FAQS

Israel is a narrow strip of land that lies on the south eastern coast of the Mediterranean. Its entire length is 290 miles and its width ranges from nine to 85 miles. For a small country it enjoys considerable geographical diversity, with arid desert in the south, and green, hilly, arable land in the north. Seventy percent of the population is concentrated on the coastal plain.

Israel is a diverse and pluralistic society, home to 7.5 million people. Seventy-six percent of its citizens are Jews, 20% Arabs and 4% other minorities. The background of Israel’s population is extremely diverse, having immigrated to the country from all over the world.

Israel has a unicameral parliamentary democracy. The 120-seat parliamentary chamber (Knesset) is elected to four-year terms on a strictly proportional system. The head of the government is the prime minister, who is usually the head of the largest party. The largely ceremonial role of president is elected for seven-year terms by the Knesset. A robust Supreme Court acts as an important check on the powers of the government, and frequently judges the legality of legislation and government decisions through a process of judicial review.

Israel has a three-tier court system which plays an important role in securing the country’s democratic checks and balances. At the lowest level are magistrate courts, above them are district courts, and the highest tier is the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, which serves as the highest court of appeals and the High Court of Justice. In the latter role, the Supreme Court allows both citizens and non-citizens to petition against decisions of state authorities and has the authority to overrule state laws and regulations. Court cases are decided by professional judges rather than juries. A committee of Knesset members, Supreme Court justices, and Israeli Bar members elect judges.

The Attorney General is the chief legal adviser to the government and the head of the prosecution. The government is bound to abstain from any action which, in the opinion of the Attorney General, is unlawful. Although appointed by the government, the Attorney General functions independently of the political system. In addition, the State Comptroller and Ombudsman, who is elected by the Knesset, oversees the activities of the public service and responds to complaints by the public. Public bodies are bound by law to abide by the Comptroller’s recommendations and apply them.

Education until the age of 18 is free, and compulsory from the age of five. A choice of educational streams is on offer. These cater for the diverse cultural and social needs of the population, including those with religious and secular outlooks as well as Arab and Druze minorities. Israel has seven highly regarded universities as well as an Open University based on the British model, and a host of other post-secondary educational institutions. Accorded full academic and administrative freedom, Israel’s institutions of higher education are open to all who meet their academic standards. Over 50% of Israelis between the ages of 20 and 24 are enrolled in further or higher education.

Israel has impressive healthcare services comparable to those of other developed countries. Average life expectancy is 79 years for men and 83 years for women. A compulsory national health insurance scheme ensures comprehensive healthcare is available to all. Israel is a world leader in the field of medical research.

With a long history of facing acute military threats, Israel invests heavily in its defence. Its army, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) consists mainly of civilian conscripts and reserves. Most men and women are drafted at the age of 18; men for three years and women for two. Men typically serve in reserve units for a few weeks each year until they are into their forties. Israel’s Druze and Circassian minorities are drafted and serve alongside Israeli Jews. Arab Israelis are not drafted but can volunteer, and many Bedouin Israelis do so.

Despite limited natural resources, Israel has a technologically advanced market economy with a strong culture of enterprise and innovation. Israel exports medical, scientific and other electronic and hi-tech equipment around the world, and is also a major centre for polishing diamonds. Economic reforms in the last few years have paved the way for greater foreign investment, particularly in the hi-tech industry. Israel’s economy grew at around 5% between 2003 and 2007. Whilst the economy suffered as a result of the global financial crisis, Israel has fared relatively well compared to other developed economies. Israel acceded to the OECD group of advanced economies in 2010 and is ranked around 30th in the world for GDP per capita (PPP).

The land of Israel has always been integral to Jewish religious, cultural and national life and remains so to this day. In the Jewish tradition, the land of Israel is central to the covenantal relationship between the Children of Israel and God. The Five Books of Moses, known to Jews as the Torah, tells how the 12 tribes of Israel, the precursors to the Jewish people, entered the land having been freed from slavery in Egypt. The first unified Israelite kingdom was founded under the rule of King Saul, around 1000 BCE. His successor David established Jerusalem as his capital. There, David’s son Solomon built the First Jewish Temple as the centre of Jewish religious life. The First Temple stood until 586 BCE, when it was destroyed by the Babylonians. The Second Temple was consecrated on the same spot in 520 BCE, and stood at the centre of Jewish life and worship until it was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE.

The destruction of both the First and Second Temples were catastrophic events in Jewish history, in which thousands of Jews were killed and exiled, and which led to the existence of Jewish communities around the world. But even after the destruction of the Second Temple, there was a continuous presence of Jews in Israel. Throughout the centuries, major Jewish cultural achievements were made by Jews who lived there. These include the compilation of the Jerusalem Talmud, dating to the 4th century, and the establishment of Tzfat as a centre for the development of the Jewish mystical tradition in the 16th century.

Jews around the world made remembering the Temple in Jerusalem and the hope for an eventual return to the land of Israel – also referred to as ‘Zion’ – central to all aspects of their religious worship and liturgy. Jewish prayers are always conducted facing towards Jerusalem. For most Jews through the ages, travelling to Israel was an impossible dream. In their prayers, traditions, poetry and scriptures, Jews from around the world expressed their yearning and longing to return.

As the capital of the first Jewish commonwealth, founded by David, and as the site of both the First and Second Temples, Jerusalem is the principal site of Jewish religious importance. It is a central symbol for the national aspirations of the Jewish people. Jerusalem has always been the focal point of the Jewish dream of an eventual return to their homeland. The city also symbolises the prophetic vision of a future age of justice and peace. The holiest place in Jerusalem for Jews is the Temple Mount (known as Har Habayit in Hebrew, and al Haram al Sharif in Arabic), which is the site of both the First and Second Temples. Nothing remains today of the Temple structure, which was destroyed by the Romans. Today the most sacred place for Jews is the Western Wall, known in Hebrew as the Kotel. This is a remnant of an outer wall which supported the Temple Mount. Jewish tradition holds that this is the closest accessible spot to the ‘Holy of Holies’, which was the holiest part of the Temple. Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since the mid-1800s.

Jerusalem also has special significance to Christians. According to the Gospels, Jesus preached and performed miracles in the city and in and around the Temple. His birthplace, Bethlehem, is close by. In the accounts of the New Testament, the capture, trial and crucifixion of Jesus also took place in Jerusalem. As a result, Jerusalem is rich in sites of pilgrimage for Christians. These include the ‘Via Dolorosa’, the path taken by Jesus on the way to his crucifixion, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Jesus’s body was believed to have been placed before his resurrection, and the Chapel of the Ascension, from where he was believed to have ascended to heaven.

Jerusalem’s importance to Muslims dates to the earliest days of Islam. Initially Mohammed had his followers pray in the direction of Jerusalem to associate the faith of Islam with the monotheistic faiths of Judaism and Christianity which had preceded it. Whilst Mohammed later shifted the focus of the Islamic faith towards Mecca, Islam retained a connection to Jerusalem. The city came under Islamic control in 638 CE, and the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque were built on the site of the ancient Jewish Temple. In Islamic tradition, Jerusalem came to be associated with a miraculous night journey made by Mohammed from Mecca that is described in the Qur’an. The al-Aqsa Mosque is the third holiest site in the world for Muslims, after Mecca and Medina.

Today Jerusalem is the thriving, modern capital of Israel with a population of over 750,000. The walled Old City of Jerusalem has four quarters: Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Armenian. Members of all faiths have access to their holy sites, and each faith is authorised by the Israeli government to administer and control its own holy places.

Zionism is the national movement of the Jewish people, calling for sovereign Jewish life in the land of Israel. The origin of the word ‘Zionism’ is the biblical word ‘Zion’, often used as a synonym for Jerusalem and the land of Israel.

Historically, Zionism as a political movement emerged as part of the growth of national movements in the last quarter of the 19th century. Jews aspired to establish an independent and sovereign entity in the
land of their ancestors. Zionist leaders, most notably the Hungarian-born Theodor Herzl, hoped that the fulfilment of such aspirations would end centuries of anti-Jewish persecution and allow for the renewal of Jewish culture, language and traditions.

The persecution of Jews was a constant of European life in the medieval period. Jews were demonised as the killers of Christ, banned from most professions, frequently confined to ghettos, periodically subjected to pogroms and expelled from one country after another. Many Jews hoped the onset of modernity, which led to emancipation for Jews in many countries, would bring about an end to anti-Jewish prejudice in Europe. However, in the modern period anti-Semitism did not disappear. It took on new forms, such as the belief that Jews were racially inferior, or involved in a global conspiracy. Jews in Europe were subject to waves of pogroms and persecution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Herzl himself was driven to found the Zionist movement after witnessing anti-Semitism in France. In a famous case in 1894, a Jewish captain in the French army, Alfred Dreyfus, was falsely convicted of treason. Dreyfus was publicly disgraced at a ceremony in Paris, where crowds of onlookers chanted ‘Death to the Jews’. Only later was he acquitted.

Herzl was the first to bring the Jewish need for an independent sovereign state to world attention. He turned the historical Jewish dream of returning to Israel into a modern political movement. He convened the first World Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897. As a democratic movement from its inception, the broad umbrella of Zionism always included secular and religious Jews, as well as those subscribing to political views from across the spectrum. Threads of the wide range of views within Zionism can still be seen today in the complex party political structure in the State of Israel.

The establishment of the State of Israel marked the realisation of Zionism’s central political goal of attaining an internationally recognised, legally secured home for the Jewish people in their historical homeland, where Jews would be free from persecution and able to develop their national identity. Zionism retains its relevance today as the Jewish state still seeks to build a home for the Jewish people that is at peace with its neighbours and able to fulfil its potential as a cultural and spiritual beacon for the Jewish people. Most Jews around the world consider themselves supporters of Zionism, in that they support the existence and development of Israel as the state and homeland for the Jewish people.

At various times, certain groups have tried to delegitimise Zionism by falsely smearing it as a racist ideology, or inaccurately characterising it as a colonial movement. One of the premises of Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people, who have a shared language, culture, history and historical homeland, constitute a nation. As such, they have equal rights to other nations, including the right to self-determination. To describe Zionism as racist is to discriminate against Jews by uniquely denying their rights to national self-determination.

Zionists sought to end the status of Jews as a persecuted minority, by re-establishing a majority in Palestine through immigration, settlement and peaceful agreement with the local Arabs. Most of the Jews who moved to Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel came not as colonisers, but as refugees fleeing persecution in various parts of Europe. They did not seek to subjugate the local population, but hoped that the lives of all the residents of the area would be improved by the influx of Jewish immigrants. The early Zionists believed that there was ample room in Palestine to support Jewish immigration, without compromising the interests of the local Arab population. The area was a relatively small and underdeveloped part of the Ottoman Empire, with no independent government or unified political structure. Jews did not enter Palestine by force, but purchased land and built new communities.

