until complete and final victory has been attained” [the italic is mine]. The idea of war as a right connected to “self-defense” is justified in the document, which considers that “the liberation of Palestine, from an international viewpoint, is a defensive act necessitated by the demands of self-defense as stated in the Charter of the United Nations” (Article 16). The document also opposes the decisions taken by international political elites in the context of the peace process by declaring Palestine “an indivisible territorial unit” (Article 2) and affirming that

the partitioning of Palestine, which took place in 1947, and the establishment of Israel is illegal and null and void, regardless of the loss of time, because they were contrary to the will of the Palestinian people and its natural right to its homeland and were in violation of the basic principles embodied in the Charter of the United Nations, foremost among which is the right to self-determination. (Article 17)

As per the Israelis—or, using the most current nomenclature of the period, the Jewish people—the construction of a cohesive national identity formed by different people from several parts of the world and with the most distinct historical, national and linguistic backgrounds can definitely be considered a challenging enterprise even nowadays. It is actually worth noting that the Jewish character of the newly founded state, that had been recognized by the UN in the Partition Resolution (UN 1947a),¹⁸ is still a matter of dispute.¹⁹ The efforts to establish a Jewish national identity that would arise from the junction of an ethnic and/or a religious community composed by people that immigrated from diverse origins and others whose ancestors were already living in the land of Palestine or neighboring Arabic countries created a highly divided society (Gratch 2015: 30–31). There are several adjectives in the Israeli society to characterize the many distinct types of Jews, either from Arabic provenance—Mizrahim and Ethiopians—or from the diaspora communities—Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Russians—just to name a few. And, more importantly, the Israeli society is not composed exclusively by Jews, since the creation of the state led to the assimilation of at least 170,000 Arabs that refused to flee or were not successfully expelled in the context of the 1948 war (Morris 2004: 602–603), as well as Bedouin and Druze populations in the Negev, and other minorities. Uniting this newly found national identity requires the construction of narratives of a common enemy based on a perceived threat to their very existence.²⁰ Although the constitution of the Jewish society is definitely relevant for any work that deals with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this book is more concerned with the representations made of the ‘other’ for the cohesion of this identity and its impact in the protracted nature of the conflict than with defining features, symbols, practices, traditions and other elements connected to the construction of a general sense of belonging to an identity group.

In this regard, it is curious to note that the literature on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is filled with similar quotes regarding the definition of a national identity. Shlomo Sand cites Karl Deutsch to affirm that “a nation […] is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbors” (Deutsch, 1969 apud Sand 2010: 1), while Avi Shlaim (2000: xi) goes even further by saying that “‘a nation’, said the French philosopher Ernest Renan, ‘is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors’. The Israelis are no exception”. Both Israeli historians begin their books, respectively about the Jewish people and the Israeli relationships with their Arab neighbors, with those quotes. This coincidence reflects the weight given to the ‘other’ in the narratives about the ‘self’ in the construction of the Jewish/Israeli identity. Ilan Pappé (2010:174) points to the institutionalization of this process in the political and governmental spheres, related with what he calls a “marginalization of ‘Arabism’ in Israeli society”, although never referring to the term dehumanization (throughout the book, he mentions a few times “inhuman” situations). In his own words,

The sense of inferiority attached to anyone Arab, whether Jewish or Palestinian, was reinforced by the state’s cultural policy. A monolithic culture of memory developed that repressed the experiences of marginalized groups within society. The economic policy, their exclusion from the cultural canon and their entrenchment on the social and geographical margins of society alienated the Mizrachi Jews, particularly from Morocco, as well as the Israeli Palestinians. (Pappé 2010: 174)

During this period, dehumanization had also appeared mainly in the constant reference to Palestinians as “Arabs” and in the many discourses about their recent presence in the region (Kelman 1999: 590), or about them belonging to neighboring countries—the latter inserted in the narratives in the context of the peace process about the emptiness of the land, which remained a constant in official discourses of this period. Other times, dehumanization would be expressed in the formulation of policies and legislations that ignored the Palestinian presence in the country, thus promoting the legalization of an unequal treatment to those populations that lived in the same territory. In 1950, the State of Israel published the Law of Return, directly binding the right to acquire nationality to the Jewish origin of the proposed immigrant, to the detriment of privileging the person’s connection to the land. Twenty years later, the Law was amended to include a definition of the members of the community called people of Israel, putting into question the secular character of the state: “a Jew is one who was born to a Jewish mother, or converted to Judaism and does not belong to another religion”. As put by Rashid Khalidi, in Israel, nationality is “not automatically associated with citizenship, but rather with religion” (Khalidi 2010: 260). More examples can be found in Ilan Pappé’s (2006: 92–96) The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, in which the author proves the premeditated and documented intention of “de-Arabizing” the territory through the analysis of the Plan Dalet and using entries of Ben-Gurion’s diary.

Those examples of developments that followed the UN Resolution 181 (II) are only a part of the picture that was being drawn during the Cold War. Tensions between the two peoples and their opposing and dehumanizing narratives toward the ‘other’ had constantly increased in the decades after the approval of the Partition Plan, culminating in a large-scale violent conflict. In 1965, the historical leader of the Palestinian people Yasser Arafat founded the Fatah, a political movement that became deeply attached to the PLO ever since. In its Charter, the Fatah takes a more radical turn compared to the narrative of the first version of the PLO Charter, calling for armed struggle as the main form of resistance “until the Zionist entity is wiped out and Palestine is liberated”. This movement first appears in direct opposition to the ‘other’ (that, in the beginning, was defined as the Zionist Movement and later started to be mixed with the State of Israel, and ultimately Israeli Jews) and promoted a discourse that denied their right of existence as an identity group with national aspirations.

