“From the river to the sea,” from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. It is difficult to find a more destructive formula, shouted by those who want to get rid of the Jews from this land of theirs.
But “from the river to the sea” could also be a prophetic formula, of true peace between the two peoples that inhabit this same land, Jews and Arabs.
The two-state solution, continually evoked by many governments and also by the Holy See, is in reality impracticable. While certainly arduous and a long way off, but more sincere and decisive, is that of a single state for Jews and Palestinians, extending precisely “from the river to the sea” and with its capital in Jerusalem.
In the Catholic camp, this is the solution invoked publicly for the first time by the bishops of the Holy Land – the first of whom was the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Pierbattista Pizzaballa – in a declaration of May 20, 2019:
“All talk of a two-state solution is empty rhetoric in the current situation. We have lived together in this land in the past; why should we not live together in the future too? The fundamental condition for a just and lasting peace is that all in this Holy Land have full equality. This is our vision for Jerusalem and for the whole territory called Israel and Palestine, set between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”
And it is also the solution presented a number of times in recent years by such an authoritative magazine as “La Civiltà Cattolica,” from the pen of its leading expert on Judaism, the Israeli Jesuit David M. Neuhaus.
But with an objection at first glance irrefutable, shared universally and also by a large part of the Jewish world. It is the objection according to which Israel is in the meantime illegally occupying territories that have never been its own, in East Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria: the territories that the United Nations had assigned to the Palestinians in the partition plan of 1947 at the origin of the current State of Israel.
But is it truly so? Or should the actual birth of the State of Israel be backdated by a quarter of a century? With its legitimate borders extending since then “from the river to the sea”?
This is precisely what David Elber, a Jewish scholar of geopolitics, maintains and documents in a book by various authors – Jews, Christians, Muslims – recently released in Italy with the title “The New Rejection of Israel.”
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Elber’s reconstruction begins with the Sanremo peace conference of April 1920, at which the victorious powers of the First World War – Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan – with the authority conferred on them by the League of Nations, decided to create a homeland for the Jewish people in the land of their fathers, a land no longer subject to the dissolved Ottoman Empire, and entrusted Great Britain with the “International Class A Mandate” for Palestine.
With the name of Palestine, which dated back to the Roman Empire but had been removed by both the Arabs and the Ottomans, the mandated power designated the whole territory that extended from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, north to the slopes of Mount Hermon and south to an outlet in the Red Sea: practically the present State of Israel plus the so-called “occupied” territories. While the territories east of the Jordan River, the present-day country of Jordan, were given the name of Transjordan.
According to article 5 of the mandate, approved on September 16, 1922 by the League of Nations, the Jewish people held sovereignty over the territory called Palestine, while Great Britain was only to administer it, protect it, and defend its borders. The mandate’s definitive entry into force bears the date of September 29, 1923, two months after the peace treaty with Turkey was signed in Lausanne.
Settlements by Jews from abroad were permitted in the whole territory called Palestine. But beginning in 1939, Great Britain, for political reasons of “appeasement” of the Arabs, practically made new settlements impossible, except in a tiny part of the territory, where land purchase prices skyrocketed.
“This decision,” Elber writes, “had the weightiest of repercussions for Jewish immigration to Palestine, and was the cause of many deaths in the extermination camps.”
In 1945, at the end of the Second World War, the dissolved League of Nations was replaced by the United Nations, article 80 of whose statutes – Elber explains – “strengthened and made binding again what had been made operational with the Mandate for Palestine”: namely, that “the mandated power did not have the full territorial sovereignty of the mandate, which ultimately belonged to the people for which it had been established.”
In the meantime, however, a genuine civil war between the local Jewish and Arab populations was bloodying Palestine, and this induced the UN General Assembly to seek a solution, which certainly could not be that of repealing a binding provision like that of 1923, established by an international treaty.
The general assembly, in fact, did not make such a decision, which did not fall within its powers, but on November 29, 1947, it approved Resolution 181, which suggested to Great Britain, in its capacity as the mandated power, how to go about quelling the conflict, with a territorial partition of Palestine between Jews and Arabs.
Elber writes:
“To make this recommendation irrevocable, the two parties involved in the partition, namely the Jews and the Arabs, had to give their consent to make the legal principle of ‘pacta sunt servanda’ binding. The Jews agreed, but the Arabs flatly refused and decided on war. Nor did the UN Security Council take the necessary measures to implement the same resolution. It is clear, therefore, that from the beginning Resolution 181 never had the powers that afterward many speciously attributed to it.”