Mainstream Zionists always believed that a non-Jewish minority would live alongside the Jewish people as citizens with full and equal rights. This principle was enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which promised Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel ‘full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.’ Today that vision is expressed in Israel. Non-Jewish residents of the State of Israel have Israeli citizenship by right and approximately 20% of the citizens of Israel are Arabs and other minorities. The spouses and children of Israeli citizens, whatever their faith, are also entitled to citizenship.

In order to fulfil its goal of being a homeland and refuge for the Jewish people, Israel grants citizenship to any Jew who wishes to live in Israel. This right is extended to the children and grandchildren of Jews and their spouses, even if they themselves are not Jewish. It is also possible to become a citizen of Israel through naturalisation in some cases.

Since the end of the 19th century, Jews have come from all parts of the world to live in Israel. Jews use the Hebrew word ‘aliya’, which means ‘going up’, to refer to the act of moving to Israel. Whilst most Jews in Israel were either massacred or dispersed following the failed Bar Kochba revolt against the Romans in the Second Century, Jews continued to live in the area in smaller numbers. In 1880, the overall population in the area was approximately 570,000, and mostly Arab. The Jewish population of Palestine was then around 10,000. Most lived in Jerusalem where there was a Jewish majority, with smaller communities in Tzfat, Tiberias and Jaffa.

The first significant movements for Jewish settlement in Palestine came in response to an upsurge in anti-Jewish violence in Russia (the pogroms) following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. This so-called ‘First Aliya’ saw the Jewish population of Palestine swell to approximately 25,000 by 1903, with many of the immigrants establishing new agricultural communities.

The Zionist movement gathered momentum among the Jews of Europe in the early 20th Century. A second wave of immigrants, fleeing great poverty and persecution in Eastern Europe, particularly Russia and Romania, arrived in Palestine between 1904 and 1914. Around 40,000 in total, these immigrants were typically young, secular and inspired by socialist ideals. They sought agricultural work, believing that both personal and national redemption could be achieved through physical toil on the land of Israel. The life they chose was beset with great poverty, disease and hardship. Many left in disappointment, but by 1914 the Jewish population had risen to 90,000.

Growing anti-Semitic hostility throughout Europe spurred increasing numbers of Jewish refugees to move to Palestine throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Many Jews were murdered in Ukraine in the aftermath of First World War. Other European countries enacted anti-Semitic legislation throughout the 1920s. In 1924, Poland began to impose severe economic restrictions on its three million Jews. But as more and more Jews faced discrimination in Europe, doors of immigration were closed elsewhere, including new restrictions on immigration to the United States. In 1933, the Nazi Party came to power in Germany and immediately began enforcing anti-Semitic laws. This created a new and unprecedented wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine. By 1936, the Jewish population of Palestine was approaching 400,000, close to 30% of the total. However, with war looming, and Britain keen not to alienate the Arab world, in 1939 Jewish immigration to Palestine was severely restricted by the British.

By 1945, the Nazi Holocaust had exterminated approximately six million Jews in Europe. After the war, well over 100,000 surviving Jews were in displaced persons camps. Tens of thousands of these survivors attempted to bypass the British blockade to enter Palestine. Many of those that failed were forcibly interned by the British in detention camps in Cyprus. After the State of Israel was established in 1948, its doors were opened to these refugees. Israel also absorbed hundreds of thousands of Jews who left as emigrants and refugees from countries in the Middle East and North Africa as a result of the War of Independence. In 1949, 45,000 Jews flew to Israel from Yemen, and in 1951-52, a further 130,000 arrived from Iraq.

Since Israel’s independence the Jewish population has swelled through immigration from around the world and natural increase. Major waves of immigration have come from Morocco (250,000), North America (200,000) and Ethiopia (76,000), as well as significant contingents from South America and Europe. During the Communist era, Jews in the Soviet Union were prevented from moving to Israel. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, close to one million Jews moved to Israel from the former Soviet Union. 34,000 Jews have moved to Israel from Britain since 1948. By 2010, Israel’s population exceeded 7.5 million, of whom 5.7 million were Jewish.

The objective of establishing a Jewish homeland in Israel gained strong international support with the Balfour Declaration, issued by the British government in 1917. The British government’s decision to support the foundation of a national home for the Jewish people was made known in the form of a letter written by then-foreign secretary Lord Balfour to Zionist leader Lord Rothschild. In September 1922, the League of Nations granted Britain a Mandate over Palestine, noting the ‘historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine’ and the ‘grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.’ Under the British Mandate, three-quarters of the territory east of the Jordan River formed the Emirate of Transjordan (later the Kingdom of Jordan), and was closed to Jewish immigration. The remaining territory remained open to Jewish immigration.

As the Second World War drew closer, the British government, fearing the loss of allies in the Arab and Muslim world, moved away from supporting Jewish immigration to Palestine. Finally, in 1939, as the threat to the Jews of Europe reached new heights, Britain issued the MacDonald White Paper, in which Jewish immigration was severely restricted.

Between 1939 and 1945, the German Nazi Party, with its allies throughout Europe, murdered approximately six million of Europe’s 11 million Jews. The Holocaust was a genocide carried out with ruthless efficiency on an industrial scale throughout Europe. The Jewish people had no place of refuge. Palestinian Arab leaders welcomed the Nazis’ rise to power, believing that in opposition to the British and the Jews, they shared common interests. The most senior Palestinian leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, cooperated with the Nazis, and in November 1941, met personally with Hitler in an attempt to forge an alliance. Meanwhile, 30,000 Palestinian Jews joined the British army to fight against the Nazis, despite the restrictions of the White Paper preventing Jewish immigration to Palestine.

After the war, many thousands of Jewish refugees who had survived the Holocaust were in refugee camps in Europe. Having been robbed of all property and rights, most were unable and unwilling to return to their countries of origin. Some who tried to return after the war were subjected to further attacks. Many of the refugees expressed their desire to move to Palestine.

In this climate, the Jewish Agency, which represented the Jewish community in Palestine, with American political support, called for 100,000 Jews to be allowed to enter Palestine. The British government refused to agree. This led to illegal Jewish immigration and a direct confrontation between the British government and the Jews of Palestine. Some Jewish extremist groups, the Irgun and Lechi, began to attack British military targets. The British forcefully suppressed all acts of Jewish resistance, at one stage arresting 3,000 people. Over 50,000 Jews who had survived the Holocaust and attempted to enter Palestine were forcibly interned in British camps in Cyprus. In 1946, the leader of the Jews in Palestine, David Ben-Gurion, attempted to unite Jewish resistance forces. The agreement broke down after the Irgun undertook its most notorious act, the bombing of the British headquarters at the King David Hotel. This act was denounced by the majority of Palestine’s Jews.

In 1947, the British turned the question of the future of Palestine over to the United Nations, which established the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to determine its future. The UN recommended partition into a Jewish and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under international control. The plan would have created a Jewish state with a Jewish majority on the Mediterranean coast, western Galilee, and Negev Desert. On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly voted in favour of Resolution 181, to approve the UNSCOP plan, by 33 votes to 13. The Jewish Agency, representing the

Jews of Palestine, accepted the plan, but the Arab Higher Committee, the Palestinian Arabs’ political representatives, rejected it. As the British Mandate formally ended, on 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel in line with the UN resolution.

The initial response of local Arabs to Jewish immigration was mixed, with examples of dialogue and cooperation as well as suspicion and rejection. Following the post-war Paris conference in 1919, Faisal Ibn Hussain, the leader of the Arab delegation to the conference, signed an agreement in London with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, which welcomed the establishment of a Jewish home as a positive development for the whole region. But hostility towards Jewish immigration, and attacks by armed Arabs on Jewish communities in Palestine, intensified during the early 1920s. Palestinian Arab nationalism arose parallel to, and to some extent in response to, the development of the Zionist movement in Palestine. Whilst some Arabs welcomed the progress that Jewish immigrants brought, others increasingly feared that the Jewish immigrants would come to dominate the local Arab population. The Arab leadership began to campaign for an end both to Jewish immigration and the British Mandate.

In 1920, 1921 and 1929, Arabs rioted and attacked Jewish communities, including the massacre of 60 men, women and children in Hebron in 1929. Arabs were also killed in the violence, mainly by British troops trying to maintain law and order and some in Jewish retaliatory attacks.

The influx of Jews fleeing Nazism brought new concerns to the Palestinian Arab leadership. They became increasingly strident in their demands for a halt to both Jewish immigration and land sales to Jews. They called a general strike in April 1936, sparking the 1936-39 Arab Revolt, during which Arab groups attacked Jewish farms, communities and property all over Palestine. Britain had to send 20,000 extra troops to Palestine to maintain law and order.

Responding to the Arab riots, the British established a commission in 1937 under the chairmanship of Lord Peel. It proposed the creation of a Jewish state consisting of only a small fraction of British Mandate Palestine. The rest of the territory was to become a separate Arab state, except for an area around and including Jerusalem to stay under British control. The mainstream Zionist movement accepted the principle of partition but rejected the specific border proposals. Arab representatives rejected the compromise out of hand, leading to its collapse. The Arabs of Palestine and the surrounding Arab states subsequently rejected the UN Partition Plan of 1947.

After the UN resolution approving the Partition Plan, violence between Jews and Arabs intensified. The Palestinian Arabs formed a guerrilla army, swelled by volunteers from surrounding Arab states, and launched attacks on Jewish communities. Whilst there was violence on both sides, the mainstream Jewish defence force, the Haganah, adopted a policy of limited reprisals against individuals responsible for attacks on Jews. The Jewish leadership called for peaceful relations between Jews and Arabs.

The conflict escalated into a bloody war of self-determination, with atrocities committed by both sides. Both Jewish and Arab civilians lost their lives and many Arabs fled villages which were involved in the fighting. On 9 April 1948, between 100 and 120 residents of the Arab village of Deir Yassin were killed by forces from the Jewish Irgun and Lechi groups, considered extremist by most Jews in Palestine. As with earlier attacks carried out by the Irgun, the mainstream Jewish leadership under David Ben-Gurion condemned and apologised for the act. One week later, 77 Jewish doctors, nurses and medical staff were killed by Arab gunmen on the way to the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. The differences within the Jewish camp, between the extremist Irgun and the mainstream Jewish leadership, came to a head in June 1948. The Irgun refused to turn a shipment of arms over to the newly formed Israeli army. Ben-Gurion ordered the ship, the Altalena, to be fired on, insisting that no armed militia could continue to exist beyond the authority of the state. Consequently, all Jewish forces were then amalgamated under the single command of the Israel Defence Forces.

As the Mandate ended on 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, in accordance with UN Resolution 181, formally declared the establishment of ‘the Jewish State, which shall be known as Israel.’ Despite the ongoing conflict, the declaration called on,

As the State of Israel’s establishment was declared, the armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria invaded the former Mandate territory with additional forces from Saudi Arabia. The Jewish forces fought with very limited resources, before being armed with more substantial weapons, particularly from Czechoslovakia.