Months before the beginning of the 1967 War, in which Israel expanded once again its territories and took control of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem (among other territories belonging to neighboring Arab countries), there can be seen a radicalization in the discourse regarding both the ‘other’ and the peace process itself. The Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the face and spokesperson of the powerful Pan-Arab movement, questioned in his speech at the United Arab Republic Air Headquarters on May 25 the validity of international discourses about the idea of peace for the Middle East. In this document, he accused the UN of bias against the Palestinians, characterized it as an imperialist tool serving the interests of the United States and Israel, and raised serious concerns about the nature of the peace process and its very definition of peace:

We notice that there is a great deal of talk about peace these days. Peace, peace, international peace, international security, UN intervention, and so on and so forth, all appears daily in the press. […] There is talk about peace now. What peace? […] Does peace mean ignoring the rights of the Palestinian people because of the passage of time? […] How does the UN stand with regard to the Palestinian people? How does it stand with regard to the tragedy that has continued since 1948? Talk of peace is heard only when Israel is in danger.

The protracted nature of the peace process is also questioned in this speech (“the passage of time”) and many others from the Palestinian leadership (see, e.g., the PLO Charter that refers to the “loss of time” in its Article 17). This is symptomatic of the lack of enforcement and results related to the UN resolutions ever since the Israeli Declaration of Independence, which had led to increasing feelings of injustice, abandonment and suspicion regarding the peace process. Twenty years of what was considered to be international inertia, which became associated in the Arabic narratives with the legitimization of the Israeli identity claims and the reinforcement of their position of power in the region, had provided the conditions for the escalation of violence. This is also reflected in several discourses of that period that explicitly or implicitly accuse the peace process of inefficiency or even bias and call for armed struggle as the only possible option toward self-determination. In that same document, Nasser accused the Jewish leadership of threatening to go to war and stated that “we are ready for war”.²¹ In May 29, he declared in his Speech to the National Assembly Members that “we are now ready for the confrontation [with Israel]. We are now ready to deal with the entire Palestine question. The issue now […] is the aggression which took place in Palestine in 1948”.²²

Despite Nasser’s confidence before the war, the events that took shape in June 1967 can be characterized as a huge victory for the Israeli political elites and a trauma with long-standing consequences for the Arab populations and their leaderships, with a special impact on the Palestinian people. The previous narrative of the Nakba, which had been the most formative event in the Palestinian collective identity and historical imaginary, was forcibly put in perspective after the less than one week-long Israeli military offensive. The Six-Day War was not only a territorial and geostrategic catastrophe. A study prepared by the Division for Palestinian Rights of the United Nations Secretariat a decade after the war characterized the situation on the ground as a human disaster in which “the great majority of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were made refugees—many for the second time, having sought refuge in these areas during the first exodus of 1948” (UNISPAL 1979). This same study also refers that, differently from those who stayed within Israel’s pre-1967 border and that were entitled to Israeli citizenship, the population from the newly acquired occupied territories has constituted a new class of people living under military occupation and subject to military rule, what created a situation of suppression of their civil liberties and rights—that persists until today. And, finally, it was the understanding of the committee that prepared this study in pursuance of General Assembly resolution 32/40 B of December 2, 1977, that “at the international level, the Palestine question at this point [1967] was still being treated as principally a ‘refugee problem’, with little attention to the Palestinian Arab identity” [the italic is mine] (UNISPAL 1979).

As mentioned in the beginning of this section, the UN involvement on this matter during the Cold War was mainly restricted to diplomatic efforts of mediation and peacekeeping missions. With regard to the latter, from the 1948 Partition Resolution to the Suez Crisis of 1956, a fragile state of negative peace was maintained with the help of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), and after 1967, peacekeeping responsibilities were assumed by the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), both sharing monitoring and observing activities as the main focus of their mandates. The UN efforts for settling the most recent armed conflict counted on the Security Council Resolutions 237 and 242 that, respectively, called for the observance of humanitarian principles of the Geneva Conventions (UN 1967a) and established the principles for “a just and lasting peace in the Middle East” (UN 1967b). The latter has become one of the bases for all subsequent discussions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since it determined the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict” and the “acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area”. Nevertheless, the generic tone of this resolution has contributed to the reinforcement of processes of dehumanization since it completely obliterated the Palestinians. No reference was made to them, either as a party to the conflict or as the people who had been most affected by the instability of the last 20 years, as the resolution “simply spoke of ‘a just settlement of the refugee problem’, without even specifying the Palestinians by name” (Khalidi 2013: 2). This understanding was later shared by the UN through the already mentioned 1979 UNISPAL study, that pointed to the many flaws of the Resolution 242, such as that

it did not explicitly mention Palestine; the only cognizance of the underlying issue of Palestine was in the reference to ‘the refugee problem’. Further, on the territorial place, resolution 242 (1967), by calling on Israel to withdraw to the pre-1967 war borders, implicitly endorsed Israel’s jurisdiction over the territory occupied by Israel in the 1948 war beyond the lines laid down by the partition resolution. (UNISPAL 1979)

This later recognition by the UN of the peace process failures in the understanding of the conflict, its causes, and main actors followed the reactions of the Palestinian political representation at that time. In the Resolution of the Palestine National Council (PNC) Meeting of June 1974, the PLO declared that “the Security Council Resolution 242 obliterates the patriotic and national rights of our people and treats our national cause as a refugee problem”. For Rashid Khalidi, the widespread perception of “disappearance” of the Palestinian identity during this period can be explained by the actual hiatus that existed in the manifestation of Palestinian identity. According to him, Palestinians perceived nonexistence during the first couple decades after the partition is in fact justifiable since “during the 1950s and early 1960s there were few indicators to outside observer of the existence of an independent Palestinian identity or of Palestinian nationalism”, what can be partly explained due to “a series of overwhelming military defeats of the disorganized Palestinians by the armed forces of the Zionist movement” (Khalidi 2010: 178).

