Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the invitation to speak today.

I would start with a statement of a position: I believe that there is no other solution than a two-state solution.

This is an opening statement, but I would also like to try to answer a question. I've listened to the other testimonies that you received today and on Tuesday. What I would like to do in these few minutes is to actually try to answer the question of why we are talking about whether Canada should recognize Palestine or not and where this idea that the recognition of Palestine should only come as a result of negotiations comes from.

It's an important question to ask before we actually say it is time to change our position: How did we get there?

I would start from a step back. This idea of the two states is not dated 1947; it actually predates the UN declaration. It really dates from the thirties. The Peel commission in the thirties proposed two states. It was a different two states, but the original idea predates both World War II and the Holocaust.

When the State of Israel was established in 1948 after the first Arab-Israeli war, Israel did not control the West Bank and Gaza was not on the borders of resolution 181 but was rather on what we have now come to call the Green Line. Basically, from 1949 until 1967, the West Bank was controlled by Jordan and Gaza was controlled by Egypt.

Jordan annexed the West Bank; Egypt did not annex the West Bank. The annexation by Jordan was not recognized internationally, other than by the U.K., at least from an administrative point of view, and Pakistan. Egypt kept the Gaza Strip as essentially a refugee area and did not give Egyptian citizenship to the Palestinians, while Jordan did, which is why so many Palestinians still have Jordanian citizenship.

The question is that once Israel got control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, originally it did not plan to keep this control, so it is important to remember why we are in this position today. The plan and the strategic priority of the State of Israel was actually that of bilateral negotiation with other sovereign states in the region, and reciprocal recognition. We saw that in 1979 with Camp David. We saw that in 1994 with Jordan.

To wrap up, as I'm aware of the time, when the Oslo agreement took place and what we call the Israeli-Palestinian—rather than the Israeli-Arab—peace process started, there was a lot of road still to travel. I would argue that the priorities of Israel were actually not with the Palestinian issue but much more with establishing itself in the region.

The reason there was so much hesitation—by now, it had already been a couple of decades—to immediately recognize the Palestinian state is that this final status negotiation was so complex to address. Reciprocal trust had to be built, and instead of immediately recognizing Palestine when the parties were so far apart and when the Palestine Liberation Organization had just transitioned from essentially being an activist organization or even, as defined by some, a terrorist organization, to the official representative of the Palestinian people, it was quite understandable that this would be a precaution.

I would say that now the question to ask—and I believe this is the question that you're all reflecting on—is this: Are the conditions on the ground different? Is there now a reason to change that policy and think that this can be done before the rest?