The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Very Short Introduction
Last read September 20, 2024
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25 highlights added in September 2024.
‘If a time comes when our people in Palestine develop so that, in small or great measure, they push out the native inhabitants, these will not give up their place easily.’
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labour Zionists, they advocated the importance of settlement work over international diplomacy
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Vladimir Jabotinsky founded the Revisionist Party with the explicit goal of attaining statehood by military force.
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From this strategy evolved the kibbutz movement, a programme of settlement based on cooperation among Jewish immigrants.
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The need for water and cultivable land had to be balanced against the more pressing need to protect oneself against attack, for example from Bedouin raids. Such considerations were of enormous importance during the early 19th century when Ottoman authorities were unable to provide the basic infrastructure required by agriculturalists interested in increasing their input of labour or capital.
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The First World War (1914–18) has been described as the most transformative event in the history of the modern Middle East.
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The British army’s occupation of Arab territories ended four centuries of Ottoman rule over them.
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six new successor states from the former Ottoman Empire were created: Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan.
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Britain’s long-standing strategic concern in the eastern Mediterranean was to protect the overland trade route to India and, after its opening in 1869, the Suez Canal, which quickly came to be regarded as the jugular vein of Empire.
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First, Britain’s high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, made promises to Sharif Husayn, the Hashemite ruler of the Hijaz region of Arabia, about the creation of an independent Arab kingdom. Secondly, Britain officially recognized the long-standing claims of her French allies to Syria, while staking claims of her own. Third, promises were made to Zionist leaders in London. A fourth set of commitments, spurred by US President Woodrow Wilson, was broadcast about the rights of all peoples to independence and self-determination
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If it was the First World War that broke the Ottoman Empire, the Second World War hastened the demise of the British Empire that had taken its place.
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Following the Second World War, many countries, especially in the West, declared their full support for an independent Jewish state as a home for Jewish refugees who had survived the Holocaust.
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The 1947 UN plan was officially entitled ‘Resolution 181 (II) Future Government of Palestine’. It proposed the partitioning of the unitary state of Palestine into two countries, one Jewish and one Arab, and the establishment of a special international regime over the Jerusalem area and its religious sites. UNSCOP went much further than the Peel Commission in accommodating Zionist aims. On paper, the areas proposed for the Jewish state comprised 55 per cent of Palestine’s territory, including vital water supplies, most citrus plantations (both Arab and Jewish), and the largely unpopulated Negev desert, even though Jews constituted only 33 per cent of Palestine’s population and owned less than 10 per cent of the total land area. This inequitable distribution was determined in large part by the anticipated need of the new Jewish state to absorb hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors. The population embraced by the proposed frontiers of the projected Jewish state comprised approximately 500,000 Jews and a very large minority of 400,000 Arabs. The proposed Arab state, on the other hand, was almost entirely Arab.
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in April 1948, Haganah authorized a campaign known as Plan D, which gave Haganah officers authority to undertake the ‘destruction and expulsion or occupation’ of Arab villages, as deemed necessary to secure the interior of the emergent Jewish state.
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killing in April 1948 of over a hundred Palestinian residents in the village of Deir Yassin by Irgun and Stern Gang extremists. Within days, Arab fighters retaliated by killing almost eighty members of a Jewish armed medical convoy on its way to Mount Scopus, on the edge of Jerusalem.
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Of the 750,000 refugees, approximately 400,000 fled to Jordan and 150,000 crossed the borders to Lebanon and Syria (see Illustration 9). Meanwhile, 200,000 refugees found themselves enclosed in a small strip of land—approximately 50 kms in length and 6–12 kms in width (360 km2)—around Gaza, which was already home to 88,000 residents.
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The Palestinians who had fled the fighting expected to return home once it had ended. But Israel refused to let them do so, arguing that the Arab states had been responsible for creating the problem by initiating hostilities.
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the picture that emerges is not the familiar one of Israel standing alone against the combined might of the entire Arab world but rather one of a remarkable convergence between the interests of Israel and those of Transjordan against the other members of the Arab coalition, and especially against the Palestinians.
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While the policy of severe retaliation may have served at some level as a deterrent, the policy also contributed to heightened enmity and a repeating cycle of violence
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The mutual sense of insecurity that emerged from this unstable border situation led all sides to expect another round of fighting. And, indeed, Israeli cross-border retaliatory raids in 1953, killing sixty-nine villagers of the West Bank town of Qibya, and in 1955, killing thirty-eight Egyptian soldiers in Gaza, were followed in quick order by a series of sharp steps that would culminate in 1956 in another war.
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Whereas the Arab states called for Israel to withdraw from all of the occupied land, Israel argued the case that the omission of the definite article—the territories—implied by omission that it could hold on to some occupied territory.
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Under Begin’s leadership, the Palestinian territories were considered an inalienable part of the Jewish people’s Biblical inheritance.
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Hamas then became the chief beneficiary to the growing disillusionment with the cronyism of Arafat’s authority.
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Israeli groups, who, mirroring Hamas, framed their opposition to the Oslo process in religious terms. For them Oslo was more than a security risk; it was an abandonment of God’s mandate.
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Accompanied by hundreds of Israeli police, Sharon sought to assert that any Jew had the right to visit the site (known to Jews as the Temple Mount), also the location of the Jewish First and Second Temples. Palestinians reacted the following day with stone-throwing demonstrations which were put down by Israeli security forces with lethal force. The death of eighteen protesters at the hands of the Israeli security forces brought to the surface the stresses and strains felt by Palestinians.
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