Washington, September 13, 1993.
Never again did peace between Israel and the Palestinians seem as close as it did on the South Lawn of the White House.
"We who fought against you, against the Palestinians, we tell you today with a loud and clear voice: enough blood and tears have been shed," said acting Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin. And Yasser Arafat, who fought against Israel for decades, expressed his joy at the extraordinary courage of both sides in reaching this moment.
The former enemies shook hands, US President Bill Clinton smiled brightly and for the first time since the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine in 1947, a lasting two-state solution seemed possible.
»The UN, which at that time consisted of far fewer states than today, decided on this partition plan back then. And the most important fact of 1947 is that the Jewish population agreed to this plan and the Arabs did not,” says SPIEGEL correspondent Bernhard Zand in this podcast on the history of the two-state solution. “And not only did they not do it, but the other Arab states around them attacked Israel in 1948 after Israel's declaration of independence. And this war basically began the pushback of this area that was originally intended for the Palestinians."
This first Arab-Israeli war became known as the Palestine War or the Israeli War of Independence. For the Palestinian people, however, it means the expulsion and flight of around 700,000 Palestinians from allocated areas and has become known as 'Nakba'. A term that can be translated as catastrophe or misfortune, but means much more: the trauma of an entire people.
What followed were many more wars and few serious attempts to create peace between peoples. Bernhard Zand traces this history - from 1947 to the Oslo peace process in 1993 - in this episode of the SPIEGEL foreign podcast Eight Billion.
Listen to this podcast episode here:
In the regular episode of Eight Billion, Bernhard Zand and host Olaf Heuser discuss the current possibilities of a two-state solution.