Palestinian statehood

The first push for a Palestinian state

Palestinian Arabs have sought self-determination since at least World War I, when Arab leaders in Southwest Asia supported the British war effort against the Ottomans in exchange for the promise of self-rule after the war (see Hussein-McMahon correspondence [1915–16]). Several Arab states emerged in the decades that followed. But the British had also promised in the Balfour Declaration (1917) “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and, under the British mandate of Palestine, Arabs and Jews contended for control. United Nations Resolution 181 (1947) set out a partition plan to divide the mandate into an Arab state and a Jewish state, but the Palestinian Arabs rejected the plan, and after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, they were left without a state: Israel was established (with a sizable Palestinian Arab minority), Transjordan (later Jordan) took control over the West Bank, Egypt took control of the Gaza Strip, and the Arab countries were flooded with Palestinian refugees.

The emergence of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as a new territorial basis

Despite the scattering of the Palestinian Arabs across several states, the experience of exile reinforced a common Palestinian national consciousness. The refugees remained isolated and unassimilated in their new localities, while those living in Israel were regarded with suspicion. Meanwhile, a class of young educated Palestinians that emerged in the post-1948 generation resisted the efforts of Amin al-Husseini, Jordanian officials, and Egyptian officials to speak as their representatives. By the 1960s the complex social and political structures of Palestinian society had become more firmly established, and guerrilla groups—most notably, Fatah—had begun organizing raids on Israel.

Later that decade the Palestinian cause began to focus specifically on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip when those territories came under Israeli military occupation during the Six-Day War of 1967. The United Nations Security Council passed resolution 242, which confirmed the position of the international community that although Israel had the right to exist in peace and security, it did not have the right to capture the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by force.

A reprise of the Six-Day War took place in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The international community reaffirmed its position in UN Resolution 338 and added a call for immediate negotiations for a durable peace between Israel and its neighbors. Following the conclusion of the Camp David Accords (1978) and the Israel-Egypt peace treaty (1979), Israel dismantled its settlements in the Sinai Peninsula and withdrew its forces from the territory, which it had also occupied during the Six-Day War. The peace treaty also called for autonomy for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

But there was little movement toward autonomy in the years that followed the treaty. In fact, there was movement in the other direction. Israel’s 1967 annexation of East Jerusalem, the city with the largest number of Palestinians in the West Bank and which Palestinians wanted as their capital, was enshrined in Israel’s Basic Law in 1980. Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip proliferated; by the late 1980s more than half of the land in the West Bank and about a third of the land in the Gaza Strip had been transferred to Israeli control. Meanwhile, outbreaks of violence between Israelis and Palestinians fostered a cycle of antagonism and militancy. In December 1987 an Israeli vehicle struck two parked vans carrying Palestinian workers, killing four of them. The incident catalyzed a large-scale uprising that became known as the intifada (Arabic انتفاضة: “shaking off”).

Bilateral agreement on Palestinian self-rule

The turmoil of the intifada, as well as the scurry of diplomatic activity taking place behind the scenes to end it, ultimately set the stage for historic peace negotiations. Israel’s inability to suppress the unrest convinced many Israelis, including its minister of defense, Yitzhak Rabin, that permanent peace would not be possible without negotiating with the Palestinians. Meanwhile, the PLO—battered from the Lebanon War—positioned itself to negotiate a diplomatic, rather than military, outcome for Palestinian liberation in a strategic bid to maintain legitimacy among Palestinians. On the one hand, it controversially declared in November 1988 the establishment of an independent Palestinian state and received the backing of about 80 countries in recognizing the PLO as a government-in-exile. On the other hand, it for the first time recognized UN Resolutions 181, 242, and 338, formally signaling its willingness to accept Israel’s right to exist and concede to a two-state solution. The United States, which had already been seeking a diplomatic solution to the intifada’s unrest, subsequently opened dialogue with the PLO and pushed Israeli and Palestinian delegations to engage in negotiations. Following Rabin’s election as prime minister in 1992—with a mandate to pursue peace—Israeli officials began meeting secretly with representatives of the PLO. On September 13, 1993, Rabin and PLO chair Yasser Arafat met on the White House lawn and signed the Declaration of Principles of Palestinian Self-Rule—the first of the Oslo Accords.