This perception of the need to affirm the Palestinian existence and get international recognition for their identity claims is a distinctive mark in the discourses within Palestinian politics and society ever since. In January 1969, the Central Committee of the Fatah approved The Seven Points in which the movement “rejects the Security Council Resolution of 22 November 1967 […] [since it] ignores the national rights of the Palestinian people—failing to mention its existence”.²³ It can be argued that the drastic failure of UN diplomatic and mediation efforts until this point to recognize the distinctiveness of the Palestinians and their national identity claims culminated in the constant denial of their agency and right to self-determination, and directly contributed to the reinforcement of already existing processes of dehumanization. Edward Said referred to this later as a situation in which Palestinians did not have “permission to narrate” (Said 1984). Nevertheless, the continuous obliteration of the Palestinian identity by the UN, Israel and the international community was a common practice that was about to change.

In the context of the Six-Day War and the Israeli occupation of neighboring territories, which included all the remaining areas that were attributed to an Arab state by the Partition Resolution, the Palestinian national movement gained a new momentum. The idea of a struggle to claim their rights reached the grassroots level and allowed for an intensified dynamism in the Palestinian society followed by renewed narratives on the Palestinian identity and unity as a people (Khalidi 2010: 193–195). Following the Palestine National Council reunion on July 1968, the PLO adopted a new Covenant²⁴ with several amendments that changed the contents of the first version of 1964, emphasizing the idea of a revolution for attaining self-determination through armed struggle and the PLO’s independence from the previous pan-Arab control. Even more explicitly than before, a narrative that intrinsically connects the history, collective memory and experiences of the group that constitutes the Palestinian identity to the negative interactions lived with the Zionist Movement can be seen in this document. On its Article 4, it can be read that

the Palestinian identity is a genuine, essential, and inherent characteristic; it is transmitted from parents to children. The Zionist occupation and the dispersal of the Palestinian Arab people, through the disasters which befell them, do not make them lose their Palestinian identity and their membership in the Palestinian community, nor do they negate them.

The need to affirm their existence as a national community also appears in Article 7 of the document referring that the existence of a Palestinian identity and community are “indisputable facts”. This affirmation was rendered necessary in light of the already mentioned dispossession and dispersion of the Palestinian people, as a consequence of the partition and subsequent marginalization of their claims and self-representation within the peace process that established their status as non-existent within negotiations with Israel.

Regarding directly the relationship with the ‘other’, although the Palestinian National Charter does not refer to the now commonly used term “State of Palestine”, their ambitions over the territory increased with the radicalization of discourse and following the 1967 war. The original document specifically refrained from sovereignty over the West Bank (considered part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan), the Gaza Strip or the Himmah Area. Notwithstanding, the text contained in Article 24 of the 1964 version was amended in 1968, leading to its exclusion. The new document included in the definition of the Palestinian territory not only the State of Israel contained in the 1964 version, but also the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that had been captured by Israel in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, initiating a long-lasting policy of refusing recognition to the already established State of Israel. Other changes operated in the Charter after the War were the idea that “armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine”, marking a change of discourse that created the idea of annihilating Israel and denying its right of existence.

On the Israeli side, the understanding that the root causes of this conflict are connected to identity needs became even more marked in official discourses.²⁵ As shown in the previous chapter, due to the nature of this situation, identity needs have always been connected to more than the assertion of ‘one’s’ claims to include the consistent negation of the ‘other’s’. The speech of the Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban to the Special Assembly of the United Nations on June 19, 1967²⁶ blames the neighboring countries for the war, since they have “denied” and “attacked” Israel’s “very right to exist”. He also considered the constitution of the Palestinian Liberation Organization a “growing danger” and justified Israel’s actions with “the paralysis of the United Nations”. In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir declared in an interview published on June 15 in the Sunday Times of London that there was “no such thing as Palestinians […] they did not exist”. A few years later, in her Statement in the Knesset on October 23 in the aftermath of the 1973 war,²⁷ she declared that “since the outbreak of the war on Yom Kippur […] it has been proved once again that defensive action alone is not sufficient to put an end to acts of terror”.²⁸ In terms of the territory, a permanent geographical separation began to be drawn. From the Six-Day War in 1963 to the war on Yom Kippur in 1973, fortified walls were erected, new roads were added to illegal Israeli settlements that were being built in the occupied territories and a building boom took place as a way to secure the new borders of the Israeli state (Pappé 2010: 186). Furthermore, in 1974, Gush Emunim, an openly colonialist movement headed by Israeli Orthodox Jewish right-wing activists, was founded. The strength of this settlement movement in the occupied territories institutionalized the intention of dispossessing Palestinians and erasing their existence from the whole territory of Palestine, raising the construction of settlements by 45 percent between mid-1975 and 1977 (Smith 2010: 329).

