2023-11-19 08:00:09
Nobel Peace Prize winners in 1994. From left to right: Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. SAAR YAACOV (GPO)
It was in November 1947 that the UN adopted the very principle of the two-state solution. She in fact voted for a plan to divide Palestine, then under British mandate for twenty-five years, between a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem remaining under international status. This plan benefited from the joint support of the United States and the USSR, who put aside, on this occasion, the differences from the beginning of the “cold war”. It was approved by the Zionist leadership, for whom the attribution to a Jewish state of 55% of Palestine represented an unexpected victory, while the Jewish population was only a third of that of the territory. It was rejected by the Arab side, who criticized the dispossession of the indigenous majority of the population for the benefit of recently settled Jewish immigrants. The fate of the large Arab minority which would have continued to inhabit the future Jewish state also aroused concern.
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From the Nakba to Camp David
The war for Palestine broke out as soon as the UN voted on the partition plan, first between Zionist and Arab militias, then, from the expiration of the British mandate in May 1948, between the new State of Israel. and the Arab armies. More than half of the 750,000 Palestinians forced to leave their homes did so before the proclamation of the State of Israel. This mass exodus, referred to in Arabic as the « Nakba » (the “catastrophe”), is accompanied by the destruction or Judaization of hundreds of Palestinian localities on the now Israeli territory, which covers 77% of Mandatory Palestine (Jordan annexes 22%, the Gaza Strip under administration Egyptian representing the residual 1%).
The UN admitted Israel as a member state in May 1949, while the Arab states agreed to deny any autonomous representation to the Palestinians. It took two decades for Yasser Arafat to take control of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), then dedicated to the destruction of the State of Israel. But the refusal of armed struggle by the Intifada, i.e. the “uprising” territories occupied by Israel in December 1987, led the PLO to endorse the two-state solution a year later.
President François Mitterrand had, from his first state visit to Israel, in March 1982, discussed the PLO and the Palestinian state from the podium of the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament. During his second state visit, in November 1992, he referred to the UN partition plan for Palestine to assert that, between Israel and the future Palestinian state, “the law is the same”. It is true that his host in Israel is Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who has just opened a secret channel of negotiations with the PLO.
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