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early as 1919, spokesmen for the Jaffa Muslim-Christian Associ-
ation, representing the Arab notability in Palestine s main town,
told the King-Crane Commission, sent by the Allied powers to
investigate the Palestine problem: We will push the Zionists
into the sea or they will send us back into the desert. 142 In-
deed, throughout the Mandate years the Palestinian Arabs
viewed the conflict as a zero-sum game that allowed of no com-
promise and would necessarily end in one side s destruction or
removal.
A noteworthy exchange occurred during Haj Amin al-Husseini s
testimony before the Peel Commission in early 1937. The com-
missioners asked:
QUESTION: Does his eminence think that this country
can assimilate and digest the 400,000 Jews
now in the country?
AL-HUSSEINI: No.
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The History of One-State and Two-State Solutions
QUESTION: Some of them would have to be removed
by a process kindly or painful as the case
may be?
AL-HUSSEINI: We must leave all this to the future.
On which the commissioners commented in their report: We
are not questioning the sincerity or the humanity of the Mufti s
intentions . . . but we cannot forget what recently happened, de-
spite treaty provisions and explicit assurances, to the Assyrian
[Christian] minority in Iraq [the reference was to the massacre of
more than three hundred Nestorian Christians by Iraqi troops at
Sumayyil in northern Iraq on 11 August 1933. The massacre oc-
curred despite government assurances of protection which al-
Husseini, when appearing before the commission, was not even
bothering to offer the Jews]; nor can we forget that the hatred of
the Arab politician [that is, al-Husseini] for the [ Jewish] Na-
tional Home has never been concealed and that it has now per-
meated the Arab population as a whole. 143
Through the Mandate years, al-Husseini espoused a one-state
solution in which only Jews who had been permanently resident
in Palestine before 1917 (or, in some versions, 1914) would be al-
lowed to stay (or, in another version, be granted citizenship). In
1938, one of al-Husseini s representatives, Musa Husseini, a rel-
ative, told Ben-Gurion that Haj Amin insists on seven per cent
[as the maximal percentage of Jews in the total population of
Palestine], as it was at the end of the [First] World War. 144 In
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The History of One-State and Two-State Solutions
September 1946 and January 1947, Husseini s representatives at
the two-stage London Conference on Palestine repeated the for-
mula that the Jews who had arrived in Palestine after 1917 were
invaders and that the future Palestine Arab state would have to
decide on their fate; the same position, which implied nonaccep-
tance as citizens of those Jews who had arrived in the country
after World War I (and perhaps a worse fate), was reiterated in
the al-Husseini party newspaper, Al-Wahda, on 10 March 1947.145
Husseini was to repeat a similar formula in 1974, shortly before
his death in exile: There is no room for peaceful coexistence
with our enemies. The only solution is the liquidation of the for-
eign conquest in Palestine . . . and the establishment of a national
Palestinian state on the basis of its Muslim and Christian inhab-
itants and its Jewish [inhabitants] who lived here before the
British conquest and their descendants. 146 It is not without rele-
vance that the Palestine National Council in the 1960s adopted a
similar formula in the Palestinian National Charter (see below).
The fact that Haj Amin al-Husseini sat out most of World
War II in Berlin, was employed by the German Foreign Ministry
as a broadcaster of anti-Allied jihadist propaganda to the Arab
world, and helped recruit Muslim soldiers in the Balkans to fight
the Russians on the Eastern Front is clearly salient to under-
standing the thinking of the Yishuv during 1945 1948: Pales-
tine s Jews believed that the Palestinians intended to slaughter
them in a second Holocaust. And at least some Arabs, too,
believed that such a denouement was imminent. Matiel Mug-
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The History of One-State and Two-State Solutions
hannam, the Lebanese-born Christian Arab head of the Arab
Women s Organization, affiliated to al-Husseini and the Arab
Higher Committee, at the start of 1948 told an interviewer: [A
Jewish state] has no chance to survive now that the Holy War
has been declared. All the Jews will eventually be massacred. 147
Nor was this expulsionist, or eliminationist, mindset restricted
to the Palestinian Arab leadership; some Arab states leaders also
occasionally gave it free rein. At the end of 1947 King Ibn
Sa ud wrote to US president Harry Truman: The Arabs have
definitely decided to oppose [the] establishment of a Jewish
state . . . Even if it is supposed that the Jews will succeed in gain-
ing support . . . by their oppressive and tyrannous means and
their money, such a state must perish in a short time. The Arab
will isolate such a state from the world and will lay siege until it
dies by famine . . . Its end will be the same as that of [the] Cru-
sader states. 148
the 1960s
The 1948 War had ended with Palestine in the hands of Israel,
Jordan (the West Bank), and Egypt (the Gaza Strip), with no
Palestinian Arab state. Arab society in Palestine had been shat-
tered. About 60 percent of Palestinians had been displaced from
their homes and were living in orchards, empty buildings, and
newly established refugee camps, largely in the West Bank
and Gaza, with the remainder in Lebanon, Syria, and Transjor-
dan. The Palestinian political and military elite had dispersed
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The History of One-State and Two-State Solutions
to the seven winds, and Palestinian political institutions had
disappeared.
During the 1950s, there was a measure of organized cross-
border guerrilla and terrorist raiding by Palestinians against
Israel, some of it orchestrated by Egyptian military intelligence.
But it didn t amount to much, and Palestinian politics were dead.
Things began to change in the early 1960s, when a handful of
nationalist and pan-Arab Palestinians began to organize in the
lands of their dispersion the rudiments of a resistance movement.
In 1964, Egypt, partly for internal Arab reasons, arranged the
convocation of a Palestine National Council, consisting of rep-
resentatives of the Palestinian communities and organizations in
Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora. The PNC first met in
Jerusalem in May 1964, there establishing an executive wing, the
Palestine Liberation Organization, with a former al-Husseini
aide, Ahmed Shukeiry, as its first president.
At that meeting, the PNC set out its political goals in a docu-
ment entitled The Palestinian National Charter (or Covenant),
henceforward the PLO s constitution. In it, the forces of inter-
national Zionism are defined as evil and the Palestinian
people are enjoined to move forward on the path of holy war
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