Surprisingly as it may sound, the new wave of radicalization in discourses and actions of both sides that marked the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s ended up in the greatest victory of the Palestinian leadership so far: the international recognition of the Palestinian identity. This is not just a symbolic recognition, as it encompassed practical implications leading to the legitimization of Palestinians as a relevant actor in the peace process efforts. The Palestinian achievement of the right to speak for themselves after more than 25 years of the beginning of the already protracted peace process deeply impacted the new formulas for dealing with this conflict from the 1990s on. The first great expression of this change was the UN decision in 1974 to include Palestine on its agenda and invite the PLO as an observer (A/RES/3237). Following this decision, on November 13 of the same year, the PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly with a speech that stressed the international recognition of the Palestinian identity and their struggle for self-determination more than two decades after the resolution that partitioned the land between “Jews” and the generic designation “Arabs”. Most of Arafat’s speech was dedicated to sharing his narrative about the “Palestinian question”, going back to the end of the nineteenth century and the establishment of the Zionist Movement. The main aim of his speech was to argue that Zionism was an imperialist movement, and that Palestine and Palestinians were contradictorily being subjected to colonialism precisely in the era of decolonization and self-determination. He accused the UN of legitimizing the Israeli claim over the land stating that “the General Assembly partitioned what it had no right to divide—an indivisible homeland” (UN 1974a). By referring many times to the State of Israel as “the enemy”,²⁹ Yasser Arafat deeply connected the enmity toward their neighbors with the national history, collective memory and shared experiences of Palestinians. The Palestinian identity is expressed in this discourse in terms of the (negative) relationship with the ‘other’.³⁰

This first step of the UN to reverse the tendency of reinforcing the dehumanization of the Palestinians—expressed in the denial of their identity and community by Israel and international actors—to which the UN unintendedly had collaborated, was a symbolic action that gave strength to the Palestinian struggle at the political elite level. Nevertheless, although the period from 1975 to the end of the 1980s is marked by a series of advancements in peace efforts in the Middle East—that culminated in the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, and in partial withdrawals of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from some of the territories acquired during the Six-Day War—the radicalization of both Palestinian and Israeli politics—with the creation of the right-wing party Likud, and its rise to power through the election of Menachem Begin in 1977, and the increase in guerrilla warfare and terrorism on the Palestinian side—intensified the desperate situation of the Palestinian population in the refugee camps and the Occupied Territories. In 1982, the escalation of violence between Israel, the PLO and Lebanon culminated in the Israeli operation ‘Peace for the Galilee’ or, better put, the Sabra and Shatilla Massacre. The invasion of Lebanon by Israel, that culminated in the massacre of hundreds of defenseless Palestinian refugees, was officially an Israeli response to PLO guerrilla and terrorist activities in the northern part of the country. Nevertheless, the attempt to siege the PLO in Lebanon was also an offensive reaction on the Jewish side to the Palestinian resistance to the occupation, their increased self-awareness regarding the Palestinian identity and their national movement, and part of Likud’s intentions to demobilize and even completely dismantle the Palestinian leadership and its national identity claims (Pappé 2010: 219).

Although both the Israeli and the Palestinian societies had been deeply controlled by their political elites, who had only demanded popular participation in their military and nationalistic efforts between the 1948 and the 1967 wars, this situation changed rapidly in the years that followed the 1973 war. The economic situation of marginalized groups that suffered from extreme deprivation regarding housing, employment, health access and other indispensable conditions for life, turned the individual attention to the concern with survival rather than state affairs. The huge investment in the military budget before the Six-Day War, taking priority over social and economic needs, deeply impacted both the Israeli and the Arab societies. Specially for the Palestinians, whose existence started to be connected with surviving the political reality of occupation, the beginning of a systematic policy of collective punishment and aggressive military rule after losing the war and the disappointment with their political leadership united both the poor and the rich (Pappé 2010: 183–184). After 40 years since the partition, life under occupation, although somewhat normalized, became more and more intolerable. The feeling of lack of hope in the Arab leadership, as well as in the PLO and the international community’s efforts through the UN, converged, in 1987, in a popular uprising known as the First Intifada—from the Arabic ‘shaking off’. The Intifada was a spontaneous movement that begun in the grassroots level of the Palestinian society, being initiated within the refugees of the Gaza Strip and later bringing both sides of the Green Line³¹ together in what resembled an anti-colonialist movement.

The extremely mediatized character of the Palestinian uprising reached the international civil society, presenting the Palestine Question for the first time since 1948 in a way reflecting the Palestinian narrative. One year after the Intifada—and a few months after the foundation of a radical Palestinian Islamic movement called Hamas, and the publication of its Charter—the PLO produced the Declaration of Independence³² that simultaneously recognized that the partition was a crime against the Palestinian people and a necessity to end the conflict and achieve self-determination. This declaration and the political gains of the Intifada at the international level turned the direct talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaderships in the context of the peace process into a valid option. It is worth noting that the Israeli response to the Intifada was brutal. More than 400 Palestinians were killed, many of them women and children, and thousands more were injured. However, the disproportionate IDF reaction became known worldwide, definitely playing a role in the increase of the symbolic power of the Palestinian cause that would culminate in the negotiation of the Oslo Accords, which will be analyzed in the next chapter.