The 1948-9 war, knows to Jews as the War of Independence, was costly for all sides. Many of the Jewish fighters had survived the Nazi concentration camps of the Holocaust only three years earlier. For all Jews, the war was seen as one of national survival. More than 6,000 Jews were killed in the fighting, a full 1% of the Jewish population of the new State of Israel at the time. The conflict was a disaster for the Arab population of Palestine, who left in large numbers for neighbouring Arab states. At the same time, Israel faced the challenge of absorbing hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants. These were not only refugees from the Holocaust, but from Jewish communities fleeing persecution in Arab countries.

The war came to an end at the beginning of 1949, with Israel signing armistice agreements with each of its Arab neighbours. The borders of Israel now somewhat exceeded those defined by the UN Partition Plan. What remained in Arab hands was the West Bank, which was annexed by Jordan in 1950, and the Gaza Strip, which was held under Egyptian military rule. Neither Jordan nor Egypt made any attempt to establish an autonomous Palestinian Arab state as mandated by the UN. Jerusalem, which had been besieged by Arab forces and was witness to intense fighting during the war, was divided between Israel and Jordan. The Old City and its holy sites fell under Jordanian control.

Estimates of the numbers of Palestinian Arab refugees created as a result of the conflict range from 600,000 to 850,000. The refugee crisis came as a result of the war, and there was no deliberate, coordinated Jewish policy to expel the Arabs. With war raging, the factors that caused them to leave were complex. Whilst in some cases individual Jewish commanders told Arabs to leave in the belief that this was a military necessity, in the chaos of the moment, many left out of fear spread by rumour and exaggerated reports of Israeli atrocities, fuelled by the incident at Deir Yassin. The lack of a wholesale plan of expulsion is evidenced by examples whereby local Jews encouraged their Arab neighbours to stay, for example in Haifa. In the midst of the conflict, Israel’s Declaration of Independence offered full citizenship and equal rights to all Arabs living within Israel. After the war, the 150,000 Arabs that remained in Israel were awarded full citizenship. Arab members were elected to the first Israeli parliament in 1949.

In the absence of a peace agreement, those Palestinian Arabs who fled to neighbouring Arab states were not able to return. For Israel, allowing large numbers of hostile Arabs to return in the wake of the war was tantamount to national suicide. They were particularly reluctant to consider the return of refugees without a general Arab recognition of the legitimacy of the State of Israel, something the Arabs refused to accept. Israel held the Arab forces responsible for the refugee problem, since it was they who had rejected the UN Partition Plan in 1947 and consequently started the war.

With no agreement, Palestinian refugees remained in UN-administered refugee camps, principally in the Jordanian-controlled West Bank, Egyptian-controlled Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. Unlike all other refugee groups around the world, which fall under the auspices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the UN singled out the Palestinian refugee question. It established a unique agency, the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), to manage the Palestinian refugee problem. The UNHCR seeks to help refugees by resettling them or facilitating their absorption into their host countries, allowing them to rebuild their lives. However, UNRWA has been used politically by the Arab world to inflate the numbers of refugees and maintain their refugee status in order to keep up political pressure on Israel. Israel absorbed hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants and refugees from Arab countries after 1948. But in most cases, the Arab leaders made no effort to absorb Palestinian refugees or grant them civil rights. As a result, many of the refugees and their descendants still live in poverty, dependent on international aid.

Even after Israel was admitted to the United Nations, the Arab world refused to recognise or negotiate with Israel and took whatever steps it could to undermine Israel’s existence. The Arab league, an official body of the Arab world established in 1945, organised and maintained an economic boycott on Israel, refusing to do business with Israel or even with companies that operated there.

In the years following Israel’s establishment, pan-Arab nationalism gathered force under the leadership of the president of Egypt, Gamal Abdul Nasser. One of the main unifying features of Arab nationalism was hostility towards Israel and opposition to its existence. In May 1967, after a period of increasing tension, Nasser illegally ordered UN peacekeeping troops to leave the Sinai Peninsula which borders Israel, and replaced the UN troops with his own forces. The UN forces were put in place to separate Israeli and Egyptian armies after the Sinai-Suez War of 1956. Nasser also signed a mutual defence pact with Syria to Israel’s north and with Jordan to Israel’s east. At the same time, in contravention of international law, he blockaded the Straits of Tiran – an international sea lane leading up to Israel’s southern port town of Eilat – to Israeli shipping. The Arab states, led by Egypt, declared their intention to destroy the State of Israel. Israel mobilised its forces, but delayed action in the hope that international mediation would defuse the conflict. When this failed to materialise, fearing an all-out assault, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike on Egypt. The Israeli Air Force destroyed Egypt’s air force on the ground and the IDF swiftly captured the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. Jordan, which Israel had hoped might stay out of the conflict, began shelling Israel, as did Syria in the north. Israel then retaliated against Jordan, capturing the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Old City, and against Syria, capturing the Golan Heights. Syria had used the heights for many years as a base to shell Israeli agricultural communities.

Whilst the war was a military triumph for Israel, it created long-term challenges that Israel still deals with today. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Israel hoped that the Arab states would seek peace, in return for Israeli withdrawal from territory it had captured. Israel accepted the principles of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which proposed this ‘land for peace’ formula. But in September 1967, at a conference in Khartoum, the Arab League made its famous ‘three noes’ declaration, rejecting peace, recognition and negotiation with Israel. As a result, Israel found itself  in control of the Palestinian Arabs living in Gaza and the West Bank.

As the situation stabilised after the Six Day War, some Israeli Jews began to establish communities in the territories captured in the war. Some were religiously inspired, believing it to be their duty to settle on land that was promised in the Torah to the Jewish people. Others were motivated by the belief that the territory belonged rightfully to the Jewish nation and was essential for Israel’s security.

Israel’s leaders felt that settlements in certain key strategic locations were vital for Israel’s future security. Because the Arab states refused to recognise Israel, prior to the Six Day War, permanent borders were never fixed. For this reason, Israel’s borders remained the temporary ceasefire lines of 1949. These borders made Israel highly vulnerable to a military attack that could divide the country in two. At its narrowest point, the State of Israel between the Green Line (the 1949 armistice line between Israel and Jordan) and the Mediterranean Sea is just nine miles wide. Before the Six Day War, the Jordanian military held artillery positions overlooking Israel’s densely populated coastal plain. In addition, Jerusalem was isolated and vulnerable to being cut off, as happened during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948.

Most of the settlers in the West Bank went to a small number of large settlement blocs which are located along the Green Line and around Jerusalem. Some were built on areas from which Jews had been forced out after the Jordanian invasion in 1948.

The UN General Assembly and Security Council have passed several resolutions in various attempts to promote solutions to the conflicts between Israel and its neighbours. In 1947, the General Assembly passed Resolution 181 which approved the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. The Jewish leadership in Palestine accepted the plan, though the borders for the Jewish state were drawn with no consideration for its security and were virtually indefensible in the long term. The Partition Plan also gave the Arab community of Palestine a state and the opportunity for self-determination. The Arabs rejected this proposal, leading to the 1948 War of Independence.

Following the 1967 Six Day War, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242, which set out that the conflict in the Middle East must be resolved based on two principles: Israel withdrawing from territories occupied during the war, and the recognition of the rights of all states in the area to live at peace ‘within secure and recognised boundaries’. The resolution deliberately avoided obligating Israel to withdraw from all the territories it had captured, leaving open the question of future borders for negotiation. Israel accepted these principles but the Arab League rejected the idea of recognising or negotiating with Israel. Following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 338, which reaffirmed Resolution 242 and called for negotiations based on it.

Israel has repeatedly engaged in efforts to make peace with its neighbours based on the principles of land for peace. Israel agreed to return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in return for peace and recognition in 1979. Israel withdrew from Palestinian population centres in Gaza and the West Bank as part of the Oslo Accords with the PLO signed in 1993. It also made territorial concessions to Jordan as part of the 1994 peace treaty between the two countries. In 2000, Israel complied with Security Council resolutions relating to Lebanon by withdrawing all its forces from south Lebanon. In 2005, Israel withdrew unilaterally from the Gaza Strip and part of the northern West Bank.

Who leads the Palestinian people?

Since 1974, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) has been recognised by the Arab League as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The PLO holds observer status – with the name ‘Palestine’ – at the United Nations General Assembly. A secular Arab nationalist movement called Fatah has taken the dominant role in the PLO since 1969. Fatah was led by Yasser Arafat until his death in 2004. As part of the Oslo Accords signed between Israel and the PLO in 1993, the PLO established the Palestinian Authority (PA) as the transitional body that would run Palestinian affairs in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank until a final Israeli-Palestinian agreement. The PA has an elected president and parliament, called the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). Arafat, the first president of the PA, ran the institution in an autocratic manner, without regular elections or proper accountability and his ruling Fatah party became associated with corruption and mismanagement. Arafat also attracted widespread international criticism for failing to stop terrorism against Israel during the Second Intifada. In 2003, Arafat responded to international demands by appointing a prime minister, although he granted the position limited authority. After Arafat’s death in 2004, Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, was elected as the president of the PA. In February 2006, elections for the PLC produced an unexpected victory for Fatah’s fundamentalist Islamist rivals, Hamas. They formed a government with Ismail Haniyeh as prime minister. The international community largely refused to have contact with Hamas because of its refusal to meet the conditions set by the UN backed Quartet. These are to renounce violence, recognise Israel, and to accept previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements. The West Bank and Gaza Strip became marred by increasingly bloody infighting between Fatah and Hamas. In March 2007, Fatah and Hamas attempted to form a unity government. This collapsed in June 2007, after Hamas carried out a violent coup against its Fatah rivals in the Gaza Strip. PA President Mahmoud Abbas then dismissed the Hamas-led government and appointed an emergency administration under the leadership of former finance minister Salam Fayyad. This administration took control in the West Bank, whilst Hamas remained in control of the Gaza Strip. For some time, Egypt has tried unsuccessfully to find an agreement between Hamas and Fatah that would reunite the Gaza Strip and the West Bank under a single Palestinian Authority and hold new elections.

Hamas is a radical Islamist organisation that emerged from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood during the early stages of the First Intifada. Its charter was issued in 1988, setting out the goals and vision of the organisation. It includes a firm and explicit rejection of the very idea of a peace process, which would involve the surrender of ‘Islamic land’ and the recognition of Israel’s right to exist on it. The central aim of Hamas is to establish an Islamic state in all territory defined as ‘Palestine’ (from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River) through armed struggle. Hamas is fiercely anti-Semitic and its charter blames Jews for all kinds of evils, including the First and Second World Wars.

