The Israel-Palestine Conflict
Last read October 13, 2024
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28 highlights.
misleading is the notion that the Arab world is a single entity that displays uniform attitudes and policies vis‐à‐vis Jews, Zionism, and/or Israel.
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when to speak of acts of “aggression” and when to refer to acts of “resistance” against that aggression.
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At the end of 2016, there were an estimated 14.5 million Jews in the world, of whom 6.5 million lived in Israel, 5.7 million in the USA, and just over 1 million in Europe.1
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When the British left Palestine in mid‐May 1948, a war erupted; at the end of the fighting, the state of Israel, the chief fulfillment of Zionism, was born and accepted as a member‐state of the UN in May 1949
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There are today over 420 million Arabs living in 22 countries of the Middle East and North Africa.
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Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt – share borders with the state of Israel and are sometimes consequently labeled the “confrontation states” in this conflict.
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Palestinian Arab people not (yet) controlling an internationally recognized state – although Palestine is an accredited member of the League of Arab States.
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9 million Palestinians spread out across the region: 1.9 million in Gaza (of whom 1.3 million are registered refugees), 2.9 million in the West Bank (of whom 801 000 are registered refugees).
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Since the advent of the Prophet Muhammad and the rise of the faith community (umma) of Islam in the seventh century CE and its subsequent spread around the globe, a majority of the world’s Arabs are also practicing Muslims.
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The number of Muslims worldwide extends far beyond the Arab world and exceeds 1.8 billion.
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The presence of this religious dimension aggravates and embitters an already difficult dispute by adding a layer of righteousness, accompanied by the further certainty of ultimate triumph over one’s enemies.
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such otherworldly overtones only prolong the conflict and make it more intractable by further dehumanizing and delegitimizing the enemy,
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Perhaps it makes more sense to view this not as a binary, either/or, choice, but rather one of Zionism being a movement both of conquest (of Palestine) and of national liberation (of Jews).35
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Zionists did indeed view the Arabs not as their equals but as an underdeveloped people not particularly attached to any particular territory, a people who respected only force and (recalling periods of repressive Turkish rule) who would bow to superior authority.
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The relief of Jewish distress must be sought elsewhere than in Palestine, for the country is too small to hold a larger increase of population, and it has already borne more than its fair share.
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No code of morals can justify the persecution of one people in an attempt to relieve the persecution of another.
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militant Jewish groups resorted increasingly to anti‐British and anti‐Arab terror attacks, declaring their own “Jewish Revolt” against British rule and cooperating with the mainstream Hagana to create a temporarily unified “Jewish Resistance Movement.”
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Palestinians objected in principle to an outside body, the United Nations, forcing the demands of a minority against the wishes of the indigenous majority.
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In the mainstream Israeli narrative of Milhemet ha‐Atzma’ut, the beleaguered and poorly armed few triumphed against the well‐armed and better‐equipped many, just as the Biblical David had bravely taken on and slain the mighty Goliath.
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But Palestinian and Arab accounts of the actual fighting show themselves confronting better‐organized and highly motivated Zionist militias who had for years been secretly training and arming themselves in preparation for this day,38 while they themselves were ill prepared, poorly led, and disorganized.
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While the entire Arab world by population and land mass does appear overwhelming in 1947when juxtaposed with the tiny Jewish yishuv numbering between 600 000 and 650 000, the effective fighting forces doing battle on the ground were more favorable to the Zionist side. For example, during the first
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The refugees’ right to return to their homes or be compensated was recognized in Article 11 of UN General Assembly Resolution 194, passed on 11 December 1948
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This explanation was challenged in the 1960s by an Irish journalist’s examination of BBC monitoring of Arabic radio broadcasts, and later by scholars digging through archive files that began to become accessible in the 1980s.
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the net result was a combination of intensified Israeli security‐consciousness and a loss of worldwide support for the Palestinian struggle for statehood, especially when violent expressions of the latter were conflated with the attacks of “9/11” directed against Americans on US soil.
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as President of the PNA. In August of the
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the injection of a religious dimension into what we consider to be a mainly national conflict makes reconciliation ever more remote, especially because these religious dimensions have become, in recent decades, increasingly fundamentalist.
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One of the lessons which analysts and leaders drew from this failed US effort is that Israeli and Palestinian leaders and their publics need to want a resolution more than the Americans do, and to be prepared to pay a price for it.
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While the entire Arab world by population and land mass does appear overwhelming in 1947when juxtaposed with the tiny Jewish yishuv numbering between 600 000 and 650 000, the effective fighting forces doing battle on the ground were more favorable to the Zionist side.
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