2 Paving the Way to Political Reconciliation in a Bipolar World

At the international level, the Palestine question at this point [1967–1977] was still being treated as principally a ‘refugee problem’ with little attention to the Palestinian Arab Identity. UNISPAL 1979

As discussed in the beginning of this chapter, with the end of the Second World War and the British Mandate resolution to terminate its rule over the region of Palestine, the more than a half-century conflict between Jews and Arabs for land and ownership was handed over to the United Nations (Smith 2010: 179–181). Following this decision, the UN proposed its very first attempt to promote a solution to the conflict in the Middle East: The Partition Plan (UN 1947a). According to the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, everyday life in Palestine before the Partition was marked mainly by “bi-national cohabitation and economic interaction opposed strongly by the political leaderships on both sides” (Pappé 2010: 123). Although occasional clashes between Jews and Palestinians in major cities such as Jerusalem and Jaffa had become a reality for the last 30 years since the Balfour Declaration (Shlaim 2010: 15–19; Darweish and Rigby 2015: 19–26), the overall social environment was that of economic agricultural ties and other forms of interaction between Palestinian peasants and Jewish settlers (Pappé 2010: 124). As discussed in the last section, this situation has deeply changed ever since the UN decision to partition the land and its consequences, for example, the Israeli Proclamation of Independence and the Palestinian Nakba that sealed once and for all the interconnectedness between Israeli and Palestinian identities, history and memories of the past.

As has been argued in this chapter, the international environment during this period is an important variable to consider insofar as the tensions connected to the Cold War between the two superpowers in a bipolar world order had led to a restriction of peacemaking efforts to the level of political elites (Khalidi 2006: 125). Efforts toward peace in this period were marked by reactive diplomatic attempts to mediate the negotiation of cease-fire agreements in the aftermath of violent conflicts. Therefore, reconciliation in this period was mainly addressed within the peace process as the promotion of negative peace between states, being the Palestinians constantly marginalized in the negotiating process and even made inexistent by the main documents connected to the conflict that were produced in this period (e.g., the UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (II) of 1947 and Security Council resolutions S/RES/242 of 1967 and S/RES/338 of 1973).

Nevertheless, as briefly mentioned before, a glimpse of change can be seen in the mid-1970s, as it marked the beginning of a shift in the policies connected to reconciliation in the next decades. First, the reintroduction in 1974 in the United Nations General Assembly’s agenda of the question of Palestine as a national matter, with resolution 3236 (UN 1974b) reaffirming the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and specifying their right to self-determination, national independence, and sovereignty. Second, the widespread international acceptance of the Palestine Liberation Organization as the representative of the Palestinian people, that was granted observer status in the United Nations in the same year by resolution 3237 (UN 1974c), ultimately promoted not only the acknowledgment of the Palestinian identity but also the international recognition of the very existence of this people and their national claims.³³ This change would unavoidably lead later to the period of mutual recognition between Israelis and Palestinians during the Oslo Accords in the 1990s. Finally, the establishment of the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP), that was first mandated to “establish contact with, and to receive and consider suggestions and proposals from, any State and intergovernmental regional organization and the Palestine Liberation Organization” (UN, 1975) and that later included in its activities to “extend its cooperation and support to Palestinian and other civil society organizations” (UN 2004), has promoted cooperation with and within civil society organizations, as well as enhanced support to their development and activities.

Created on November 10, 1975, by the General Assembly’s resolution A/RES/3376, the CEIRPP was first designed to “recommend to the Assembly a program of implementation to enable the Palestinian people to exercise its rights” (UN 1975) of self-determination, national independence and sovereignty. It aimed to address in a practical way the societal level, interacting with local individuals and organizations, and breaking with the established paradigm of addressing the conflict mainly at the level of political elites. It proposed in the year following its foundation

a two-phase plan for the return of Palestinians to their homes and property; a timetable for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the occupied territories by 1 June 1977 […]; an end to the establishment of settlements; recognition by Israel of the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention to the occupied territories pending withdrawal; and endorsement if the inherent right of Palestinians to self-determination, national independence and sovereignty in Palestine. (UN 1976)

However, the recommendatory character of the Committee has rendered its reports a symbolic impact. Without the means to enforce such proposals, which failed to be adopted by the Security Council due to the negative vote of a permanent member,³⁴ their actual impact to conflict developments have been limited. However, the CEIRPP, which is the only body within the United Nations exclusively devoted to the question of Palestine, still counts on yearly renovations of its mandate, and its reports have been endorsed by an overwhelming majority of UN members in the General Assembly, thus reflecting the relevance of its work for the transformation of official positions and discourses regarding the conflict.

The United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine (UNISPAL) was also created in this context and has produced reports, maps, provided open-access to official UN and non-UN documents and promoted the widespread information about the conflict (UNISPAL n.d.). It has published since 1978 a series of historical studies about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,³⁵ produced by the Division for Palestinian Rights of the United Nations Secretariat under the guidance of the CEIRPP, that have provided a more truthful account of the history of the conflict and a source of factual information about the UN’s involvement in the matter. Those were efforts clearly developed in order to correct the wrongdoings of biased and conflicting narratives about the past, what started to pave the way for reconciliation by promoting recognition and justice. Also, they aimed at overcoming the UN paradigm of denying the Palestinian identity, expressed in its main resolutions on the conflict, which dealt with the “Palestinian problem” as merely a refugee issue. This statement is based on the information about the study found in the General Assembly resolution 32/40 B of December 2, 1977, in which it is expressly assumed that “the study should place the problem in its historical perspective, emphasizing the national identity and rights of the Palestinian people” (UN 1977). By reorienting the official narratives and discourses about the conflict toward the recognition of the Palestinian identity, these initiatives have affected the perceptions about the conflict, at the level of both international and local political elites thus contributing to the creation of the conditions that have made the Oslo Agreements a possibility.

These late changes in the approaches, narratives and policies connected to the peace process during the Cold War encountered correspondence on the ground. Several NGOs and CSOs aiming at the defense of community rights, such as those of social and political inclusion, education, access to health and services, as well as other organizations focused on the assertion of the Palestinian identity and nationalist aims were founded. Shany Payes (2005: 317–320) provides a detailed map of the organizations that were created in this period as well as their activities, having traced the creation of at least 28 NGOs in this period operating in Israel alone, being most of them founded from 1974 onward. Some have acted in the field of human rights, lobbying and advocacy, being the Arab Association for Human Rights (1989), B’Tselem (1989), the Centre for Jewish-Arab Economic Development (1988), the Association for Support and Defense of Bedoin Rights in Israel (1976) and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (1972) enduring examples of this. Others like Abna al-Balad (1973), The Arab Student Union, Haifa University (1972), the Association of Forty (1978), the Follow-up Committee on Education in the Arab Sector (1980), The Galilee Society: The Arab National Society for Health Research and Services (1981) and so on, have acted at the social, political and institutional realm by promoting political participation of minorities, lobbying for equal access to social services and resources and community rights. A consequence of the increasing international recognition of the national aims and claims of the Palestinian people and, therefore, the legitimization of their existence and rights, these organizations have struggled for political change, social awareness and de-alienation of minorities within the Israeli political system with some success (Payes 2005: 230–231).

Also part of the changes of narratives and discourses regarding the Palestinian identity in the context of the peace process, the creation of assumedly peace movements that aimed at mutual recognition and political advocacy in the higher levels became perceptible, favoring a negotiated solution to the conflict and thus impacting the very peace process through lobbying within the national political systems. Just to cite an example, in 1978, the Peace Now movement was founded in Israel. According to their website, they are “the largest and longest-standing Israeli movement advocating for peace through public pressure” and their work aims at “arriving at peace agreements between Israel and its neighbors […] [and] to ensure Israelis embrace the only viable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: two states, meaning the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel”.³⁶ To this aim, they have for the past 40 years or so organized demonstrations, debates, social mobilization and public campaigns with the purpose of impacting the peace process and political reconciliation by advocating for further Israeli involvement in negotiations. Through the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens in public demonstrations, they have collaborated to pressure the Israeli government to commence direct negotiations with the PLO, withdraw from settlement constructions and educate the public opinion about the Palestinians (Kelman 1998).

It is important to note that the Peace Now movement, created by Israeli veteran soldiers, is associated with a pragmatic Zionism that in fact aims at defending the institutionalization of the Jewish character of the State of Israel—and, according to Ilan Pappé, the movement has even failed to oppose the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, having most of its members in fact taken part in the fighting (Pappé 2010: 222). Nevertheless, regardless of its underlying motivations, this movement and others appeared in the context of a larger debate with the settler’s movement Gush Emunim, raising public awareness about the Palestinian identity and, therefore, actively collaborating to the reversal of the narrative of their inexistence, while combating the expansion of settlements (Newman and Hermann 1992).

Following the growing recognition of the Palestinian identity in both Israel and internationally, in the late 1970s, and even more intensively in the 1980s, several organizations that aimed at promoting intergroup dialogue and organizing structured encounters between Jewish and Palestinian youth in Israel were established. According to Shany Payes, most of these encounters were organized by institutions such as universities and organizations like The Jewish-Arab Centre in Giv’at Haviva, the Arab-Jewish Centre Bet-Hagefen and Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, the latter being the only jointly run Jewish-Palestinian organization. However, the author draws harsh critiques to the work developed by the organizations. On the one hand, she argues that these encounter groups “do not contribute to conflict resolution, as they do not question the status quo nor discuss the roots of the conflict” (Payes 2005: 211–212). By promoting interactions and building relationships in a depoliticized fashion, the actual range and long-term effects of these activities are remarkably limited. On the other, she points to the romanticized vision of life together promoted by Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, for example, that is seen to create an artificial reality as if in a bubble. As will be further discussed in the next chapters, despite the positive dynamics of dialogue and positive identity building entailed by such initiatives, they nevertheless risk normalizing the conflict instead of promoting its positive transformation.

Generically speaking, these changes in the societal level in both Israel and Palestine from the 1970s onward, accompanied by the international recognition of the PLO and institutional efforts toward changing narratives and correcting misinterpretations of the past, had, as history has shown, limited capacity to perform actual changes and meet the expectations of people on the ground. However, the effects of such transformations, although mainly limited to the symbolic realm, were at least twofold. On the one hand, these symbolic changes in this phase allowed for the proliferation of organizations, movements and activities that sought within the changes of discourses and narratives for an opportunity to manifest their aims and claims and to amplify their voices to a new audience willing to hear from them. This alone has promoted the enhancement of democratic practices and the strengthening of institutions, as well as helped to bring the topic of peace into the public agenda. On the other hand, the limitations of such transformations within the symbolic realm led to the feeling that actual change would not come without social pressure and involvement in the peace endeavor.