Hamas has become a leading perpetrator of terrorist attacks against Israel, as well as against suspected Palestinian ‘collaborators’ and Fatah rivals. Hamas has carried out suicide bombings and attacks against Israel since the early 1990s. In recent years, its principal method of violence has been the firing of mortars and rockets at Israeli towns close to the Gaza border. Hamas’s military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, has been proscribed under the UK’s Terrorism Act 2000 since February 2001. The organisation is also outlawed in its entirety by the EU and US.

Hamas is responsible for the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was taken from inside Israel in a cross-border raid in June 2006.

The Quartet – the EU, US, Russia and the UN – demands that Hamas renounces violence, acknowledges Israel’s right to exist and recognises previous agreements between Israel and the PA. Hamas has refused these demands. These are not arbitrary principles. They are equivalent to the commitments made by the PLO at the beginning of the Oslo peace process in the 1990s. They are the logical premise for moving towards a peaceful two-state solution. The Israeli government has repeatedly and explicitly recognised the national rights of the Palestinian people and their right to their own sovereign state. Hamas is expected to equally recognise Israel’s right to exist.

Hamas leaders occasionally talk of a long-term ‘hudna’ (temporary ceasefire) with Israel. However, they have never given any sign that they are ready to accommodate the existence of Israel as part of a permanent solution to the conflict.

In April 2003, Israel agreed to the principles of the ‘Roadmap’ peace plan for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Roadmap specifies steps required by the Israelis and the Palestinians to build confidence and reach a settlement on establishing a Palestinian state. It is sponsored by the Quartet, which is made up of the European Union, the UN, the US, and Russia. Whilst the Roadmap has been superseded by subsequent events, it remains an important touchstone in the Israeli Palestinian peace process. In October 2003, then-Israel-Palestinian peace process.

In October 2003, then-Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon initiated an historic plan to withdraw Israel’s forces from the Gaza Strip and part of the northern West Bank. The Disengagement Plan was an extremely difficult and divisive step in Israel. It was nevertheless implemented in August 2005 and received widespread international support. It reflected a strong desire in Israel to move towards a two-state reality, even in the absence of an agreed solution. Following the withdrawal, the Agreement on Movement and Access (AMA) was signed between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. This agreement was designed to facilitate access and movement of goods and people in the Gaza Strip. It broke down following the election of Hamas

In 2006, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was elected with a plan to unilaterally withdraw Israeli forces and settlers from large portions of the West Bank, should bilateral negotiations with the Palestinian leadership fail to bear fruit. However, the rise to power of Hamas in Gaza, as well as the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006, undermined Israeli confidence in withdrawing unilaterally from the West Bank.

After Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas dismissed the Hamas government in June 2007, Israel reopened negotiations with the PA. These negotiations were given international support at a major conference convened by the United States in Annapolis in November 2007. At the end of these negotiations, in September 2008, Olmert proposed a deal to create a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank, including part of East Jerusalem. According to Olmert, Mahmoud Abbas never responded to the proposal.

Alongside these negotiations, former British prime minister Tony Blair, as Quartet envoy, has been working with the Palestinian and Israeli governments to improve the situation for Palestinians in the West Bank and to develop their economic and political capacity. Israel has removed many checkpoints, supported the deployment of newly trained Palestinian security units in place of Israeli forces, and allowed more Palestinians to work inside Israel. Major economic cooperation projects are also planned for the Jordan Valley and northern West Bank. As a result of this cooperation, the Palestinian economy in the West Bank grew 8.5% in 2009 according to the IMF.

After a general election in 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister of a new Israeli government. Despite representing the right-of-centre Likud party, shortly after his election Netanyahu declared his support for the creation of a Palestinian state and called for new negotiations. Netanyahu accelerated the process of removing restrictions to movement within the West Bank, in the belief that economic development is the best way to lay the groundwork for peace. This has led to consider In April 2003, Israel agreed to the principles of the ‘Roadmap’ peace plan for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Roadmap specifies steps required by the Israelis and the Palestinians to build confidence and reach a settlement on establishing a Palestinian state. It is sponsored by the Quartet, which is made up of the European Union, the UN, the US, and Russia. Whilst the Roadmap has been superseded by subsequent events, it remains an important touchstone in the Israeli Palestinian peace process. In October 2003, then-Israel-Palestinian peace process.

In October 2003, then-Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon initiated an historic plan to withdraw Israel’s forces from the Gaza Strip and part of the northern West Bank. The Disengagement Plan was an extremely difficult and divisive step in Israel. It was nevertheless implemented in August 2005 and received widespread international support. It reflected a strong desire in Israel to move towards a two-state reality, even in the absence of an agreed solution. Following the withdrawal, the Agreement on Movement and Access (AMA) was signed between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. This agreement was designed to facilitate access and movement of goods and people in the Gaza Strip. It broke down following the election of Hamas

In 2006, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was elected with a plan to unilaterally withdraw Israeli forces and settlers from large portions of the West Bank, should bilateral negotiations with the Palestinian leadership fail to bear fruit. However, the rise to power of Hamas in Gaza, as well as the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006, undermined Israeli confidence in withdrawing unilaterally from the West Bank.

After Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas dismissed the Hamas government in June 2007, Israel reopened negotiations with the PA. These negotiations were given international support at a major conference convened by the United States in Annapolis in November 2007. At the end of these negotiations, in September 2008, Olmert proposed a deal to create a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank, including part of East Jerusalem. According to Olmert, Mahmoud Abbas never responded to the proposal.

Alongside these negotiations, former British prime minister Tony Blair, as Quartet envoy, has been working with the Palestinian and Israeli governments to improve the situation for Palestinians in the West Bank and to develop their economic and political capacity. Israel has removed many checkpoints, supported the deployment of newly trained Palestinian security units in place of Israeli forces, and allowed more Palestinians to work inside Israel. Major economic cooperation projects are also planned for the Jordan Valley and northern West Bank. As a result of this cooperation, the Palestinian economy in the West Bank grew 8.5% in 2009 according to the IMF.

After a general election in 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister of a new Israeli government. Despite representing the right-of-centre Likud party, shortly after his election Netanyahu declared his support for the creation of a Palestinian state and called for new negotiations. Netanyahu accelerated the process of removing restrictions to movement within the West Bank, in the belief that economic development is the best way to lay the groundwork for peace. This has led to considerable improvements for Palestinians within the West Bank and reduced friction.

able improvements for Palestinians within the West Bank and reduced friction.

Consistent polling shows that a solid majority of the Israeli public favour the creation of a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as part of a peace deal. However, the internal division within the Palestinian camp, and the threat of Palestinian radicalism, have undermined Israeli confidence about whether an agreement can be reached.

Every Israeli government since 2000 has publicly committed Israel to the two-state solution as the best way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This solution, as defined by the Clinton parameters in December 2000, is a solution which results in, ‘the state of Palestine as the homeland of the Palestinian people and the state of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people.’ Since 2000 the two-state model has been accepted internationally and endorsed by UN Security Council Resolutions.

The principle of the two-state solution is that a Palestinian state will be created within the territory of Gaza and the West Bank, and will exist alongside and at peace with Israel. Repeated polls indicate that a majority of Israelis and Palestinians accept this idea, though it involves difficult compromises on both sides. For Israel it means giving up control of territory in the West Bank which is of great historic, cultural and strategic importance for the Jewish people. For Palestinians it means accepting that the solution for the Palestinian refugee problem lies not in refugees returning to Israel but in returning to a new Palestinian state.

However, the alternatives are not acceptable to most Israelis and Palestinians. Under the status quo, Palestinians that live under Israeli control in Gaza and the West Bank are denied the rights of citizenship. This in turn damages Israel’s international standing. Many Israelis fear that as the population of Arabs in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank begins to overtake the population of Jews, the democratic legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state will be undermined. Furthermore, the conflict is a costly burden on Israeli society which most Israelis would like to see confined to history. For this reason they see the creation of a Palestinian state, which will secure the rights of Palestinian Arabs, as being in Israel’s interest, as long as it comes with sufficient security guarantees. The alternative, of a single binational state of Jews and Arabs, is not acceptable to most Jews, who want the character of Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people to be secured.

Borders

The PLO claim the West Bank and the Gaza Strip within pre-1967 borders for their state. Israel has accepted in principle the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. There is a broad consensus in Israel that the larger settlement blocs around Jerusalem and on key strategic points protecting Israel’s narrow coastal plain should remain part of Israel. The Clinton Parameters in 2000 and the unofficial Geneva Accords in 2003 accepted this principle and suggested some form of land swap whereby the new Palestinian state would receive other territory from Israel in return for the settlement blocs. The Palestinians want territory within Israel to build a transport link that connects Gaza and the West Bank, and this could form part of an exchange deal. In 2008, under the Annapolis process, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas conducted negotiations along these lines, though there were gaps between the sides on how much land would be exchanged.

Security

Israel’s recent experience of withdrawing from territory in the hope that it will bring peace has been very negative. After Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000, and from Gaza in 2005, Israel was subsequently attacked from both locations, in particular with rockets. Any deal to bring about Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank will have to address Israel’s legitimate security fears. Israel will not be willing to allow the establishment of a military force in the West Bank or Gaza that could threaten Israel, and expects a future Palestinian state will be demilitarised. It will further expect a future Palestinian state to act decisively to prevent attacks on Israel originating from within its territory. Israel will also want to retain a military presence in the Jordan valley in the initial period after the creation of a Palestinian state to prevent arms smuggling into the West Bank. The Palestinians are opposed to an Israeli military presence, and have proposed a third party international presence instead.

Refugees

A peace deal will have to define a solution to the question of Palestinian refugees. The Palestinians claim the right of return for the descendents of refugees from the 1948 war to return to their homes in Israel. Israel does not believe it is responsible for resettling the refugees, believing their plight to be the responsibility of the Arab states that rejected the 1947 Partition Plan, started the war, and then refused to resettle the refugees created by that war in their own territory. In any case, no Israeli government will accept a solution that would allow millions of Palestinians to settle in Israel. This would effectively spell the end of the Jewish majority and the viability of Israel as a democratic Jewish state. Israel proposes that refugees be compensated with the help of the international community, and be resettled either in the new Palestinian state or in their country of residence. This is the principle of two-states for two peoples.

Water

The region has limited water resources and Israel currently depends on the West Bank for a significant part of its water supply. Any peace deal will have to address both the allocation and management of water from the Jordan River and the underground aquifers in the West Bank. In 2006, Israel began operating the largest desalination plant of its kind in the world on its Mediterranean coast and is building several more to address its water needs. This may make a solution on the question of water easier to address in the future.

Jerusalem

Both Israelis and Palestinians have a very strong cultural, historical and political attachment to Jerusalem and both claim it to be their capital. Particularly sensitive are the Old City and its religious sites. If Palestinian demands to return to pre-1967 borders were taken literally, it would result in the redivision of Jerusalem and the loss of Israeli sovereignty over the Old City, which is something that most Israelis would not be willing to contemplate. Both the Clinton Parameters and the Geneva Accords proposed a solution whereby Arab neighbourhoods would come under Palestinian sovereignty and Jewish neighbourhoods under Israeli sovereignty. Previous negotiations have proposed a special regime for the Old City.

