Dear Palestine-supporter: Who created the problem? Israel? Britain? Russia? Arab countries?

And does that matter?

Is Israel a European Jewish settler-colonialist project as first argued by Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe in 2006? If so, would this make the Zionist entity an evil that must be wiped out, à la “From the river to the sea, . . ?” Should we, stubborn Jews that we are, acknowledge that Israel was born in sin and that we created the Israel-Arab conflict that plagues the world to this day (later renamed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict)?

Or is Britain to blame? In 2016, the Palestinian Authority planned to sue the British government for the Balfour Declaration with the claim that the British gave Muslim land to the Jews who had no right to it.

Or perhaps it is the Arabs’ fault — it is interesting, as a thought experiment, to wonder what would have happened if the five Arab armies had not attacked the Jews after the British Mandate of Palestine expired at midnight between 14-15 May 1948. Without war between the Jews and the Arabs, what would the borders of Israel have been then and now? What kind of relationships between Israel and her neighbours would have developed without the 1948-1967 Jordanian occupation of Judea, Samaria, and the Old City of Jerusalem and Egyptian occupation of the Gaza Strip? What would be the Arab proportion of the population of Israel had Arabs not run away when neighbouring armies attacked?

Or perhaps it is Russia’s fault. One could say they started it by trying to convince Arabs living in the Ottoman Empire before the turn of the 20th Century that they were Palestinians, even though that didn’t go very well back then. They finally succeeded when they invented the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1960s after having groomed Arafat for the position of Soviet representative against the Jews in the Middle East.

This 19-minute video gives a very good explanation for how the USSR turned the Israel-Arab conflict into an Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Regardless of how much you know about our history, you stand to learn a few new points by viewing this video.

History has an element of subjectivity to it because records are kept by people, stories of events are told by people, and analyses of these data are made by people. At the same time, it is possible to understand the past with every increasing accuracy as history continues to be studied and argued over. It is not just a matter of conflicting “narratives” that must be swallowed whole, leading to the belief that everyone is correct or nobody is correct.

Such a situation would provide no solid ground upon which to move forward in modern society’s attempt to resolve longstanding conflicts. Could Australia move forward without the truth and reconciliation programme? Could Germany and Israel have moved forward without the (truth and) reparations arrangement?

Given that, regardless of how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was created, what is the way forward to resolution? Historian Efraim Karsh of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies suggests what is holding it back: Finalizing a peace accord with Israel

. . . would transform the Palestinians in one fell swoop from the world's ultimate victim into an ordinary (and most likely failing) nation-state, thus terminating decades of unprecedented international indulgence. It would force Palestinian leaders into responsibility, accountability and the daunting task of state building. It is therefore of little surprise that whenever confronted with an international or Israeli offer of peace or statehood, Palestinian leaders will never approve.

When this is the price of peace for “Palestinian” leaders (in addition to having to give up the steady flow of monies into their pockets), does it matter how the conflict started?