The roots of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict
What was the initial Arab response to Zionism?
The initial response of local Arabs to Jewish immigration to Palestine 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 Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, which welcomed the establishment of a Jewish home as a positive development for the whole region. However, hostility towards Jewish immigration, and attacks by armed Arabs on Jewish communities in Palestine, intensified in the early 1920s. Palestinian Arab nationalism arose in parallel 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 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 for 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 was forced to send 20,000 extra troops to Palestine to maintain law and order.
Responding to the Arab riots, the British established a royal commission in 1937 under the chairmanship of Lord Peel. The commission proposed the creation of a Jewish state on only a small fraction of British Mandate Palestine, with the rest of the territory allocated for a separate Arab state, except for the area around and including Jerusalem that would 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.
What happened in Israel’s War of Independence?
In 1947 the Arabs of Palestine and the surrounding Arab states rejected a UN proposal to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. 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 continually 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 Lehi 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 their 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 on-going conflict, the declaration called on ‘the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve the way of peace and play their part in the development of the State, on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its bodies and institutions.’
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 1948-49 war, known 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 one per cent 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.
When 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 exceeded those defined by the UN Partition Plan. What remained in Arab hands were 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 was besieged by Arab forces and witnessed intense fighting during the war, was divided between Israel and Jordan, with the Old City and its holy sites falling under Jordanian control.
What caused the Palestinian refugee problem?
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 Arabs. With war raging, the factors that caused them to flee were complex. Whilst in some cases individual Jewish commanders told Arabs to leave, in the chaos of the moment, many left out of fear spread by rumours and exaggerated reports of Israeli atrocities, fuelled by the incident at Deir Yassin. The lack of a coordinated Jewish policy to expel Arabs is demonstrated 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 Israel’s first 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 Arabs states 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 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 Arab states 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 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.
How did Arab states react to the creation of Israel?
Even after Israel was admitted to the United Nations, Arab states refused to recognise or negotiate with Israel and took whatever steps they 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.
What happened in the 1967 Six Day War
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 increased 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, Nasser 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, in response, 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 captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Old City from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.
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. However, 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.
Why are there settlements in 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. As 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.
How has Israel addressed UN Security Council resolutions on Middle East peace?
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 that 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 to be resolved in negotiations. 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 the south of the country. In 2005, Israel withdrew unilaterally from the Gaza Strip and part of the northern West Bank.