It was in this context that the First Palestinian Intifada erupted, with an actual impact of forcing Israel to cease temporarily the annexation of territory, creating political pressure for both sides to engage in direct conversations and bringing the concept and practice of peace into the grassroots’ level (Pappé 2010: 230–235). The reach of the Intifada, part and consequence of this process of democratization of society initiated in the 1970s, ranged from the local to the international level, contributing to important changes in conflict developments in the years to come. For instance, according the Darweish and Rigby (2015: 63),

over the Christmas/New Year of 1989–90 thousands of international peace activists joined Israelis and Palestinians in a series of demonstrations in Jerusalem under the banner of ‘Time for Peace’. In retrospective this was the high point of the Intifada as an unarmed mass-based popular resistance movement.

Notwithstanding its symbolic character, the consequences of these gradual changes in the discourses, official documents, vocabulary and behaviors regarding the conflict can be expressed in quite material terms, since they have affected the cultural component of violence, “defined here as any aspect of a culture that can be used to legitimize violence in its direct or structural form” (Galtung 1990: 291). By promoting a shift toward reconciliation and coexistence in the societal level, these actions have contributed to pave the way for political reconciliation. As discussed in Chap. 2, Galtung’s generic conceptualization comes along with various concrete examples that range from religion and ideology to culture and art explaining how those aspects of a culture might produce and reproduce direct and structural patterns of violence, while the transformation of cultural violence promotes positive peace instead. This is also the case of processes of dehumanizing the ‘other’, which reinforces the idea that identity issues should be tackled when dealing with conflict. As will be further discussed in the next chapters, by promoting mutual recognition and building relationships, the activities developed by these organizations have had the potential of deeply transforming the conflict from the bottom-up, thus impacting the very peace process.

3 An Action-Reaction Approach and the Construction of National Identities

The period of the Cold War marks an important moment in terms of the formulas for solving this conflict until today and the (re)definition of the actors that have become relevant for such solution. Although unintendedly, the balance of the first phase of the protracted peace process can be considered to have affected the identities in conflict by pending toward dehumanization rather than reconciliation. As shown during this chapter, representations made of the peace process at the political elite’s level intensified discourses of enmity and national identity narratives connected to the negative relationship with the ‘other’. At the societal level, the increase of violence justified in the political narrative by decisions connected to the peace process, or because of its perceived absence, culminated in diverse armed conflicts (Khalidi 2006: 105–139; Smith 2010: 223–325; Pappé 2010; Shlaim 2010). The UN itself also directly contributed to the reinforcement of dehumanization processes by failing to acknowledge the Palestinian identity claims and their agency, thus denying them the right to speak for themselves and accidentally corroborating discourses that aimed at disproving their existence as a people (UNISPAL 1979). Contradictorily, the peace process introduced in this phase new grievances that were added to the already existing ones, increasing resentments and feelings of injustice rather than promoting peace.

Due to the geopolitical and ideological constraints derived from the Cold War, from 1947 to the end of the 1980s, international interventionism took the shape of a series of mediated accords between political elites, as a reaction to each moment of escalation of violence that culminated in several armed conflicts.³⁷ Initiatives that aimed at transforming the conflict in a positive manner by dealing with the societal level and identity issues were practically inexistent, since the UN efforts on the ground were mainly restricted to peacekeeping missions (UNTSO) and humanitarian relief provided by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian refugees.³⁸ The UN interference was designed as efforts toward dealing with threats to international peace under chapter XVII of the UN Charter (UN 1945) and, therefore, were intended to maintain a state of negative peace, being unable to deal with—and many other times misinterpreting—the root causes of the conflict. Because of this, what can now be perceived all in all as a peace process proved itself incapable of avoiding the series of escalations that culminated into several armed conflicts during the more than 40 years that encompass this first period into analysis. Moreover, it was actually the first decision in the context of this process, the Partition Plan, that provoked the first war between Israel and its neighbors.

On the Israeli side, following the violent reactions after the Partition Plan, discourses about ‘security’ and ‘defense’ became the norm (White 2009: 1–2), thus reinforcing an atmosphere of fear at the societal level, as well as the image of the enemy. As for the Palestinians, after a period of relative political apathy—a consequence of the demobilization connected with the massive displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians after the 1948 war—increased radicalization in terms of both discourses and actions marked the development of a new, restructured national movement. Consequently, the 1950s and the 1960s were marked by social detachment and separation between the two groups, thus reinforcing narratives of conflict, enmity and hatred. After a period of demobilization, the (re)construction of the Palestinian national movement was deeply influenced by the conflict and the attempts to provide a permanent solution for the ‘Question of Palestine’ that was initiated with the Partition in 1947.

The events that preceded the Six-Day War led to the understanding that no peace process could provide a solution to the situation of the Palestinian people due to its compliance with the Israeli narrative that actively promoted the erasure, denial and dehumanization of the Palestinians. As showed by the analysis of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s discourses months before the 1967 war, the radical decision to rely upon a violent action was justified by the inability—or lack of will—of the peace process to deal with this matter in a just way. In this sense, even the symbolic construction of a peace process (as showed in Sect. 5.1, Nasser mentioned the “great deal of talk about peace” at that moment as an everyday appearance in the media) had a deep impact on the identities in the conflict insofar as it reinforced the feeling of desperation and injustice that led to the mobilization of the population in a violent way. However, it is important to note that the actions of the peace process at that time were restricted to a reaction to direct violence due to the fragile international peace architecture in the bipolar world order of the Cold War, meaning that violence became a means to force action internationally, what created a contradictory effect.

