The complex, confusing and ever-volatile issues surrounding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are so daunting that some scholars and observers of the Middle East have given up even trying to trace its history or offer possible paths to a solution. 

Robert P. Barnidge Jr., a lecturer and coordinator of international relations at Webster University, has plunged headlong into the Middle East maelstrom with his academic but highly readable book “Self-Determination, Statehood and the Law of Negotiation: The Case of Palestine” (Hart Publishing, $95). 

Barnidge densely packs the 264 pages of this timely and user-friendly (though costly) book with extremely detailed descriptions of the various Middle East plans to resolve the dispute between two competing nationalisms: Zionism, the effort to re-establish an independent Jewish State at its original biblical site, and Palestinian nationalism, the Arab effort to set up its own independent State of Palestine, either alongside Israel or in place of the Jewish State.

The author delves into the crucial period just after World War I, when the victorious allied powers, especially Great Britain and France, carved up portions of the Ottoman Empire, which was on the losing side of the Great War. 

The region known as Palestine was placed under a League of Nations mandate to be supervised by Great Britain, while the French were given a sphere of influence that included Syria and Lebanon. Those artificial boundaries imposed upon the Middle East would come back to haunt the very powers that drew the lines. At the time of their promulgation under the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, the boundaries seemed like an example of pragmatic colonial power statesmanship. 

Britain was placed in charge of Palestine from 1922 under the mandate that was set to expire in May 1948, the month in which Israel proclaimed its independence. The United Nations had replaced the League of Nations in the meantime, and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe had been murdered during the Holocaust. During the World War II years, Britain placed a cruel ceiling on the number of Jewish refugees to be admitted to Palestine and, as a result, hundreds of thousands of Jews who could have escaped the Shoah perished.

Inspired by Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, tens of thousands of Jews, mostly from Europe, began to resettle in Palestine and set up the Jewish Agency as a kind of government-in-waiting.

Barnidge provides detailed descriptions and analyses of the various efforts to meet the nationalistic aspirations of the Jews and Arabs in Palestine. The British in 1922 attempted to placate Emir Abdullah by its first partition of Palestine. The British hoped that if Emir Abdullah was given his own “private pasturage,” he would “surely quit meddling” and attempting to “dilute the Zionist project.” 

Abdullah was installed as king of the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, by which London “hoped to fashion a bridge of stability between British-controlled territory in Mesopotamia and French -controlled territory in the Levant.” 

Far from bringing about the desired result, this effort merely ceded the larger part of Palestine to Abdullah, whose Bedouin subjects were from the Hejaz region of Saudi Arabia. 

Barnidge makes clear that the present “crazy quilt” of conflicting secular, religious, nationalistic and ethnic interests in the post-Arab Spring Middle East is not unprecedented. The path to Middle East hellfrom the very beginnings of the Zionist-Palestinian clash of nationalisms has been well paved with ill-fated good intentions. 

Far from solving anything, carving out Transjordan from the Palestinen Mandate was, in the words of scholar  Mordechai Nisan quoted by Barnidge, “founded by Arab aliens in association with British (and) represented no national idea or political ideal. From the start it was lacking in roots and values. We might describe it as an ‘imagined kingdom’ born on the edge of a desert, to deny the east bankto Zionism and southern Syria to Arab nationalism.” 

Barnidge also presents a cogent discussion of the Peel Commission, which was set up by the British government. The commission, under British statesman Robert Peel, formally recognized the conflict in Palestine as one between two nationalities, or nations. Peel’s Palestine Royal Commission Report, like so many later plans, recommended partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. 

The Jewish Agency-World Zionist Organization representatives, headed by Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, were prepared to accept that plan, while the Arab Higher Committee, headed by the rabidly anti-Jewish Grand Mufti Hajimin al-Husseini, rejected it out of hand. 

Ten years after the collapse of the Peel Commission report, the U.N. General Assembly approved the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Ben-Gurion immediately accepted the decision, while the Arab Higher Committee and the neighboring Arab states rejected the plan and invaded Israel the day after its independence was proclaimed May 14, 1948. That the tiny Jewish State survived its War of Independence has been regarded as a historic “miracle” in that ancient land.

Barnidge continues his comprehensive survey and analysis of the various Arab-Israeli wars, the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979 and the continued, frustrating efforts to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian peace. 

Looking toward the future, Barnidge states:

“What does seem clear is that Israel and the PLO will have to forgo certain claims and cure certain breaches if they are to reach a final settlement. Unless both sides are willing to do this, to negotiate with one another without preconditions and according to international law of negotiation, it is unlikely that there will be a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, at least one reached consensually.”

However – and whenever – the various efforts to restart the moribund peace process between Israel and the Palestinians plays out, and there are some hopeful plans on the table at present, it is clear that among the important reference books, classroom textbooks and journalistic resources, Barnidge’s book will be near the top of the list.