Gilad Shalit was an Israel Defence Forces soldier who was captured by Hamas in June 2006 in a cross-border raid from Gaza into Israeli territory.  Hamas held Shalit for over five years, until he was released on 18 October 2011. 

Shalit was born in 1986 in northern Israel, and is the son of Aviva and Noam Shalit. He holds dual Israeli and French citizenship, as his father’s family originates from France.

During Shalit’s imprisonment all requests from the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit Shalit were refused, contrary to the demands of international humanitarian law. During captivity, Shalit also had sparse communication with his loved ones. A year after his abduction, Hamas released a recording of his voice. The Islamist group subsequently allowed the transfer of three letters from Shalit to his family in mid-2008, and delivered a video of the captive soldier to Israel in September 2009 as proof of his welfare.

Gilad Shalit’s captivity touched almost every Israeli as most are called to military service for two to three years at the age of 18. His captivity did not just affect the Shalit family but every family in Israel that have sons and daughters in the IDF.

During his captivity Shalit’s family and the Israeli public campaigned vigorously for his release. His father Noam played a particularly high-profile role in the fight for his freedom.

On 11 October 2011 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the signing of a mutually agreed upon prisoner exchange deal to secure the release of Shalit. Ultimately brokered by the Egyptian government, the deal stipulated that Israel would release 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in two batches over the following months.

In the early afternoon of 18 October 2011 Gilad Shalit was set free and returned to Israel and his waiting parents after 1,940 days in Hamas captivity. On the same day Israel released 450 Palestinians serving sentences for their involvement in terror activities. More than 300 of them were serving life sentences.

Upon his release Shalit was promoted to the rank of sergeant first class.

Further reading: BICOM Analysis: The political implications of the Shalit deal

According to the 1947 UN Partition Plan, the West Bank was supposed to become part of a Palestinian Arab state. In 1948 it was seized by Jordan and subsequently annexed. Israel captured the West Bank, along with East Jerusalem, from Jordan in the 1967 Six Day War. Israel extended sovereignty to East Jerusalem but not to the West Bank, which it considers disputed territory, the fate of which should be determined in peace negotiations. In the absence of a peace agreement, Israelis established settlements in the West Bank. Today there are close to 300,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and approximately 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The Oslo process that began in 1993 resulted in the creation of Palestinian self-rule over Palestinian population centres in the West Bank. The West Bank is now divided into three types of administration. Seventeen percent is designated as Area A, under Palestinian administrative and security control. Twenty-four percent is Area B, which is under Palestinian civilian administration and Israeli security control. The remainder is Area C, which is under full Israeli control. Ninety-six percent of Palestinians live under Palestinian Authority administration in areas A and B.

There is day to day coordination between the Israeli military authorities and the Palestinian Authority on the administration of the West Bank.

Prior to the threat of suicide bombings and other Palestinian terrorist attacks inside Israel, Israelis and Palestinians travelled relatively freely between the West Bank and Israel. Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement came in response to terrorist attacks that occurred initially after the signing of the Oslo Accords, but more significantly after the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000. The restrictions also prevent Israelis from entering Palestinian towns and cities.

Israeli checkpoints between the West Bank and Israel, and within the West Bank, are part of Israel’s defensive measures against violent attacks. Israel uses checkpoints to identify terrorists and to control the movement and activities of terrorist cells.

Checkpoints which prevent the movement of people and goods within the West Bank and between the West Bank and Israel are the source of great frustration for ordinary Palestinians. They are a barrier to Palestinian economic development. Israel recognises this problem, and the need to provide economic opportunities which draw people away from violence. It has therefore worked with the Quartet envoy, Tony Blair, to reduce the number of checkpoints and limit their effect on the daily lives of the Palestinian people.

As a result of the improved performance of Palestinian security forces in recent years, and a reduction in Palestinian violence emanating from the West Bank, Israeli restrictions on movement and access have been considerably reduced. A report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs published in June 2010 noted that as a result of changes in 2008 and 2009, movement between Palestinian population centres was much improved. It stated that ‘large segments of the Palestinian population enjoy better access to services, places of work and markets.’

Nevertheless, Palestinian terrorist groups in the West Bank continue to plan and execute attacks against Israelis. This creates a difficult balance between the need to promote Palestinian development, and the need to maintain security for Israel.

After the failure of the Camp David negotiations in 2000, the Second Intifada broke out and brought with it a wave of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks to Israel. Whilst Israel has experienced terrorism throughout its history, it had never been so intense. In 2002, a fatal suicide bombing was carried out in Israel nearly every two weeks. The attackers invariably came from the West Bank. In response, Israel decided to build a security barrier in order to stop terrorists from entering Israel from the West Bank. This contributed to a dramatic reduction in successful terrorist attacks inside Israel. All but 5% of the barrier is an electronically monitored fence and the rest is a wall.

The purpose of the security barrier is to prevent attacks on Israeli citizens. Whilst the final border between Israel and the Palestinians has to be resolved by negotiations, the route of the security barrier is determined by the need to save Israeli lives by preventing Palestinian terrorists from reaching Israeli towns and cities. In 2004, the Israeli Supreme Court made a landmark ruling, which concluded the fence was legal, on the strict grounds that its purpose was to protect lives. The court determined that the route should not cause disproportionate harm to the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank. On the basis of this ruling, the route of the fence was changed in many places to minimise the impact on Palestinian life. The revised route follows the route of the Green Line (the 1949 armistice line) in many areas and includes less than 10% of the West Bank territory.

Palestinians living in the West Bank are able to appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court against the route of the fence where it causes disruption to their lives, and have successfully done so in some cases. Attempts are made to minimise disruption caused by the fence, for example by building agricultural gates which allow Palestinian farmers to access their land.

The international community works intensively to promote Palestinian economic, security and political development. Since the split between Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in the West Bank in 2007, the principal focus of international efforts has been to work with moderate Palestinians in the West Bank. The US has led a mission to train and equip Palestinian security forces, while the EU has developed a programme to support Palestinian civil policing. Israel has cooperated with these programmes by allowing Palestinian cadets to travel to Jordan for training and permitting them to bring equipment and weapons into the West Bank. The success of these missions has brought far greater security and calm to the Palestinian population in the West Bank. Israel’s policy is that as the Palestinians do more to maintain security and clamp down on terrorists in the Palestinian areas, Israeli security forces will do less. As a result, Israeli forces have progressively withdrawn from Palestinian population centres and removed many roadblocks and checkpoints. In September 2009, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that since April 2008, ‘access relaxation measures have resulted in a significant reduction in travel time between major cities, as well as a reduction in the points of friction between Palestinians and Israeli security forces’.

It is also the policy of the Israeli government to promote Palestinian economic development in the West Bank, in the belief that this will undermine extremism and create a more conducive environment for peace. The reduction in movement restrictions has facilitated considerable economic improvement in the West Bank. Quartet envoy Tony Blair has worked with the parties to help facilitate this process, as well as to promote projects that build up Palestinian institutions.  In mid-2009, the IMF estimated that if easing of restrictions continued, economic growth in the West Bank for 2009 could be 7%, despite the global recession.

The Gaza Strip is a small strip of territory on the Mediterranean coast which borders Israel and Egypt and is home to 1.5 million Palestinians. Under the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which proposed the creation of a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine, it was supposed to become part of the Arab state. However, after Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, it came under Egyptian military occupation. The territory was captured by Israel from Egypt in the 1967 Six Day War. Between 1967 and 2005 approximately 8,000 Israeli civilians established communities in the Gaza Strip. In the summer of 2005, Israel withdrew all its civilians, dismantled the settlements and removed all its military forces. In November 2005, Israel signed the Agreement on Movement and Access with Palestinian President Abbas which put the Gaza Strip’s borders with Egypt and Israel under Palestinian control. This was the first time in history that Palestinians had managed their own borders. The agreement also included plans to increase exports from the Gaza Strip and for the development of a seaport and an airport.

After the election of Hamas in January 2006, the agreement broke down. The number of rockets being fired at Israeli towns from Gaza, a form of attack that began in 2001, increased considerably. In June 2006, Hamas forces captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in a cross-border raid and took him captive in Gaza. In 2007, a short-lived Palestinian unity government between Hamas and Fatah collapsed, with Hamas ousting Fatah and taking complete control of the Gaza Strip. Because of the threat posed by Hamas to Israel, the Israeli government defined the Gaza Strip as a hostile entity. Israel acted to stop the smuggling of weapons from Hamas’s Syrian and Iranian allies by preventing maritime access. It also restricted the goods that could be imported to the Gaza Strip from Israel. Operating the border crossings was made more difficult by terrorist attacks by Hamas on the crossings themselves. Nonetheless, Israel always recognised its humanitarian responsibility to Gaza, and consistently allowed large quantities of goods to enter Gaza to meet the humanitarian needs of the population.

Egypt considers Hamas a threat to its own security. After the Hamas takeover, Egypt restricted movement through its own border with Gaza.

In the middle of 2008, Israel and Hamas reached a temporary ceasefire which brought a sharp reduction in the firing of rockets into Israel. In November 2008, after an Israeli operation to destroy a tunnel being dug by militants under the Gaza-Israel border, Hamas abandoned its ceasefire and resumed regular rocket attacks on Israeli towns. As a result, at the end of 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, a three week intensive military campaign against militants in Gaza to stop the firing of rockets. This operation brought about another ceasefire which greatly reduced the firing of rockets.

Following attempts by foreign activists to breach the maritime closure on Gaza in 2010, Israel relaxed its restrictions on goods entering Gaza through its borders. All goods were allowed to enter except for those that could be used to make weapons, which remained restricted. This includes cement which is badly needed for reconstruction efforts. Israel works with the UN and other international agencies to facilitate the entry of building materials under close supervision. Exports and the movement of people are also closely controlled, though medical patients routinely enter Israel from Gaza for advanced medical treatment in Israeli hospitals.

The restrictions on the movement of people and goods in and out of the Gaza Strip have severely damaged the Gaza economy, increased dependency on aid, and greatly limited the opportunities for the people living there. The long term solution for Gaza is in the hands of Hamas. It will be difficult for Gaza to function normally so long as Hamas poses a threat to Israel. If Hamas were to accept the Quartet conditions by renouncing violence, accepting previous agreements in the peace process, and recognising Israel, and were to release Gilad Shalit, there would be no further need for restrictions to access and movement in Gaza. Hamas have rejected Egyptian attempts to forge a Palestinian unity agreement that would bring about new Palestinian elections.

