Part 13. Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

From the Rise of Zionism to Israeli Independence

It is often claimed that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an ageless duel between uncompromising extremes, a dispute whose origins can be traced back for millennia. Although such claims have certainly been made by representatives from both sides in the dispute, in reality the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as we know it is a modern creation.  The roots of this modern conflict can be traced back to the late nineteenth century when a new movement arose among European Jews who sought to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.  Although the Biblical promises of God to Abraham and the historical existence of the ancient nation of Israel in the area have served as justification for the contemporary state, the founders of the modern Zionist movement were mostly secular Jews who were looking for a solution to specific problems facing modern European Jewish communities.  In fact, early Zionists such as Leon Pinsker and Theodor Herzl were more influenced by European ideas such as nationalism and socialism than they were by Biblical conceptions of the Promised Land.  Because they became convinced that Jews would always be vulnerable to persecution when living as minorities within Europe, these Zionist thinkers were open to establishing their new Jewish state in any number of locations, including Argentina, eastern Africa or the western United States.  They weren’t driven by some Biblical mandate to reclaim Palestine as a Jewish state.

Once the Zionist movement was officially established at Basel in 1897, it became clear that, for the vast majority of Jews, the only acceptable location for the Jewish homeland would be in Palestine.  Still, it took another twenty years for significant progress to be made towards turning these dreams into a reality.  The first big break for Zionists came with the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, when Great Britain declared that it would “view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and that it would “use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.”  This pledge, although delivered for political reasons, would become particularly relevant in the aftermath of World War One, when Great Britain found itself in possession of most of the Middle East.  By means of the Mandate system, the British were granted supervisory powers over Palestine, with the charge to facilitate the establishment of the Jewish homeland, even while not disadvantaging the Arab population that already lived in Palestine.  Not surprisingly, “in the ensuing years, Britain’s Palestine policy went in two opposite directions.  In the international arena it tended to back Zionist aims . . . In Palestine British officials favored the Arabs” (Goldschmidt and Boum, A Concise History of the Middle East, 2016, 257).  Such an inconsistent approach would only serve to further inflame conflict between Jews and Arabs during the interwar years.

However, just because their charge was impossible to fulfill doesn’t mean that the British didn’t try to do so.  As the British sought to fulfill their dual charge for the Palestine Mandate (1920-1948), they gave considerable autonomy to organizations run by the Zionist movement, which went about acquiring cultivable land, bringing Jewish immigrants into the land, and setting them up to develop productive farms.  As time passed and conflicts arose with the Arab population, the Jews developed their own militias to defend their growing community.  Although there were certainly divisions among the Jewish community in Palestine, on the whole, the Zionists were much more unified than were the Arabs.

This situation was bound to be explosive over time.  As more Jews immigrated into Palestine, and Arab workers were dispossessed from their lands, inter-communal violence broke out numerous times between 1929 and 1939.  The British had to put down this violence and Parliament began to dispatch commissions of inquiry in order to determine the cause of the violence and to plan a strategy for controlling it in the future.  Following the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, the British finally decided to clamp down on Jewish immigration, but the whole situation would change with the outbreak of World War II in 1939.  At the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of Jews made homeless by the Nazi extermination policy created additional pressure upon the world community to support the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.  By the time the British dumped the problem on the newly created United Nations, and withdrew from Palestine in 1948, tensions were at an all time high.  In a decisive war fought between November 1947 and July 1949, Israel captured more land than had originally been granted the Jewish state by the United Nations, and more than 700,000 Arabs had fled their homes in Palestine to become refugees in the neighboring countries.  The impact of this surprising triumph would be monumental, not only for the new state of Israel, but also for the surrounding Arab states and for the Middle East as a whole.

Israel and the Arab States from 1948 – 1979

Over the next two decades, the focus of the conflict was largely upon battles between Israel and the surrounding Arab states, particularly Egypt, Syria and Jordan, but also including Lebanon and Iraq.  For most of this period, Israeli politics were dominated by the Labor party, which had been the guiding influence over the Zionist movement during the British mandate.  The new nation of Israel developed a political system and political culture, and also went through dramatic changes in the composition of its population, as well as enduring tensions generated between nationality, religion and the state within Israel, and the problems of security and foreign relations.  One of the issues faced by Israel was the fact that the surrounding Arab states refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state, continuing to maintain that they supported a restoration of Arab hegemony in Palestine in which the Arabs would drive the Jews into the sea.