The war, as is known, ended with the victory of the Jews, who settled within the current borders of the State of Israel, officially proclaimed on May 14, 1948, while East Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria were annexed to Jordan, and the Gaza Strip to Egypt. Elber continues:
“So when did it arise, the unfounded accusation against Israel of illegally occupying the West Bank and Gaza? It arose after the Six-Day War of 1967, a defensive war in which, in truth, Israel did nothing more than reconquer lands that already belonged to it legally, even if it did not have effective possession of them.
“For nineteen years, between 1948 and 1967, these lands had been illegally occupied by Jordan, without Israel ever having renounced its full sovereignty. In 1967 Jordan made a military attack on Israel, which defeated the Jordanians and reconquered the aforementioned territories. In any case, the territorial dispute ended in 1994 with the signing of the peace treaty between the two countries, according to which Jordan renounced all territorial claims to Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem.
“And yet, despite this, over the years the belief that Israel illegally occupies the territories of Judea and Samaria has become so deeply rooted that this thesis has become a certainty in all contexts relating to Israel and the Middle East. This belief is so deeply rooted even in Jewish circles in the diaspora and in Israel itself – especially among those on the left – that it is considered a factual certainty even if it is plainly false.”
And the Palestinians? Elber writes again:
“As concerning the Palestinian claims, it can be emphasized that they were not a people recognized as such by international law either in 1948 or in 1967. They were recognized as such by the international community only in 1970 (UN General Assembly, Resolution 2.672 C of December 8).
“For this reason they cannot claim ‘ex post’ prerogatives over that land. Until that date they were an Arab people indistinguishable from the Jordanians or Syrians (which, moreover, they still are today in terms of language and culture). They could have claimed the right to the land if they had accepted the provisions of Resolution 181, which – it is worth reiterating – had no legal force in itself: only if it had been accepted by both the Jews and the Arabs would it have created the basis for a right of territorial partition between the two peoples.”
Elber stops here in his reconstruction. But the sequel does not change the substance of the question. There was the Yom Kippur War of 1973, then in 1979 the peace with Egypt with its renunciation of Gaza, then that phase – between the Oslo Accords of 1993 and the Camp David Accords of 2000 – in which the two-state solution appeared closer but failed due to Palestinian rejection, up to the current war ignited by the massacre of the innocents of October 7, 2023, committed by Hamas in the land of Israel, ever and again with the stated aim – not only of Hamas but of the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Yemeni Houthis, and above all of Iran – of annihilating the Jewish nation.
This axis of enmity is emerging from the current war greatly weakened. But a true peace does not seem close by any means. In the so-called “occupied” territories, coexistence between Jews and Arabs is not at all peaceful, both because of the hotbeds of Islamist guerrilla warfare and because of the abuses of power theorized and practiced by a large part of the 700,000 Jewish colonists who have settled there year after year.
But there are also the 2.1 million Arabs who are citizens of the State of Israel, more than a fifth of the whole population, with their representatives in parliament, governments, the supreme court, and at the head of the country’s biggest bank, with prominent roles in hospitals and universities. None of them shows any intention of emigrating to neighboring Arab countries in search of freedom. And Israel’s founding act of 1948 unequivocally affirms the equality of all citizens without distinction, an equality that cannot be affected even by the highly criticized law passed in 2018 on the Jewish nature of the state.
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Returning to the book that prompted this Settimo Cielo post, published by Belforte and edited by Massimo De Angelis, it should be noted that it bears as its subtitle: “Reflections on Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the self-hatred of the West.” And it is meant to address the most crucial questions that have arisen since the pogrom of October 7, 2023, first of all that “new rejection of Israel” (the book’s title) which even goes so far as to deny it the right to exist.
Among the authors of the chapters, in addition to David Elber and Massimo De Angelis, there are the Jews Michael Ascoli, Marco Cassuto Morselli, Sergio Della Pergola, Ariel Di Porto, Alon Goshen-Gottstein, Fiamma Nirenstein, Shmuel Trigano, Ugo Volli; the Christians Pier Francesco Fumagalli, Guido Innocenzo Gargano, Massimo Giuliani, Ilenya Goss, Paolo Sorbi; the Muslim Yahya Pallavicini; the secularist Vannino Chiti.
All this driven by the conviction that “perhaps only the rediscovery of the way indicated and preserved by the religions, which in the Middle East certainly conflict but also have a deeper and more original bond between them, can illuminate a path of dialogue toward the rediscovery of our identity and the recognition of the other.”
It could be helpful to set the analyses in the book alongside the editorial by the historian Ernesto Galli della Loggia in “Corriere della Sera” of December 30, 2024, on the “sentiment of unbearability” that is growing in the West toward Judaism, partly on account of Israel’s uninhibited use of the instrument of war when it sees its very existence threatened.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.
