The Israeli-Palestine dispute: time for compromise: Phil Goff argues that the chance for peace in Palestine should be grasped.

• Author: Goff, Phil

On Monday 14 May 2012 we were in Jerusalem as it marked the 64th commemoration of the day Israel declared its independence in 1948. For Israelis, that day was the fulfilment of the dream of a Zionist state. After centuries of persecution of Jews in the diaspora, culminating in the Nazi murder of six million Jews during the Second World War, their desire for a state of their own was understandable.

But for Palestinian Arabs it is the day they commemorate as Nakba, a day of catastrophe. It marks the flight or forcible expulsion of up to 750,000 Palestinians, with today around five million people who are refugees or their descendants. As a banner in Ramallah proclaimed, 'Their independence is our Nakba'.

Israel has opened its doors to Jewish people from around the world, with a surge of over a million migrating to Israel from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. Nearly six million Jews and 1.5 million Arabs are now Israeli citizens.

The Israelis say their claim to settle the land stems from the forced exodus from their traditional homeland 2000 years ago. Yet there was no sense of irony when a passionate member of the Israeli Knesset (parliament) told us that the Palestinians were not refugees, merely the children and grandchildren of refugees.

When Israel launched the Six Day War in 1967, it did so in the belief that its existence was threatened by universally hostile neighbours whose aim was to destroy the state of Israel. Its victory, however, made it the occupier of lands and the controller of lives of millions of non-Jewish people, which continues in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel today exercises effective power over 2.75 million Palestinian Arabs who live on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem and 1.6 million Arabs in the Gaza Strip. A further three million live as refugees in Jordan, Egypt, Syria and the Lebanon.

If Israel annexed the West Bank, the Arab population in the wider Israel would soon approach that of the Jewish population with the Palestinian population growing faster. The very essence of Israel is that it is a Jewish state. It could not remain so if it absorbed the Arab population, according them equal rights. Expelling non-Jews or creating an apartheid state where some citizens had lesser rights would be utterly unacceptable.

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