As the religious, national and cultural focal point of the Jewish people for 3000 years, Jerusalem holds a unique status for Israel. The city has had a Jewish majority since the mid 1800s. Successive Israeli governments have emphasised the city’s political and symbolic centrality for the country. Between 1949 and 1967, Jerusalem was divided between Israel, which held the western parts of the city, and Jordan, which controlled the eastern neighbourhoods, as well as the Old City. During that period, Jews were prevented from accessing the Jewish holy places in and around the Old City and the two parts of the city were divided by a fortified border.

After the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel gained control over East Jerusalem, Israel removed the border and reunified the city. During this process, Israel expanded the municipal boundary of the city, extended its sovereignty over the entire city, and proclaimed Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Arab residents in East Jerusalem were offered Israeli citizenship, though most of them did not take it up. The Old City was reopened to worshippers of all faiths. Jews were again permitted to reside in the Old City, having been forced out of the Jewish Quarter by Jordanian forces in 1948. Israel also constructed new neighbourhoods and towns around the city. In building these new areas, Israel aimed to strengthen its hold on the city, and prevent a situation such as happened in 1948, where Jerusalem was temporarily cut off from the rest of Israel and besieged.

Government construction in Jerusalem is not guided by the intention to create a Jewish presence within Arab neighbourhoods. However, independent Jewish right-wing organisations have worked to acquire houses in Arab neighbourhoods like Silwan and Jabel Mukaber. The Israeli government contends that there is no legal basis to prevent Jews from acquiring homes in eastern neighbourhoods of the city.

Jerusalem is also of central importance to the Palestinians and they claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. The fate of the city has been part of successive negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian leadership. In the 2000 Camp David Summit, the 2001 Taba Summit and the 2007-8 Annapolis Process between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, various compromise solutions were discussed. Both Ehud Barak in 2000, and Ehud Olmert in 2008, agreed to Palestinian sovereignty in the Arab neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, but could not secure an agreement from the Palestinians.

Palestinian terrorist groups often justify their attacks on Israeli civilians as ‘resistance to the occupation’. However, most of the groups carrying out violence are opposed to the peace process and an agreed two-state solution, and are committed to Israel’s destruction. The real goal of these organisations is not to bring about the end of Israel’s presence in the territories. Their agenda, supported by their sponsoring states, Iran and Syria, is to prevent Israelis from living a normal life, and to prevent the development of a peaceful two-state solution. The clearest indication of this is the fact that the focus of their attacks, whether they are suicide bombings or rocket attacks on cities, is often civilians inside Israel.

The Israeli government supports the creation of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank. The Oslo process, initiated in 1993, aimed to reach a final status agreement between the two sides. Extremist groups have consistently acted to undermine this process. Since the signing of the Oslo Accords, Israel has lost hundreds of lives in Palestinian terrorist attacks, with thousands more maimed and injured in shootings, bombings, suicide attacks and rocket and mortar fire.

The perpetrators of terrorism in the 1990s were opposed to peace with Israel, and their actions helped undermine the peace process, which was increasingly handing over autonomy to the Palestinians. In US-brokered peace talks in 2000, the Israeli government agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian state close to the 1967 borders, but Yasser Arafat rejected the proposal. He then gave his support to the Second Intifada, which caused immense damage to the peace process. After Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip unilaterally in 2005, rocket attacks by extremist groups there only intensified.

Palestinian violence perpetrated by extremists runs contrary to the interests of the Palestinian people, as has been recognised by PA President Mahmoud Abbas. The threat of violence forces Israel to use defensive measures, such as restrictions on movement in the West Bank and entry into Israel, which inhibit the lives of ordinary Palestinians and their economic development. Without the threat of violence from extremist groups, there would be no need to apply these restrictions.

In recent years, the primary method by which terrorist groups have sought to attack Israeli civilians has been the use of rockets and mortars. Since 2001, terrorist groups including Hamas and Islamic Jihad have fired domestically produced ‘Qassam’ rockets at Israeli communities in and close to the Gaza Strip. Since 2001, thousands of Qassams have been fired at towns and kibbutzim in southern Israel, resulting in 20 deaths between 2004 and 2010, several of them children, as well as hundreds of injuries. The worst hit has been the small town of Sderot, which has a population of 23,000. After Israel withdrew from the whole of the Gaza Strip in 2005, the rate of attacks increased markedly. From January to April 2008, close to 850 rockets were fired; an average of one rocket every three and a half hours. The range of the rockets also increased to include the large coastal city of Ashkelon. In all, Palestinian groups fired 2,300 rockets and mortars at Israel between December 2007 and June 2008, at which point a temporary ceasefire was negotiated.

Towards the end of 2008, after an Israeli military operation to destroy a tunnel being dug by militants under the Gaza-Israel border, Hamas abandoned its ceasefire and resumed regular rocket attacks on Israeli towns. After Hamas refused to renew the ceasefire, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, a military operation intended to decrease the attacks. In the course of the conflict, Hamas extended the range of its attacks, using smuggled Katyusha rockets supplied by Iran to hit a number of Israeli cities at a range of 40 kilometres. This brought close to a million Israelis within range. After a three-week campaign by air and ground forces, a ceasefire was called.

The operation succeeded in dramatically reducing the rocket attacks for an extended period. At the end of the operation, Israel secured an international commitment to help stop the smuggling of rockets into the Gaza Strip. However, Hamas has not stopped trying to smuggle more rockets in preparation for a future round of conflict. Towards the end of 2009, Hamas test fired a rocket with a range of 60km, capable of reaching Tel Aviv.

Whilst the number of fatalities from rocket attacks is relatively low compared to the numbers killed in suicide bombings, the impact on the day-to-day lives of those living within range of the rockets is immeasurable. Ninety percent of residents in Sderot have experienced a rocket falling in their street or in an adjacent street. Early warning sirens, which do not always sound, give residents around 15 seconds to take cover before the rocket strikes. That means being more than 15 seconds from a shelter at any time is potentially life threatening.

Towns in the western Negev region close to the border are some of the poorest in Israel. Few residents can afford to move away, but businesses have been forced to close and manufacturers have relocated.

The threat of rockets does not come only from Israel’s south. In 2006, with the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War, the Lebanese terrorist organisation Hezbollah fired close to 4,000 rockets provided by Iran and Syria at northern Israel. One million Israelis were forced into bomb shelters and hundreds of thousands left their homes to be out of range. In the course of one month, 44 Israeli civilians were killed and over 4,000 wounded by the rocket fire.

In the case of both the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon, stopping the firing of rockets has proved a very difficult challenge for the IDF. They are easily concealed within civilian areas and can be fired by small cells from a simple pipe or the back of an ordinary-looking truck. Those who have been responsible for firing the rockets, be it Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in the Gaza Strip, deliberately target Israeli civilians. They act from within civilian areas with little regard for the danger posed to people on their own side. Israel is in the process of developing defence systems capable of intercepting the rockets. Coming under this kind of rocket assault, from territories from which Israel has withdrawn, has made Israel extremely wary of future territorial concessions.

Israel has declared that it is committed to investigating all credible allegations of misconduct against its armed forces, whether they come from Palestinian sources, the media, or NGOs. Responsibility for IDF investigations falls to the Military Advocate General (MAG), a legal officer with the rank of Major General who heads an independent legal branch within the IDF. The Military Advocate General is appointed directly by the Defence Minister and is outside the IDF command structure. He determines whether a case warrants a full criminal investigation.

The decisions of the Military Advocate General are subject to review by Israel’s civilian Attorney General, who is also an independent figure. A complainant or non-governmental organisation may trigger the review of the Attorney General by simply sending a letter directly to the Attorney General. Both the decisions of the Military Advocate General and the Attorney General are subject to judicial review by Israel’s Supreme Court, which can be petitioned by any interested party including Israelis and Palestinians alike, and NGOs. One hundred and fifty allegations were investigated following Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s major military operation to stop rocket attacks from Gaza. These have resulted in disciplinary and criminal proceedings against IDF soldiers and officers in some cases.

Israel also has a strong legacy of independent judicial and state inquiries into the conduct of military and political leaders in times of conflict. In two recent examples, major inquiries were led by former Supreme Court judges into the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and the Gaza flotilla incident in 2010 in which nine Turkish activists were killed.

Israel has been drawn into conflicts with irregular forces in urban environments. In recent operations in the Gaza Strip and in southern Lebanon, Israel has acted primarily to prevent the firing of rockets at its town and cities. As with British and American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel faces complex problems in fighting against forces which deliberately hide among the civilian population.

The IDF considers itself bound by international humanitarian law and makes use of all available measures to distinguish combatants from non-combatants and to act with proportionality. Its soldiers are required to act according to its ethical code, known as ‘The Spirit of the IDF’. This code includes the principle of the ‘Purity of Arms’, according to which forces are expected to do all they can to prevent harm to non-combatants. This task is deliberately made difficult by the tactics of the militant groups Israel is confronting. Both Hamas in Gaza, and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon deliberately embed themselves within civilian populations in order to make it harder for Israel to act against them.

During Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s military operation to stop rocket fire from Gaza at the beginning of 2009, Hamas fighters used the civilian population as cover. They fired rockets at Israel from civilian areas, established bases and weapons stores in mosques, apartment buildings, and hospitals and booby trapped civilian neighbourhoods. Fighters removed their uniforms so it would be impossible for the Israeli forces to distinguish combatants and non-combatants.

Israel used a range of techniques to try and overcome these challenges. These included issuing widespread warnings to civilians with leaflet drops, and telephoning residents of individual buildings to warn them they were going to be targeted. Over 1,000 Palestinians were killed in the operation. NGOs have claimed that the majority of those killed were civilians. Israel has compiled a list of fatalities indicating that fewer than a third were civilians. Israel maintains that most were operatives in Hamas’s military and security system.

After the operation the Israeli military launched a number of investigations to examine lessons that could be learned to further reduce the harm to civilians. These included better coordination with humanitarian agencies and better control over the use of weapons which caused harm to civilians, such as white phosphorous. In July 2010 Israel announced that to better ensure its own adherence with its humanitarian responsibilities, a humanitarian officer would be introduced to combat units at battalion level.

In 2009 an inquiry commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council and led by South African Judge Richard Goldstone claimed that Israel had deliberately struck civilian targets in the Gaza Strip. Whilst Israel had cooperated with other UN inquiries into its conduct, Israel decided not to cooperate with this inquiry because the UN Human Rights Council is dominated by states which do not recognise Israel and use the body as a forum to attack Israel politically. Israel rejected absolutely the accusation that it deliberately targeted civilians. Israel also criticised the report for failing to give sufficient weight to Hamas’s deliberate use of the civilian population as human shields. Israel subsequently published a series of reports on its own internal investigations in response to the accusations made in the Goldstone report. Whilst acknowledging that there were serious accusations to which Israel needed to respond, the British government described the Goldstone Report as ‘flawed’. The UK criticised the report for not taking sufficient account of Israel’s right to self-defence or of the actions of Hamas, and disputed Judge Goldstone’s interpretation of international law.

Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades: The al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades is a coalition of armed Palestinian groups linked to Fatah, the secular Palestinian nationalist movement. Formed in October 2000, the groups have taken responsibility for hundreds of terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings, in which Israeli civilians have been killed. It is designated as a terrorist group in the United States. After 2007, many of the Brigades’ activists in the West Bank signed amnesty deals with Israel and ceased their engagement in violence. However, the group still regularly claims responsibility for the firing of rockets from the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ): The PIJ is committed to the creation of an Islamic Palestinian state and the destruction of Israel through jihad (holy war). The PIJ considers Israel and pro-Western, secular Arab regimes to be manifestations of Western imperialism in Islamic lands. The group’s operatives see themselves as laying the groundwork for the day when a great Islamic Arab army will be able to destroy Israel in a military confrontation. The PIJ has been responsible for many attacks, including suicide bombings, against Israeli targets, and routinely fires rockets at Israel from Gaza. The group is proscribed in the UK under the Terrorism Act 2000. The PIJ is considerably smaller than Hamas, and draws inspiration from a combination of Iranian Shi’ite Islamist revolutionary ideology and Palestinian nationalism. Its main source of support is Iran.

The Popular Resistance Committees (PRC): The PRC is a terrorist organisation active in the Gaza Strip. The organisation was founded at the beginning of the Second Intifada in September 2000, by former Fatah and Palestinian security apparatus members. Its ranks also include ex-Hamas terrorists and operatives who belonged to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP): The PFLP was founded in 1967 with the stated objective of liberating all of ‘Palestine’ to establish a democratic socialist Palestinian state. The group has a long record of terrorism both inside Israel and internationally claiming many victims. In 2001 the group was responsible for the assassination of then-Israeli tourism minister, Rehavam Ze’evi. The PFLP remains engaged in rocket attacks and shootings against Israeli targets.

The Arab Peace Initiative is a proposal originating with the Saudi government for resolving conflict between Israel, the Palestinians and the broader Arab world. The proposal, first adopted by the Arab League in 2002, presents conditions under which the states of the Arab League would be willing to make peace with Israel and normalise relations. The conditions are that Israel withdraw to 1967 boundaries, allowing for the creation of a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It also demands ‘a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194.’

Although this position represents a considerable advance from the days when the Arab League refused to even contemplate peace with Israel, the proposal was initially treated with caution in Israel for several reasons. One problem is that the initiative appears to call on Israel to accept its terms without negotiation. Whilst the agreement may be seen as a basis for negotiation, the terms as they stand are not acceptable to Israel. Israel accepts the principle of a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank but believes the final borders must be negotiated, and cannot be exactly as they were in 1967. Furthermore, UN General Assembly Resolution 194, dating back to 1949, suggests that Palestinian refugees should be allowed to return to Israel. For Israel to accept such a proposal today would spell the end of the Jewish majority in Israel and therefore the end of the Jewish state. Israel maintains that since it accepted the UN’s Partition Plan of 1947, and it was the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states that started the war of 1948, it is they and not Israel who bear responsibility for the refugees. Israel further maintains that the principle of the two-state solution means that the Palestinian state, and not Israel, will be the national home of the Palestinian people and the destination for Palestinian refugees.

However, Israeli leaders have repeatedly called for direct negotiations with Arab states. At the UN General Assembly in 2008, Israel’s President Shimon Peres called on the King of Saudi Arabia to further his initiative and invited ‘all leaders to come and discuss peace in Jerusalem, which is holy to all of us.’ ‘Israel,’ he added, ‘shall gladly accept an Arab invitation at a designated venue where a meaningful dialogue may take place.’

In a speech in June 2009, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the leaders of the Arab countries to make peace and said, ‘I am willing to meet at any time, at any place, in Damascus, in Riyadh, in Beirut, and in Jerusalem as well.’

The international community works intensively to promote Palestinian economic, security and political development. Since the split between Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in the West Bank in 2007, the principal focus of international efforts has been to work with moderate Palestinians in the West Bank. The US has led a mission to train and equip Palestinian security forces, while the EU has developed a programme to support Palestinian civil policing. Israel has cooperated with these programmes by allowing Palestinian cadets to travel to Jordan for training and permitting them to bring equipment and weapons into the West Bank. The success of these missions has brought far greater security and calm to the Palestinian population in the West Bank. Israel’s approach is that as the Palestinians do more to maintain security and clamp down on terrorists in the Palestinian areas, Israeli security forces will do less. As a result, Israeli forces have progressively withdrawn from Palestinian population centres and removed many roadblocks and checkpoints. In September 2009, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that since April 2008, ‘access relaxation measures have resulted in a significant reduction in travel time between major cities, as well as a reduction in the points of friction between Palestinians and Israeli security forces.’

It is also the policy of the Israeli government to promote Palestinian economic development in the West Bank, in the belief that this will undermine extremism and create a more conducive environment for peace. The reduction in movement restrictions has facilitated considerable economic improvement in the West Bank. Quartet envoy Tony Blair has worked with the parties to help facilitate this process, as well as to promote projects that build up Palestinian institutions. The IMF estimated Palestinian economic growth in 2009 at 8.5%.

A boycott would do nothing to contribute to the advancement of a peaceful and just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Far from helping the Palestinians, a boycott would hinder the development of dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians on which prospects for future peace and security rely. The goal of peace depends on two sides, Israelis and Palestinians, working together with international support towards the mutual goal of a negotiated two-state solution. An environment of rejection and misdirected pressure targeted at Israel is counterproductive to an internationally-backed peace process premised on the development of mutual understanding and respect for both sides.

An academic and cultural boycott, which has been promoted by various trade unions and other activists, contradicts the principles of scientific ethics and the open spirit of international cooperation between scientists, artists and others. It is particularly counterproductive to target Israel’s academic community, which has a proud record of promoting honest debate, criticism and self-examination within Israeli society. Israel’s universities have a significant Arab student intake and are important forums for interaction and cooperation between Jews and Arabs. Arab citizens of Israel have increasingly risen to high ranks within Israeli academia.

Whereas Israel, an open and democratic state in which Jewish and Arab citizens enjoy equal rights, and which embraces free academic inquiry, has been threatened with a boycott, no other country is subject to such a campaign. Prominent Palestinian academics such as Sari Nusseibeh, President of Al Quds University in East Jerusalem, have been firm critics of the movement to boycott Israeli universities and academics.

Similarly, an economic boycott cannot help the Palestinian people, whose future prosperity depends on creating an atmosphere of economic and political cooperation. Since Israel’s establishment, the Arab world has tried to use an economic boycott to isolate and weaken Israel economically, and thus make the state non-viable. Whilst Egypt and Jordan have direct trade links with Israel, most Arab states are reluctant to trade directly with Israel. The Roadmap peace plan specifically calls for the normalisation of relations between the Arab states and Israel, including the return of trade links.

Around 76% of Israel’s 7.5 million citizens are Jews. They originate from a wide range of countries. The earliest waves of modern Jewish immigrants came from Europe, and are known as Ashkenazi Jews. After the creation of the state, they were joined by large number of Jews from Middle Eastern countries, known as Sephardi Jews. The most recent waves of Jewish immigration, in the 1980s and 1990s, have been from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia. Almost a third of the Jews in Israel were born outside of the state.

Figures released by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics showed that 8% of Israel’s Jewish population defines itself as Haredi (ultra-Orthodox), 12% as religious, 13% as traditional-religious, 25% as traditional and 42% as secular, on a descending scale of religiosity. ‘Traditional’ indicates participation in Jewish traditions but not observance of the strictures of Halakha (Jewish law). Haredi Jews observe very stringent interpretations of Halakha and live very conservative lifestyles within relatively closed communities.

Arab-Israelis comprise about 20% of the general population. Over 80% are Muslims, and the rest are Christians or Druze. The Druze minority has its own distinct identity. Whilst most Arabs are not conscripted to national service, Druze have a close identification with the state and are conscripted. Bedouin Arabs, who live mainly in the south of the country, also form a distinct group, and generally have closer identification with the state than other Israeli-Arabs. Bedouin are not drafted to national service but many volunteer.

Israel has an extremely diverse society. As in many other states, the challenge of accommodating cultural, ethnic and political differences is an important feature of the country’s domestic political agenda.

The vision of Israel’s founders was of an open and democratic state with a Jewish majority in which non-Jews would enjoy full and equal rights. The principle of equality for all citizens was enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence and is protected by Israel’s Supreme Court. There are many successes in this regard. All democratic freedoms familiar to a Western democracy are present in Israel. The country has a vigorous and diverse free press, a very well developed and active civil society and a highly respected judicial system protecting individual rights. This is affirmed by the international freedom and democracy watchdog Freedom House.

In Israel, women have achieved substantial parity at almost all levels of society. In 2008 the president of the Supreme Court, the foreign minister and the speaker of the parliament were women.

Representatives of Arab and other minorities play a full and active role in the state, including as ministers in the government, justices of the Supreme Court, members of parliament, senior academics, ambassadors, members of the civil service, and in the military. In 2007, Raleb Majadele, a member of the Labour party, became the first Arab to sit as a minister in the Israeli cabinet.

However, as in other societies, minority groups still suffer from inequalities, including discrepancies in the allocation of resources and access to public sector jobs. The Arab-Israeli conflict makes particularly difficult the relationship between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority, and between Israeli Arabs and the state. There are ongoing efforts by governmental and non-governmental agencies to overcome inequalities between Jews and Arabs in Israeli society.

Israel defines itself as a Jewish and democratic state, but in almost all aspects, Israel is a secular state, and freedom of religion is respected. Most Jews in Israel, whilst retaining a strong attachment to Jewish culture and tradition, are not observant of Halakha, and Halakha is not enforced by the state. The main exception, where religious law has standing before the state, is in relation to personal status issues. There is no civil marriage in Israel, but Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Bahai religious authorities each have jurisdiction over marriages among their members.

Haredi Jews are represented by special interest parties in the Knesset, and often participate as minority partners in governing coalitions. Tensions sometimes arise between secular and religious Jews in Israel, for example, over whether religious law should be enforced in public places in areas where Haredi Jews live. Governmental and legal authorities are periodically called upon to find compromises which meet the interests of different sectors in society.

In every generation throughout its history, the Jewish people have suffered persecution and expulsion, especially from countries across Europe. One of the primary goals of the Zionist movement was to create a state, the only one in the world, which would be a national home for the Jewish people and which would by definition be open to Jewish immigration. When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, one of its most urgent challenges was to absorb hundreds of thousands of stateless Jewish refugees who had been forced from their homes and lost everything in the Holocaust. Israel passed a law that granted the right of citizenship to any Jew who wished to live in Israel. Whilst the traditional religious definition of a Jew is someone who has a Jewish mother, the right of return takes a broader definition. In Nazi Germany, individuals were persecuted as Jews if they had even one Jewish grandparent. Therefore, the State of Israel defines a Jew for the purposes of the right of return as anyone with one Jewish grandparent. The principle is that anyone who could be persecuted for being Jewish ought to have the right of refuge in the Jewish state.

