EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Just as Israel is a Jewish state of nearly 9 million citizens, where some 2 million non-Jews live in peace and security, there is no reason why a Palestinian Arab state should not host a sizable Jewish minority living in peace and security with the Arab majority.
It is a historical irony that what was internationally recognized as an indisputable Jewish right nearly a century ago has become a foremost denigration of this very right.
In 1922 the League of Nations, the UN’s predecessor, endorsed the 1917 Balfour Declaration on the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine and tasked Britain with facilitating this goal. It was taken for granted that the biblical areas of Judea and Samaria, the bedrock of Jewish statehood from time immemorial, would be part of that prospective national home (or, rather, state). Indeed, the mandate given to Britain even included the vast territory east of the Jordan River, or Transjordan as it was known at the time (it is now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan).
This was not to be. Transjordan’s emir-turned-king Abdullah I conquered these territories during his 1948 attack on the nascent state of Israel and made them the West Bank (of his kingdom) two years later, only to have their future become an internationally contested issue after their capture by Israel during the June 1967 war. With the passage of time, and in contravention of the November 1967 Security Council Resolution 242, which established the land-for-peace principle and envisaged Israel’s retention of some of the territories captured in the war, the perception of the West Bank as “occupied Palestinian territory” has become a widely accepted axiom, with Israeli communities established in this area (or settlements as they are commonly known) derided as flagrant violation of international law.