To confront Zionism and Western imperialism, history must be rewritten: Palestine is owed its own Balfour Declaration

We can pinpoint the start of the colonial assault on Palestinian Arab rights to the Balfour Declaration. This is why we need a new, more ethical declaration that affirms equality and justice for all, argues Rami Khouri [photo credit: Getty Images]

The ceasefire that halted the US-Israel attack on Iran unleashed major new political and strategic dynamics that potentially impact core actors and conflicts across the Middle East, including this week’s new American ceasefire initiative to halt the US-Israeli genocidal assault on Gaza and the rest of Palestine.

But all the new power dynamics and ceasefire ideas will get us nowhere if they continue to ignore the foundations of the past century of nonstop warfare, colonialism, and resistance. It is time to explore dramatic new ways to resolve Israel's occupation of Palestine and reverse the trend of more wars across the region.

As the US and Israel now exploit their sense of dominance in the region to achieve their most elusive goal of subduing Palestine, the focus now is on three objectives: urgently achieve a ceasefire and resume humanitarian aid in Gaza, launch a credible post-war governance and reconstruction process in occupied Palestine, and explore wider Israeli-Arab negotiations for a permanent peace agreement. The latter would credibly expand the now delusional Abrahamic Accords into a genuine regional economic and developmental boom.

The Trump administration, in particular, urgently needs to end the Gaza war, or all its gains and plans in the region and elsewhere would be badly constrained.

If the combined mighty military, economic, technological, and political power of the US and Israel could not defeat Hamas and free Israeli hostages after 18 months of relentless, often barbaric, high-tech warfare against unarmed Palestinian civilians, the world wonders, why should they be taken seriously in future in any realm beyond relentless killing, mayhem, genocide, and civilisational destruction?

The Palestinians, for their part, are busy exploring mechanisms for self-governance, elections, and reconstruction in Gaza and the West Bank. They’ve offered proposals on a technocratic transitional government after the fighting ends and accepted that Hamas will disband militarily after a security arrangement protects Palestine from Israeli attacks.

Trump’s urgent push to complete a Gaza-Israel ceasefire highlights two massive contradictions that years of diplomacy and war have never resolved: on the one hand, the Palestinians and the Israelis repeatedly make concessions to the other, as they do this week; but on the other hand, this conflict has steadily expanded over time to see Israel/US wage war in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen — because the underlying root spark of Israel's occupation of Palestine has never been addressed seriously.

This dramatic US push for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza repeats a new pattern of activism that mostly seeks to serve Israeli and American interests, without equal weight for Palestinian rights.

This proposal aims heavily to help rescue Netanyahu from his criminal indictment in Israel and to bolster Trump’s desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

Palestinian national rights are secondary or unmentioned, as they were in the 1917 Balfour Declaration that inaugurated the Palestine-Israel conflict.

Nevertheless, we also simultaneously see how the US, Israel, and Palestinians make new concessions that narrow their differences, but only when both achieve important goals because they see each other’s national rights as mutual, equal, and simultaneous.

This is why serious diplomacy in the coming phase, after a Gaza ceasefire, must go where no mediators and diplomats have ever ventured to go before: grasp and resolve the root causes of Israel's occupation of Palestine and Arabism-Zionism conflicts. These include three related elements that are not easy to resolve but are essential to resolve if our region is ever to enjoy normal life.

The three are: 1) ending Western colonial/imperial manipulation of people and lands in the Middle East, 2) defining and containing Zionism/Israel to end their regional colonial expansions and wars; and, 3) mustering global support for equal and simultaneous rights of both Israelis and Palestinians to enjoy self-determination, statehood, security, and sovereignty in historic Palestine.

Any serious peace effort must undo the harm that launched the conflict, the 1917 Balfour Declaration by which the UK promised to support the creation of a Jewish home in Palestine, even though it did not have title to that land, never defined what this “home” would comprise, and ignored the parallel national and political rights of the Indigenous Palestinian Arab majority who comprised 93 percent of the population.

Those colonial traditions never ended for Palestinians, and the century of British and then American support for Zionist/Jewish superior rights in Palestine has only sustained warfare across the region.

My suggestion, inspired by my longtime friend and colleague Michal Ben-Joseph Hirsch, a political science professor at Suffolk University, is that we need a new foundation for the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians.

The current international focus is a proven failure in its commitment on paper to a “two-state solution” or getting more states to formally recognise a Palestinian state that does not actually exist.

We need something today that has the force of the Balfour Declaration, generates the superpower support for both sides that Balfour did for Zionism a century ago, and triggers global support for Palestinian-Israeli equal rights in the land they both claim.

Perhaps the US and UK could jointly submit a resolution to the UN Security Council and the General Assembly that supports secure and simultaneous national homes for Israelis and Palestinians in the historic land of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

The details of any agreement on this will require extensive negotiations and trust-building. The whole world would support a new declaration by the US and UK on Palestinian-Israeli equal national rights — only Israel rejects a two-state solution, and that position will have to change for peaceful coexistence to occur.

Such an initiative by the two imperial powers that are most responsible for enabling Zionism’s century of non-stop conflicts in the region would harness world support for ending Zionism’s nonstop wars and expansions across the region, which now include US-Israeli attacks against Iran, and shift Palestinian and other Arab military resistance to democratic state-building and human development.

Major Western states have done this before. They’ve grappled with their ugly histories of slavery, genocide, apartheid, and colonialism in Africa, Asia, and North America – from symbols like removing statues of racist leaders to compensatory mechanisms for the descendants of Indigenous people whose lives were curtailed by colonial savagery in the 19th and 20th centuries.

In Palestine, we can pinpoint the start of the colonial assault on Palestinian Arab rights to the Balfour Declaration. This is why we need a new, more ethical declaration that affirms equality, justice, and peaceful coexistence for all – if major Western powers actually believe in these ideals, which remains unclear.

Rami G Khouri is a Distinguished Fellow at the American University of Beirut and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Arab Center Washington. He is a journalist and book author with 50 years of experience covering the Middle East.

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