The creation of the state of Israel probably was a mistake. 

Between the two World Wars, emigration from rabidly anti-Semitic Eastern European countries[1] had a great (though not universal appeal) among Eastern European Jews.  Zionism[2] had NOT had a great appeal among the same groups.[3]  During the First World War, a desperate Britain did announce that it favored a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, so long as it didn’t harm the Arab peoples already living there.  Once Britain got Palestine away from the Ottoman Empire (1918), Jewish immigration became possible.  Not many people went.  The arrival in power of Adolf Hitler in the midst of a global economic disaster turned many non-Zionists into Zionists because getting to Palestine looked like the only chance to survive. 

The state of Israel came into being in the aftermath of the Holocaust.  Hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors of anti-Semitic Nazi barbarism had no desire to remain in Europe.  Many, perhaps most, of these survivors still had no particular desire to go to Palestine. 

Given their ‘druthers, they would have followed a long-standing pattern and gone to the United States.  After the Second World War, the United States did not want to admit up to a million East European Jews.  The United States clung then, as it does today, to a legally regulated and limited immigration.  To admit many Jews would require rejecting an equivalent number of Italians, Irish, and Poles.  These were important established political constituencies.  So, it served American domestic political interests to have the Jews go somewhere else.  America’s loss became Israel’s gain.  Zionists organized the movement of large numbers of Holocaust survivors to British-ruled Palestine. 

            Nationalism came late to the Arabs, but it did begin to take hold during the inter-war years.  Arabs had not liked being ruled by the Turks and they didn’t like being ruled by the British and French any better.  Egypt, in particular, had been under the British thumb since the 1880s.  A nationalist movement there wanted the British out of the country and out of the Suez Canal Zone.  The League of Nation’s “Mandates” granted to Britain and France became the basis for the countries of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.  The British were content to hold Iraq and Jordan under indirect rule, but the French ruled with a heavier hand.  Nobody consulted the Arabs about Zionist settlement.  Arab nationalists seethed. 

            In this context, any plan to settle European immigrants in Arab lands had to look like ONE of the things that it was: European settler colonialism.[4]  The exclusion of so many Palestinian Arabs as a result of the war of 1948, like the ongoing “settlements,” amounts to a huge land grab. 

            It was a mistake made 75 years ago.  Egypt and Jordan could have created a Palestinian state when they ruled Gaza and the West Bank.  They preferred to cling to a grievance.  Bad mistake.  Israel isn’t going away.  Nor should the Palestinians.  Time to think anew and act anew. 

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[1] The Soviet Union, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, and Rumania. 

[2] Nationalism is the belief that people who share a history and culture, oftentimes expressed in speaking a single language, should be grouped together in an independent, self-governing state.  Zionism is the application of this idea to Jews.  Moreover, Zionism came to focus its aspirations on a specific physical place centered on the city of Jerusalem.  Until 1918, this territory lay under the control of the decrepit Ottoman Empire.    

[3] “You want me to leave my job as a violinist in Berlin to become a melon-farmer in the middle of nowhere?” 

[4] Another thing it was: an idealistic attempt to create a democratic safe-haven for a much oppressed people.