Arabs Must Make Peace with Zionism

Arabs who remain at war with Israel routinely blame their endless conflict on the Jewish state, pointing to the Gaza war, Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, and far-right ministers such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. However, these political grievances offer convenient scapegoats for a more fundamental, century-old Arab refusal to accept the core premise of Zionism. To many in the Arab world, Zionism is reduced to a racist, supremacist ideology, often deployed as a political insult. Yet if peace is ever to prevail, the Arab world must come to terms with Zionism. To do so, it must first understand what Zionism actually is. At its core, Zionism is Jewish nationhood—the right of the Jewish people to sovereignty within a nation of their own. This sovereignty is tied to a specific geography, anchored in Mount Zion just outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City. Historically, Arab rejection has targeted both of these components: the concept of Jewish self-determination and the specific territory where that sovereignty is realized. This rejection often rests on the premise that Judaism is strictly a religion, rather than an ethnicity or a national identity. By applying this narrow definition, critics misportray Israel as an exclusivist theocracy whose citizenship, they argue, hinges solely on faith. Their argument is fundamentally flawed. First, outsiders should not dictate how an indigenous group defines its own identity. If the Jewish people define their identity through a blend of faith, shared lineage, and national heritage, that is their right. To understand how religion and national identity can intertwine, the Arab world needs only to look at its own history. While the Arabic language predates Islam by a millennium, and Arab Christians and Jews have always existed, the separation of Islam and Arabism became nearly impossible after the seventh century. Even the most famous Arab nationalist thinkers have acknowledged this reality. In his foundational text, The Arab Awakening, George Antonius—a Christian scholar—argued that the Prophet Mohammad was the true founder of the Arab nation. Antonius posited that Islam gave the Arab peoples their defining language, culture, and national mission. This definition was endorsed by later pan-Arab nationalists, such as Constantine Zurayk and Michel Aflaq, the Christian founder of the Arab Baath Party who later converted to Islam. If the Arab world accepts that Islam can give rise to a legitimate national identity, it cannot logically deny Judaism the same evolutionary path. The Arab world’s own political structures undermine its criticism of Israel. Most Arab states explicitly designate Islam as the state religion and declare that Islamic jurisprudence is the primary source of legislation. Several countries include the name of the dominant ethnic group in their official state names, such as the Syrian Arab Republic and the Arab Republic of Egypt. Even Lebanon, the once predominantly Christian nation whose constitution described it as “a country with an Arab face,” was eventually forced to change that characterization to “Lebanon is an Arab country.” If Arab ethnic or Muslim religious preferences do not invalidate the legitimacy of Egypt, Syria or Lebanon, neither can Hebraic or Judaic markers invalidate Israel. The second component of Zionism is land, centered on Jerusalem and other territories in the southeastern Mediterranean basin, known historically as the Holy Land or Terra Santa. The historical record shows that the Holy Land was never home to an independent, locally governed Arab or Muslim state. Instead, its residents were always the subjects of expansive empires governed from distant imperial capitals like Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, and Istanbul. The Holy Land was sovereign under Israelite rulers such as King Ahab, whose forces are documented in the Mesopotamian Kurkh Monolith’s account of the 853 BCE Battle of Qarqar. It was also ruled locally by the semi-independent Jewish Hasmonean kingdom, which controlled parts of Galilee and the Jordan Valley in the two centuries leading up to the Common Era, and later by the medieval Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. By 1936, a growing Jewish population in British Mandate Palestine was seeking independence, facing fierce Arab resistance to non-Muslim sovereignty. During my research for The Arab Case for Israel, I stumbled on an interview in which Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi framed the problem this way: Jewish migrants were tolerated as individuals but rejected as a self-determining collective. By demanding that Jews Arabize to be accepted, Khalidi enforces a supremacist standard that prioritizes Arab cultural dominance over Jewish self-determination. Ultimately, the Hebraic-Judaic and Arab-Muslim national projects failed to coexist within the British Mandate for Palestine. While Arabs blame Jewish exclusivity for this failure, the precipitous decline and near-extinction of non-Muslim minorities in neighboring Arab countries — Christians, Druze, Alawites, and Yazidis — points to a different reality. This regional pattern indicates that it was Arab intolerance, rather than Jewish behavior, that doomed the binational state project from the outset. The two remaining options are either separation into two states — a Hebraic Israel and an Arab Palestine — or a single state in which one nation is sovereign and the other autonomous. To this day, Arab peace frameworks offer no path to genuine Jewish sovereignty, as evidenced by the Saudi-backed Arab Peace Initiative. By demanding the “return” of 5.9 million UNRWA-registered Palestinians to Israel while requiring the evacuation of 800,000 Israelis from the West Bank, the plan would effectively create two states: an Arab-only Palestine alongside a half-Arab, half-Jewish Israel. With both the binational and traditional two-state models effectively dead, the only remaining resolution is for one national project to concede to the other and live as an autonomous minority. If the Jewish people concede their sovereignty, the world loses its only Jewish state. If the Arabs concede Palestine, 21 sovereign, Muslim-majority Arab states will still remain on the planet. Given that Zionism has proven its capability by producing a highly successful and innovative state like Israel, contrasted with the historically subpar record of state-building in the Arab world, common sense demanded a pragmatic Arab shift. The best way forward is for the broader Arab world to finally make peace with Zionism and accept a framework of robust Palestinian autonomy. Such a settlement would secure a significantly higher standard of living, greater economic stability, and better governance for Palestinians compared to the chronic volatility found in neighboring Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. A lasting peace cannot be built on the expectation that Israel will eventually disappear or demographically transform into something other than a Jewish state. It requires a fundamental shift in the Arab educational and media landscapes, moving away from anti-Zionist rhetoric and toward an honest engagement with Jewish history. When the Arab world recognizes Zionism not as an adversary, but as a parallel movement of national liberation, compromise becomes possible. Only by validating the foundational identity of their neighbor can Arab nations build a stable, prosperous, and coexistent Middle East. Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a columnist focusing on Lebanon and broader Arab affairs.