The Middle East crisis and global security (5)

By : Sylvester Odion Akhaine

Date: 12 December 2025 3:41am WAT

Share :

A third major route to peace is the Abraham Accords, a series of agreements mediated by Donald Trump, the U.S. President, that normalised relations between Israel and a handful of Arab states, namely, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. The agreements signed in 2020 were apparently for cooperation in areas such as security, technology, and economics, but latently to break Israeli isolation in the Arab world and to undermine Iran’s growing regional influence. It was significant against the backdrop of Israel’s earlier normalised relations with Egypt and Jordan in the region.

However, pending is the resolution of the Palestinian statehood based on UNSC resolutions 181, 242, and 338, among others. In this connection, there are on the table formulas for peace, such as the one-state solution, the two-state solution, and now the Trump Plan. One-State Solution vs. Two-State Solution

The One-state solution has three aspects, namely, the Israeli perspective, the Arab perspective, and the civic perspective. The Israeli perspective, an offshoot of Zionist fundamentalism, was reified by the Arab countries’ refusal to accept the UN two-state solution. In Israel, there are two visions of an Israeli state, namely, a civic state and an exclusive Jewish state.

The exclusive Zionist viewpoint often peddled by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister, borders on total control of the Jewish historical territory beyond the more secular position that acknowledges a community of Jews wishing to establish a Jewish state in Palestine on which they can be Sovereign to assure themselves their own security”(Garry, 2018-1019, p. 32). Chomsky provides a proletarian insight into the one-state solution that embraces both the Jews and Arabs in Palestine. In his reflection, he notes:

The alternative to the framework of national states, national conflict, and national interest, is cooperation between people who have common interests that are not expressible in national terms that in general assume class lines. Such alternatives are open to those who believe that the common interest of the great masses of people in Palestine – and everywhere – is the construction of a world of democratic communities in which political institutions, as well as the commercial and industrial system as a whole, are under direct popular control, and the resources of modern civilisation are directed to the satisfaction of human needs and libertarian values. There is little reason to suppose that these interests are served by a Jewish state, any more than they are served by the states of the Arab world. Ghanem (2013, pp. 19-20) provides a summary of the Arab perspective:

At the fourth session of the PNC, in July 1968, the Palestinian Covenant was amended to emphasise Palestinian distinctiveness within the Arab nation. The changes were drafted and approved with the agreement of the fedayeen organisations and all those attending the PNC meeting.

In general, the Covenant opted for maximalism and extreme language that stressed the fact that Palestine is “the homeland of the Palestinian people and an integral part of the greater Arab homeland”; that the territory of mandatory Palestine “is an indivisible territorial unit”; that the Palestinian people have “the legal right to their homeland”; and that Israel should be eliminated from the region. Judaism, according to the Covenant, “being a religion, is not an independent nationality, nor do the Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.

As we have seen in the preceding sections of this lecture, PLO’s exclusivist standpoint has shifted to a two-state solution. It is Israel that is now stone-walling. The two-state solution is enshrined in the United Nations Resolution 181, passed by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 1947.

The resolution called for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with the city of Jerusalem to maintain the status of a corpus separatum, that is, a separate entity run by a special international regime. The resolution was accepted by the Israelis in quest of a legitimate state of their own, recognised by the international community.

This has been reiterated in several UN resolutions. However, the Arabs who saw the insertion of Israel in Palestine, where they had lived for ages and clearly outnumbered the Jewish communities in the area, saw it as a mortal intrusion and therefore rejected the Plan. It was in the UN Plan that the concept of a one-state solution first emerged and materialised. The UN Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) that worked on the resolution had two reports: the majority and minority reports.

The minority report had proposed a binational federation or state comprising autonomous Jewish and Palestinian areas. Whereas the Israelis accepted the two-state solution, the Arabs, however, turned down both options, with a counterproposal to the binational state to the extent that only those Jews and their descendants who had arrived before the Balfour Declaration would be citizens of the state. Expectedly, it was rejected by the Zionists.

The result was the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. Arab nationalism did not see a place for the Israeli in Palestine. Although it has since been revised following Yasser Arafat’s pragmatism, which culminated in the Oslo Accords.

Iran, a non-Arab state, has held on to the position of a Palestinian state without the Jews. This viewpoint gained reinforcement after the Islamic revolution of 1979 and was re-echoed recently by the Iranian leadership in the wake of the Twelve-Day War with Israel.

Trump Plan The Trump Plan, a 20-point agenda, first made public on 29 September, 2025, is essentially about conditions for ceasefire, exchange of prisoners and aid flow, post-war governance architecture comprising an apolitical committee of experts that includes Palestinian and international experts, and Board of Peace, transitional in nature and chaired by President Trump to handle the redevelopment of Gaza to exclusion of Hamas.

The architecture also provides for the creation of a special economic zone with tariff privileges for participating countries, a temporary International Stabilisation Force (ISF) for Gaza underpinned by a promise that Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza and promotion of peaceful co-existence through interfaith and political dialogues.

The plan, which was signed on October 9, received diplomatic nod at the 13 October 2025, Sharm El-Sheikh Peace Summit and has been endorsed by the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 of 17 November, dousing the perception of U.S. unilateralism and a neo-imperial takeover of Gaza. However, Professor Marc Weller, Programme Director, International Law Programme at Chatham House, has pointed to its shortcomings: The U.S. achieved the adoption of a resolution that retains all the key elements of its initial draft and remains faithful to the 20-point Trump plan. In doing so the U.S. managed to respect Israel’s red lines while giving Arab states a little of what they required, including a Chapter VII mandate, even if disguised…Palestinian participation in governance and in shaping the future of the territory is very limited and largely deferred to an undetermined point in the future. In past missions of this kind, like Eastern Timor and Kosovo, strong local pressure for a more meaningful local role in governance soon became apparent, along with the demand for a final status process leading to independent statehood. To be continued next week. Akhaine is a Professor in the Department of Political Science, Lagos State University (LASU). He delivered this Lecture (excerpts) at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs on December 2, 2025, as part of the Institute’s Foreign Policy Lecture Series.

Tags: