As the security situation in Palestine began to disintegrate in 1936, an independent royal commission led by Lord William Robert Wellesley Peel arrived in the country. Peel’s task was to find a way out of the deteriorating mess for all parties, Arab, Jewish and British. I have just finished reading his 412-page report, and am taken by both its balance and insight.

The report is breathtaking in scope. It looked far into the past for context, while gazing into the future in ways that only can be described as prescient. It was written in a dispassionate, subtle, yet powerful manner. It confidently identified two, and only two, causes for the Arab-Jewish conflict.

The first cause was Arab nationalism: Palestinian Arabs were caught up in the passion of the times and fervently wanted their own independent state. The second was a mixture of Arab chauvinism and xenophobia or, as Peel put it: “[T]heir hatred and fear of the establishment of the Jewish National Home.” Peel asserted that all other factors, both internal and external, were secondary.

The commission’s radical and unexpected solution was a call for major surgery. To Peel, the “races” had clearly demonstrated that they could not live together, and partition was the only answer. In modern words: a “One-State Solution” was unworkable. Arab and Jew needed to part ways and accept two states as the only viable answer.

To justify partition, he cited the 1923 precedent that followed the bloody Greco-Turkish war. As part of a very successful peace agreement that remains effective to this day, 1.3 million Greeks left Turkish rule to live on Greek soil, while 400,000 Turks left Greece. Peel wrote optimistically that for Palestine, “the number of people involved would be very much smaller” (about 225,000). All that it would require, he said, was that the “Arab and the Jewish leaders might show the same high statesmanship as that of the Turks and the Greeks and make the same bold decision for the sake of peace.”

Peel had a mastery of facts on the ground, and the honesty to acknowledge that the analogy with Greece was limited. In contrast to Palestine, Greece possessed adequate tracts of uninhabited, but cultivable, land upon which refugees could settle. That’s where his genius showed. Peel looked beyond the present reality to recognize that “barren” Palestine was, in fact, probably quite fertile. He called for urgent studies that “justified the hope that the execution of large scale plans for irrigation, water storage and development in . . . Beersheba and the Jordan Valley would make provision for a much larger population than exists there at the present time.”

A casual drive through modern Israel shows how much of a visionary the man truly was: All the areas he mentioned are now green with life. Peel was right on the money, and the 1923 Greco-Turkish model for peaceful population transfer indeed was an equally valid solution for the 1937 quagmire that was Palestine. Peace was at hand, and it took a creative thinker of Peel’s caliber to recognize this.

David Ben-Gurion pushed hard for acceptance of Lord Peel’s solution, but the Arab leaders would have none of that. They dismissed his recommendations out of hand and, within several weeks, sought their own solution: an onslaught of savage violence against their Jewish neighbors and the British authorities.

The Second World War started shortly thereafter, and the desperate British sought to shore up their southern front by appeasing Arab sentiment. They abandoned Peel’s recommendations and reversed themselves on earlier promises for a Jewish national home. Ten years and countless lives later, a variation of Peel’s partition ideas was promoted by the United Nations but, again, Arabs chose violence over compromise. The price this time was much higher: the bloody 1948 War of Independence, known to Palestinians as “the Naqba,” left deep scars that may never heal.

In 1937, peace was at hand, but only one side was prepared to compromise. And now? Read the papers. At last week’s Arab League conference, Syria’s Bashar Assad urged the Palestinians to stop negotiations and restart violence. His words sound familiar: “The price of resistance is not higher than the price of peace.”

 

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