One of the people most frequently blamed for igniting the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict is Arthur James Balfour, popularly known as Lord Balfour, the one-time U.K. Foreign Secretary and later Prime Minister (1902-1905). His 1917 proposal, the Balfour Declaration, was a promise by Britain to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. At the time, Britain administered Palestine under the British Mandate for Palestine that was instituted by the League of Nations after the First World War. Many people have said that it was that public pledge by Lord Balfour that sowed the seed for the later eviction of large numbers of Palestinians from their native land following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

That the Balfour Declaration was highly controversial from the outset, even in Britain, and that it ultimately played a role in the creation of the Jewish state, have never been in doubt. However, the actual basis for the formation of the state of Israel was United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, which was adopted in 1947, thirty years after Lord Balfour issued his proposal. Resolution 181, also referred to as the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, called for the establishment of independent Arab and Jewish states to coexist within the territory of Palestine. Although a majority of the then 57 members of the United Nations voted for the Partition Plan, it was rejected by the Arab nations of the Middle East, which promptly launched what became a series of wars against Israel, culminating in the current Israel-Hamas conflict.

Through those successive wars, Israel has captured and occupied additional lands at various times not only within the original territory of Palestine, but also in other parts of the wider region, including Egypt and Syria. Over that period, there have been numerous peace initiatives and United Nations resolutions aimed at resolving the multiple conflicts. Those efforts have had mixed success, at best.

I was a young boy in middle school in Ghana in 1974 when I read about former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s then ongoing Shuttle Diplomacy. It was my first exposure to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Kissinger’s mediation efforts that year helped resolve, to some extent, the stalemate that Israel and its two major opponents, Egypt and Syria, had reached following the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

In the decades since then, successive U.S. administrations have tirelessly mounted one peace initiative after another in search of a final resolution to this multipronged conflict. Most of those efforts have been focused on getting the two sides to agree on a two-state solution, as prescribed in UN Resolution 181. However, success has remained elusive. Most experts on the Middle East have pointed to the 1993 Oslo Accords as the closest the parties have ever come to reaching a deal. Under that agreement, which was signed by Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the PLO agreed to renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist. In return, Israel allowed the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a governing body to establish a platform for a future independent Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Hardliners in both Israel and within the Palestinian population promptly derailed the Oslo Accords. Rabin’s signing of the agreement was what led to his assassination by an Israeli right-wing extremist in November 1995. That peace deal was also the catalyst for Hamas’s rise to prominence.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton made another attempt to revive the peace process in 2000. He invited Arafat and then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to Camp David to try to broker a deal but that effort also failed. No U.S. administration since then has been able to make any major breakthroughs, and the extremists on both sides have taken maximum advantage of that vacuum in the last couple of decades.

It was natural for the native Palestinians to be aggrieved by the Partition Plan, which carved out 56 percent of their land for the establishment of the Jewish state. I am not a student of history so I don’t know how that apportionment was arrived at. However it came about, the reaction of the Arab nations appears to indicate that the decision was imposed on them without proper consultation.

That grievance notwithstanding, with all the nations around them collectively threatening to wipe the Jewish state off the map since the day after it came into existence, the Israelis have had no choice but to fight for their survival. But there is no justification for some of the heavy-handed ways in which Israel has gone about it. In particular, I have always been troubled by the bulldozing of family homes of young Palestinians who carry out attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians. Entire families have been thrown onto the streets with nowhere to go because of the actions of one member. Everywhere else in the world, parents and siblings are rarely held collectively responsible in such fashion for anything.

Aggressive and illegal Jewish settlement expansions constitute another indefensible behavior over the last several decades. There have been frequent reports of armed extremists in Israel forcibly ejecting Palestinians from their lands, with impunity. That has resulted in more and more of the Palestinian population being squeezed onto ever-shrinking parcels of land. The siege they have been under has radicalized an entire generation of Palestinians, leading to the escalating cycle of violence that the world has witnessed in recent years.

I vividly remember the horror I felt on the morning of Oct. 8 last year as details of the surprise Hamas attack on Israel the previous day emerged. As I stood in stony silence watching the television coverage, a flood of questions entered my mind. Over and over, I asked myself: How did it get to this? How could a population be left so desperate that it feels the only way to get the world to recognize its plight is for some of its radical members to kill that many innocent people indiscriminately, burn some alive, rape women, and take hundreds of others hostage?

Throughout this past year, the one thing that I have incessantly wondered about is this: How did the UN, which drew up the Partition Plan, fail so spectacularly to take proper ownership of the problem when the Arab nations attacked Israel immediately after it came into existence? And given how impotent today’s UN appears to be on the issue, the entire world has to take responsibility for this horrible mess in the Middle East. If this global body doesn’t have the authority to deal with this kind of conflict, as it increasingly appears, then who does?

The UN had fifty-seven member countries in 1947 when it adopted the Partition Plan. At the time, many of the other 136 nations that have joined the organization since then were colonies of some of those original members. I suspect that a majority of the current membership therefore views the 1947 UN as illegitimate, which would explain the obvious lack of respect for its decision to create the Jewish state.

Most people would blame the current paralysis on the structure of the Security Council and America’s use of its veto power to shield Israel from accountability for some its egregious actions. There is plenty of validity to that argument. Why did it take Oct. 7 for a White House to finally recognize the appalling behavior of violent Jewish settlers and impose sanctions on some of the worst abusers?

But, the fact of the matter is that all of us should look in the mirror. We live in a world now where few people are willing to speak clearly on anything. Everything is viewed through a partisan lens these days. People see wrong only when it is perpetrated by others they don’t like. That lack of objectivity is what causes America to feel that it has no choice but to protect its besieged ally at all cost since no one else would otherwise.

The dual U.S. role in the Middle East is another thing that I find quite perplexing. America provides weapons and other forms of aid to Israel to fight its multiple wars, while also serving as peace broker. It is perhaps the biggest conflict of interest ever recorded in history. Unsurprisingly, many of the past peace initiatives have failed because the U.S. is not seen as an honest broker by the Arab counterparts.

The over 1,200 Israelis and foreigners who were murdered by Hamas on Oct.7 were no more guilty than the nearly 3,000 Americans killed by Al Qaeda terrorists on September 11, 2001. Ordinary citizens cannot be held responsible in such fashion for the actions of their governments, even in functional democracies. Otherwise, an overwhelming majority of the world’s population would deserve such violent death because most of us have been complicit in all manner of things at one time or another. We should all hang our heads in shame for our collective past and present actions—and inaction—that allowed the Middle East conflict to fester for so long. The result of that is the slaughter of over 43,000—and counting—mostly innocent Palestinians, including large numbers of women and children, in just the past year.

Clearly, the way the world has dealt with the situation in the Middle East up to now is no longer tenable. It is past time for honest, responsible global leaders to step up and take charge of it. Or do we need Overlords?