As we will see in the next chapter, the term peace process only became widespread used in the 1990s. However, the analysis developed in this chapter makes it evident that there was a consensual understanding at that time that the international attempts toward peacemaking were not episodic. Rather, they were depicted as ever going—even when stalled. This notion can be seen in official documents and discourses of the period of the Cold War, showing how the peace process had become an enduring social structure (Hopf 1998; Checkel 1998; Kurki and Wight 2013; Barkin and Sjoberg 2019) impacting the positionality of actors, their actions, interests, and identities, in the context of the conflict. The idea of a peace process had come into being by means of its action but also through discourses and narratives which rendered it a bidimensional existence, ranging from material to symbolic (Bourdieu 1977). The construction, or better put, consolidation, of national identities in this period was, similarly to the previous moment analyzed in Chap. 4, strongly influenced by the search for international legitimacy and recognition. But differently from the interwar period, the beginning of the peace process has actively promoted a geopolitical change expressed in material terms, insofar as the partition meant the creation of the Israeli state and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people who lived in the region. From this moment on, the narrative representation of both national identities became explicitly connected with the denial of the ‘other’, which is the main indicator of dehumanization as per the definition used in this book (Kelman 1973).

The discourses analyzed so far related with the peace process during the Cold War had an unpredictable impact on the identities in conflict. Although until mid-1970s most had portraited the denial of the Palestinian identity, in different ways, they were responsible for strengthening the very sense of unity of both communities. At the same time, these discourses had contributed to the already existing process of negative interconnectedness between the two national identities, which continued to position themselves increasingly in a competitive way, with a strong focus on de-identification or the differences from the ‘other’. For example, it is possible to connect the lack of recognition of the indigenous people of Palestine’s self-determination claims with the strengthening of a cohesive Palestinian national identity. The fact that during decades Palestinians were considered by the international community a homogenous part of a very diverse group of Arab peoples helps explain why Palestinian self-determination claims only got internationally recognized by the end of the 1980s, in the aftermath of the First Intifada.

In sum, the pattern of actively ignoring the Palestinian existence that initiated with the Balfour Declaration would endure for more than 60 years until the widespread recognition of the Palestinian identity, consolidated in the context of the First Intifada. This first period of the peace process is marked mainly not by reconciliation between the two parties of the conflict but by a negative approach to peace that aimed at brokering cease-fires and promoting the pacification of the region as a reaction to episodic outbursts of confrontations. While reconciliation was dealt as establishing a minimum basis between political elites to terminate war and bypass the escalation of direct violence, a glimpse of change can be seen by analyzing the period after the Yom Kippur War in the 1970s which witnessed the creation of specific agencies within the UN to deal with the Palestine question and their effects on social identity. The correction of misinterpretations that had been made regarding the conflict expressed mainly, but not only, in the recognition of the PLO and the inclusion of the Palestine Question in the UN agenda, promoted a reframing of established meanings, policies and practices regarding the conflict. The incorporation of the moral/cultural and political/institutional dimensions of reconciliation into narratives and approaches regarding the conflict in the international level has also encountered echo in the societal level through the development of several CSOs and NGOs in both Israel and Palestine which, despite their limitations, have brought the discussion and practice about peace to other levels.

In the context of these transformations that started to take shape in the Israeli and Palestinian societies, the historical changes in the international structure in the turn to the 1990s promoted new opportunities and bigger challenges. The following period is marked by a pre-emptive approach to conflict that aimed at building institutions and infrastructure (statebuilding and development), while promoting relationships and an atmosphere of peace. Nevertheless, as we shall see, reconciliation is addressed in this next period as a post-conflict tool for building sustainable peace, thus maintaining the limitations of conflict transformation and the state-centric character of the peace process and neglecting to incorporate the potential of grassroots initiatives developed in the previous decades. The next chapter addresses the implications of this approach to conflict transformation and its impacts on the identities of societies.

4 Conclusion

This chapter began by putting in context the mandates, tools and mechanisms employed to promote peace during the Cold War. Then, it proceeded with an analysis of official documents connected to the peace process from 1947 to the First Intifada, to examine how these policies and mechanisms have affected identities and, more specifically, dehumanization and reconciliation. Finally, it analyzed the reactions in the Israeli and Palestinian societies to each moment of the peace process in this period, aiming to draw some conclusions on the consequences that representations at the official and public discourses of failure and success of this process have in the levels of direct and cultural violence within societies. The analysis presented in this chapter shows that dehumanization processes have increased during the Cold War, above all as a defensive reaction to developments in the international level related with the peace process that was mainly restricted to elite-driven negotiations toward reaching a written agreement concerning the governments and boundaries of the now partitioned territory, regardless of the increasing identity needs and claims fueling the conflict. Ever since, the process of dehumanizing the ‘other’ has become part of the narratives and official discourses that are connected with the identities of both societies, thus influencing their very positions within the peace process, which, as we will see, directly feeds back the cycle of protractedness of this conflict.

This model of peace building focused on avoiding war and managing the escalation of direct violence had proven its failure. Nevertheless, the changes operated in the 1970s that led to the inclusion of the PLO as an observer member of the UN General Assembly would culminate in the first direct talks between Israelis and the Palestinians. Next chapter, dedicated to the short but intense period of ten years in which were developed the Oslo Accords, deals with changes in the international interventionist paradigm that, although failing to solve the conflict, were able to create bridges across what seemed to be an impossible divide.