Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION2

Thesis Statement3

DISCUSSIONS3

Historical Context3

Establishing State Hood5

Control over its Borders6

World Community Recognition7

Moving Towards a State8

SOLUTIONS/ RECOMMENDATIONS9

WORKS CITED11

Is Palestine a State? The Significance of the Israel/Palestine Border Dispute

Introduction

The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians remains one of the most intractable conflicts of the 21st century. It has engendered four full scale state-on-state wars between 1948 and 1973 and innumerable smaller scale conflicts. Moreover, it is also seen as a cause for many smaller conflicts that have ranged from insurgencies and terrorist attacks to full scale military engagements, such as the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Beyond generating instability in a strategic critical region of the world, this conflict generates, many terrorist organizations, whose activity destabilizes more than the immediate geographic area of the Middle East. For this reason understanding the conflict and developing strategies to solve it or at least minimize its ferocity represents one of the most critical tasks. The Israeli-Palestinian problem has its origins in the late nineteenth century with the birth of the modern concept of Zionism within the programmatic writings of Moses Hess, Judah Alkalai, Hirsch Kalischer and Theodore Herzl (Shulewitz, pp. 143).

The First World War completely changed the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East, with the fall of the age-old Ottoman Empire and the creation of French and British mandates in the area. The first real success of the Zionist movement was achieved due to the famous "Balfour Declaration", in which the British representative in Palestine is engaged in "construction of a Jewish homeland (Smith, pp. 234-246). That too, in the area and at the same time safeguarding the rights of the influx of Jewish immigrants and the reality of an imperialist foreign government provoked a revival of nationalist Palestinian Arabs, whose society is polarized in those years. However, as the time passed by the debate relating to the statehood of Palestine have always been questioned. Historians such as John Darwin have argued that the ending of the Second World War marked a watershed in international politics (Robert & Kenneth, p.56). The emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union as the world's preeminent super powers forced Britain into a distant third world order. It seems, though, that the global significance of the Jewish question has too often taken away from the fact that Palestine was a mandated territory of the United Kingdom; a territory of strategic, monetary, and symbolic value, which was not dissimilar to other colonial or mandated territories controlled by Britain throughout the world.

However, in this regard many experts view that since U.N has accepted Palestine and its statehood, it is and should be state worldwide. But things are not as simple as it might seem on paper, the history of the long standing issues between Israel and Palestine and the atrocities committed form both sides fails to decode the statehood of Palestine. Similarly the fact cannot be ignored that UN resolutions have never been enforced, the right of refugees to return, and the creation of an independent Palestinian state, continue ...