Although Arafat and Rabin maintained momentum for the peace process through the remainder of Rabin’s term as prime minister, it was immediately met with ardent (and often violent) opposition by religious nationalists. In February 1994 a Jewish extremist opened fire on Muslim worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs holy site frequented by both Jews and Muslims in Hebron, a city in the West Bank that was set to be governed by the Palestinians. In April Hamas launched a campaign of suicide bombings in Israel. Undeterred, Arafat and Rabin advanced the peace process by concluding the Cairo Agreement (1994), which established the Palestinian Authority (PA) to govern parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the interim period, and the Oslo II Accord (1995), which set an effective deadline for May 1999 for a two-state solution to be finalized.

Breakdown of the peace process

The peace process was finally disrupted on November 4, 1995, with the assassination of Rabin by a Jewish extremist. When elections were held months later—and amid a fresh wave of Hamas attacks—security had become a major concern for the Israeli public, and Benjamin Netanyahu, campaigning on a slogan of “peace with security,” won a narrow victory. Netanyahu, a vocal critic of the Oslo Accords, at first paused the peace process and later attempted to link Palestinian self-governance to Israeli security through brokering the Wye River Memorandum. The memorandum was quickly suspended amid opposition within Netanyahu’s coalition, and Netanyahu’s government was dissolved. As May 1999 came and went without Palestinian statehood in sight, frustration mounted among Palestinians, who had expected a final agreement by that date. Netanyahu’s successor, Ehud Barak, was unable to conclude a speedy final status agreement with Arafat, with Jerusalem’s status at the height of contention in the negotiations. During a pause in the negotiations, Barak’s political rival Ariel Sharon made a provocative visit in 2000 to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, a holy site for both Jews and Muslims, to press Israeli rights of sovereignty. The visit brought Palestinian frustration to a head and sparked widespread violence that became known as the second intifada. The peace process ground to a complete halt, and in 2001 Sharon was elected prime minister.

As prime minister during the new intifada, Sharon followed Rabin’s earlier conclusion that Israeli occupation was unsustainable. But he proceeded with a two-state solution on his own terms and, without coordination with the PA, he pushed a unilateral plan to remove Israeli soldiers and settlers from the Gaza Strip. The withdrawal was completed in September 2005 and proved a political boon for Hamas, which claimed that its use of violence against Israeli soldiers and settlers in the Gaza Strip drove Israel to withdraw. Following elections for the PA’s legislative council in 2006, Hamas won the majority of seats and, following a power struggle with its political rival Fatah, took control of the Gaza Strip from the PA by force in 2007. Hamas then ruled the Gaza Strip nearly uninterrupted from that point until the Israel-Hamas War began in 2023.

Expansion of recognition and access to international institutions

Apart from a brief period of constructive engagement from 2007 to 2008 between Mahmoud Abbas and Ehud Olmert, the successors of Arafat and Sharon, respectively, progress toward a negotiated two-state solution remained at a virtual halt. In 2009 the PA’s prime minister, Salam Fayyad, put forward a plan to unilaterally build the institutions needed for a functioning independent state. After a failed attempt in 2010 to resume negotiations with Netanyahu (who returned as prime minister in 2009), Abbas began seeking international recognition of Palestinian statehood in the hope of securing concessions from Israel through diplomatic pressure. His efforts were bolstered by the release of a United Nations report in early 2011 that found that the PA had developed “sufficient” institutions for statehood. The PA gained recognition from about two dozen additional countries during this push, including from Argentina, Brazil, and Thailand. Recognition in this wave was granted along the borders of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), given the acceptance of UN Resolution 242 by both Israel and the PLO in the Oslo Accords. Some countries, such as Brazil, explicitly recognized East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital. On November 29, 2012, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to upgrade the status of the Palestinian mission to the UN to “nonmember observer state,” falling just short of full UN membership but allowing the PA access to numerous international bodies and treaties. Months later, the PA began calling itself the “State of Palestine.” In 2015 the PA acceded to the Rome Statute and joined the International Criminal Court (ICC), allowing the PA to pursue litigation against Israel for violations of international law.