Israel and a Palestinian State: Redrawing Lines?

Abstract

On November 5, 1904, Leo Amery (1873–1955), later an under-sec-retary in David Lloyd George’s (1863–1945) national government, pointed out to Arthur Balfour (1848–1930) that it would be impossible to put an end to the Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia until “all those regions have been fully developed and till our boundaries march side by side in the same fashion that boundaries do in Europe” (Amery 1904).¹ More than one century later it is becoming increasingly common to read academic and journalistic analyses aiming at reconsidering the historical role played by Western powers in the Eastern Mediterranean area by imposing borders and a state system designed by the West. In a recent article titled “Stop Blaming Colonial Borders for the Middle East’s Problems,” which appeared in The Atlantic, Nick Danforth (2013) pointed out for instance that:

The idea that better borders, drawn with careful attention to the region’s ethnic and religious diversity, would have spared the Middle East a century’s worth of violence is especially provocative … this critique … overlooks how arbitrary every other border in the world is, implies that better borders were possible.