The Reemergence of One-Statism

world wars. More recently, Germany, Japan, parts of the former Belgian Congo and former Portuguese/Indonesian East Timor were temporarily governed by great powers or the United Nations. Palestine itself was governed, between 1917 – 1918 and mid-1948, by Britain as a League of Nations mandated territory. Before that, Palestine was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, but this hardly applies, both because in the waning decades of the empire there was no substantial Jewish population in the country (in 1881 there were some 25,000 Jews and 450,000 Arabs, and in 1914, 60,000 – 85,000 Jews and 650,000 Arabs) and no real “national” conflict between Jews and Arabs, and because Palestine was not ruled as one political or administrative entity but as a collection of subdistricts, governed from the provincial capitals of Damascus or Beirut, or in the case of the Jerusalem subdistrict, directly from Istanbul. But the British Mandate proved unsuccessful, insofar as Whitehall failed either to find or to impose a solution for the Zionist-Arab divide or to prepare the population of the country for joint, unitary self-rule.

Given the growth of Palestinian Arab national consciousness and the Palestinian national movement since that time, as well as the realities of Zionist numbers and power, it is highly unlikely that either group would agree to the permanent suppression of its national aspirations within the framework of permanent international governance, and the violence that would almost instantly erupt, were such international rule to be imposed, would without doubt, sooner or later, undermine the willingness of any