Israel, which is about the size of Wales and with a population of over seven million, is located among 22 Arab states with a combined population in excess of 300 million, covering a land mass larger that Europe. Egypt and the other North African states are to Israel’s west and southwest, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iraq are to the east and Syria and Lebanon are to the north. When Israel was founded, the Arab world refused to recognise it and enforced a strict economic boycott. But since the late 1970s, some Arab states have recognised Israel and built political ties with it. Egypt was the first Arab state to make peace with Israel, concluding a peace treaty in 1979. The PLO recognised Israel in 1993 as part of the Oslo peace process. This paved the way for the signing of a peace agreement between Israel and Jordan in 1994. With the development of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, more Arab states began to establish ties with Israel. Israel opened trade representation and interest offices in Oman, Qatar, Morocco and Tunisia. The economic boycott was relaxed somewhat during this time. In 1999, the West African state of Mauritania became the third Arab state to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel. The outbreak of the Second Intifada caused Morocco, Oman and Tunisia to break off their ties, but contacts have been maintained in some areas. In 2002, the Arab League proposed to normalise relations with Israel in the context of the creation of a Palestinian state. In the last few years there have been periodic high-level contacts at international summits between Israeli leaders and representatives of Arab countries with which Israel does not have formal relations.

Iran, which is a Persian speaking, Shi’ite Muslim country, has been led by a radical and fundamentalist Islamic leadership since 1979. The regime subscribes to a theocratic ideology that is fiercely anti-Western and opposed to the very existence of a Jewish state in the region.

Iran is a country with ten times Israel’s population, nearly 80 times Israel’s size, and 10% of the world’s oil. It aims to be the strongest power in the region and to export its radical ideology throughout the world. Iran’s leaders frequently call for the eradication of the State of Israel and have promoted anti-Semitism including denial of the Holocaust.

Destabilising the region

Iran’s ambitions are not only of concern to Israel. Iran opposes internationally-backed efforts to bring stability across the region, by supporting violent anti-Western forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon. The British government has linked Iran to attacks on its troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its sailors were abducted and taken to Iran from international waters in 2007. Iran’s missile programme has developed long-range weapons that can reach many parts of Europe.

Iran views terrorism as a legitimate means to further its ideological and strategic aims. Iran opposes any Arab peace agreements or recognition of Israel and assists Islamist terrorist groups and organisations that strive to attack Israel, sabotage the peace process and destabilise the regimes of the more pragmatic Arab countries. The Iranian regime arms, funds and provides military training to the Lebanese Shi’ite terrorist organisation Hezbollah, which shares its ideology and acts in coordination with the Iranian government. Iran supplied Hezbollah with the missiles and rockets that hit major cities and towns in the north of Israel in the Second Lebanon War of 2006, killing and injuring hundreds of Israelis. Iran supports Palestinian terrorist organisations such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It provided them with military and financial assistance in their violent activity against Israel. Iran also has a close strategic relationship with Syria.

Iran’s nuclear programme

The danger posed by Iran to stability in the region threatens to be greatly enhanced by its rapid development of nuclear weapons technology. Iran claims that its nuclear programme is purely for civilian purposes, but in 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitors nuclear programmes on behalf of the UN, discovered that Iran had been systematically lying about the true extent of its programme for many years. In 2009 it was revealed that Iran had continued to deceive the world, when a secret uranium enrichment facility was exposed in Qom by Western intelligence agencies. Iran has repeatedly refused to explain evidence held by the IAEA that it has been developing nuclear weapons technology. Most Western governments believe that Iran’s true goal is the development of nuclear weapons capability.

The UN Security Council has demanded that Iran cease its uranium enrichment programme (which could provide it with the raw material for a nuclear bomb), and fully disclose the extent of its nuclear programme. Iran has refused to do so, and in 2010 the Security Council passed a fourth binding resolution imposing sanctions on Iran for its continued non-compliance. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council, along with Germany, have made a series of offers to provide political and economic assistance to Iran if it accedes to international demands. So far these have been repeatedly rejected. The threat that Iran might use a nuclear weapon, or pass on the technology to one of its terrorist clients, would make it much harder to counter Iran’s malign influence in the region.

When Israel declared its independence in 1948, Syria was one of the countries that attacked the newly established Jewish state. Following the war, Syria used the Golan Heights and Mount Hermon as a base from which to shell Israeli agricultural settlements in northern Israel. Disputes over the water sources in the area were also a cause of tension. In 1967, Syria made a military pact with Egypt and backed Egypt’s calls for the destruction of Israel. During the Six Day War, Israel captured the Golan Heights. In 1973, Syria and Egypt launched coordinated surprise attacks on Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, in what became known as the Yom Kippur War. Israel was pushed back in the war, but following a series of extremely costly battles managed to regain control of the Golan.

Since 1973, the border between Israel and Syria has been quiet, but Syria has supported armed groups in neighbouring Lebanon, which it partly occupied from 1976 to 2005, in their attacks on Israel. In particular, Syria supplies weapons and other support to Hezbollah, and allows weapons supplies from Iran to pass through Syria. Syria also funds and supports extremist Palestinian terrorist groups in their attacks on Israel. The political head of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, is hosted by the Syrian government in Damascus, along with the leaders of other terrorist organisations.

On a number of occasions Israel has engaged in negotiations, either directly or indirectly, with Syria to explore the possibility of returning the Golan Heights in exchange for Syria signing a peace treaty with Israel and halting its support for terrorist groups that attack Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin made this offer via American intermediaries in 1994. Prime Minister Ehud Barak entered into negotiations on this basis with then-Syrian president Hafez Assad in 2000. But the Syrians eventually backed away from the deal. Under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Israel also explored the possibility of a deal via indirect talks mediated by Turkey. Given the threat posed to Israel by Iran, Israel will expect Syria to distance itself from Iran’s attempts to undermine Israel, and cut off support to terrorist groups, as part of any deal.

There are no legitimate territorial disputes between Israel and Lebanon, but Lebanon is a very weak and divided state and has been used by various groups as a base from which to attack Israel. In 1970, the PLO established itself in southern Lebanon and launched terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. In 1982 this triggered the First Lebanon War, in which Israel invaded Lebanon and succeeded in expelling the PLO. It also drew Israel into the complex and bloody internal fighting within Lebanon. During the war, Christian Lebanese forces allied to Israel committed an infamous massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps outside Beirut. A subsequent Israeli inquiry found then-defence minister Ariel Sharon indirectly responsible. Eventually Israel pulled back to a ‘security zone’, 20km inside Lebanon. In 2000 Israel pulled all its forces to the internationally recognised boundary and the UN Security Council concluded that Israel had fully withdrawn from Lebanon in accordance with UN requirements.

After the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon in 1982, the principal threat to Israel was posed by the radical Shi’ite terrorist group Hezbollah, which established effective control of the southern part of Lebanon. Hezbollah, closely allied to Iran, has continued to use Lebanon as a base from which to attack Israel without justification. After the UN endorsed Israel’s withdrawal in 2000, Hezbollah took the opportunity to increase its arsenal of missiles and other weaponry. Between May 2000 and June 2006, Hezbollah carried out numerous missile attacks and cross-border raids against Israel, including one which resulted in the capture of three Israeli soldiers whose bodies were only returned four years later. In 2006, it launched a simultaneous rocket attack and cross-border raid, killing eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two more, triggering the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War (known in Israel as the Second Lebanon War). Over the next month Hezbollah fired approximately 3,800 rockets into northern Israel, deliberately targeting Israeli civilians. They displaced between 300,000 and 500,000 Israelis from their homes and forced many more into bomb shelters.

Whilst Israel attempted to avoid Lebanese civilian casualties in its attempt to halt Hezbollah’s fire, Hezbollah’s tactic of intentionally hiding its forces and infrastructure within densely populated areas made this difficult. After a month of fighting, a ceasefire was established based on UN Security Council Resolution 1701. This calls for the disarmament of Hezbollah, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon, the deployment of the Lebanese army, and an enlarged United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in south Lebanon. Israel withdrew its forces in accordance with the resolution. Hezbollah, on the other hand, remains in possession of its weapons. It has rearmed with even more rockets aimed at Israel than before the war, and has deployed its arms within civilian villages to avoid the detection of UNIFIL forces.

Today, Hezbollah claims that it still has legitimate grounds to fight Israel because Israel retains control of the ‘Sheba Farms’ area, an eight square mile piece of land between Lebanon and the Golan Heights. Israel’s position, is that it no longer occupies any part of Lebanon and the area was in fact formerly part of Syria. This is backed by the UN. It should therefore be subject to negotiations between Israel and Syria.

Hezbollah (Party of God) is a radical Shi’ite Islamist organisation, based in Lebanon since 1982. Ideologically and religiously inspired by the fundamentalist Iranian regime, it receives extensive military support from Iran and Syria.

With Iranian and Syrian support, Hezbollah has developed extensive independent military forces and is the strongest faction in Lebanon. It is also a powerful political force representing Shi’ite Muslims. Since the early 1980s, Hezbollah has carried out numerous terrorist attacks against Israel and Jews around the world, and has killed hundreds of innocent people. In addition, Hezbollah has acquired a large arsenal of missiles which they have fired at Israeli communities. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is known for his venomous rhetoric and has called repeatedly for the destruction of the State of Israel. Israel and the international community have long called for Hezbollah to be disarmed in accordance with UN Security Council Resolutions 1559 and 1701, which call for the Lebanese army to be the only military force in the country.

Israel established a nuclear research programme in the 1950s. On the question of nuclear weapons, Israel maintains a strict policy of nuclear ambiguity, neither confirming nor denying the possession of a nuclear arsenal.

However, it is widely believed by analysts that Israel has a nuclear weapons capability. Israel’s unusual stance is rooted in its unique security concerns. Geographic and demographic asymmetries in the region leave Israel inherently vulnerable to attack. Its small size prevents the possibility of ‘strategic depth’ – the ability to absorb a first strike and then launch a counter-attack. This geostrategic vulnerability is regarded as the key concern that motivated Israel to develop a nuclear deterrent. However, if Israel explicitly acknowledged possession of nuclear weapons, the fear is that this might motivate Arab countries to establish nuclear programmes, triggering an arms race and further proliferating nuclear weapons. Maintaining a policy of ambiguity has been successful in preserving Israel’s strategic deterrence, without resorting to threatening rhetoric.

Israel, though not a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has the highest interest in preventing other countries from obtaining nuclear weapons or related materials, especially those countries that support proxy terrorist groups in the region. Israel has stated that it supports the vision of a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction. Israel’s position is that this goal can be pursued effectively when regional peace is secured and all states in the region come into compliance with their arms control and non-proliferation obligations.