This reality of conflict with its neighbors created an ongoing sense of insecurity within Israel, and a feeling that, should they let down their guard at any point, Israel could be overwhelmed by its Arab enemies (who were much more numerous than they) and a repeat of the Holocaust would take place.  This insecurity was only slightly decreased by the repeated Israeli victories in wars with the Arabs during this period (particularly in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973).  These conflicts made it clear that Israel possessed a decisive military superiority over its neighbors (a superiority that was enhanced by the increasingly close alliance that Israel had with the United States).  Still, Israeli insecurity was such that they treated the 1973 victory almost as a defeat, launching an internal investigation into the reasons why Egypt and Syria had managed to take Israel by surprise in the October War.

Of all the wars with its neighbors, Israel’s victory in the Six Day War of 1967 was by far the most influential.  As a result of this conflict, Israel more than doubled the amount of territory under its control, and also gained oversight of “almost a million Arabs, most of them Palestinians” (Goldschmidt and Boum, A Concise History of the Middle East, 2016, 303).  Disagreements over how to administer this territory in the short term, and what the long term objectives should be for it, led to divisions within Israel itself.  The seemingly miraculous victory over three Arab states in six days also led to a feeling of invulnerability among the Israeli military.  But for the Arabs, the defeat was disastrous.  The war “discredited Arab nationalism . . . Arab armies were riven by factionalism and their governments did not trust one another” (Goldschmidt, A Concise History of the Middle East, 2016, 303).

In fact, the ‘67 war changed the whole paradigm of the conflict from one that involved Israel versus the surrounding Arab states (little Israel against the numerically greater and vastly more populated Arab world) to one that involved a militarily superior occupying power (Israel) against an oppressed and defenseless indigenous population (the Palestinians). Needless to say, this paradigm shift did not reflect positively upon Israel.  Although there would still be another war between Israel and its neighbors (the October War of 1973) as well as a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, future conflicts and peace negotiations would increasingly emphasize Israel and the Palestinians rather than Israel and the Arab states.  The war also led to much more aggressive involvement from outside powers, such as the United States and the United Nations, which sought to promote a peace treaty and an end to the decades-old conflict.

Throughout the first six decades of the twentieth century, a number of factors led the Arab population of Palestine to increasingly view itself as a unified people known as Palestinians.  Despite this fact, and the fact that the surrounding Arab states all proclaimed their support of the Palestinian cause, more than any other group the Palestinians repeatedly took the brunt of the fallout from the multiple Arab defeats in wars with Israel between 1948 and 1973.  In fact, it was this reality, more than anything else, that convinced Palestinians that they should begin to speak more for themselves following the Six Day War.

In the 1970s, an organization that claimed to speak for the Palestinians (the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO) began to gain a much higher profile than it previously had enjoyed.  It is important to realize that the PLO was created “to act as an umbrella group for all organizations serving the Palestinian Arabs” (Goldschmidt, A Concise History of the Middle East, 2016, 295).  A Palestinian refugee who grew up in Cairo, Yasir Arafat, rose to leadership of the PLO following the Arab defeat in June 1967.  The PLO sought to present a more diplomatic image during the 1970s and, as a result, gained support for its mission of establishing a Palestinian state among many governments and populations in the wider world.  However, the commando branch of the organization continued to cause trouble for the PLO, leading to its expulsion from Jordan in 1970.  Meanwhile, as the years dragged on without a peace agreement, Israel developed a policy that encouraged Jewish settlement in the Occupied Territories, and particularly in the West Bank.  Of all the developments of the 1970s, perhaps this one would bear more ominous fruit for the future of the conflict than any other.

In the aftermath of the 1973 October War, a series of events took place that led to the signing of a surprising treaty, the Camp David Accords, in 1979.  The main driving force behind this treaty was Anwar Sadat, who had decided in the early 1970s that involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not worth the cost to Egypt and he was determined to find a way out of it.  Sadat had to move carefully, because all Arab states had agreed with one another in their hostility towards Israel, and the majority of the Egyptian populace possessed a strong hatred for the Jewish state, a hatred which had been actively encouraged by the Egyptian government and media for several decades.  With the election of Jimmy Carter as United States president in 1976, Sadat found an ally who would work with him towards achieving a peace agreement with Israel.  In 1977, the election of a hard line Likud regime, led by Menachem Begin, in Israel seemed to bode ill for the push towards peace.  But later that year, Sadat took the dramatic step of visiting Israel and speaking before the Knesset, the first Arab leader to visit Israel since 1948.  In September 1978, Carter, Sadat and Begin all met at the Camp David retreat center in Maryland to hash out a deal.  After a tense twelve days of negotiations, an agreement was concluded, but no other Arab state would acknowledge the agreement and Egypt was expelled from the Arab League.  A couple of years later, Anwar Sadat would be assassinated by Muslim extremists in Egypt.

Although Egypt received the Sinai Peninsula back from Israel and the treaty between the two countries remains in place to this day, once again the Palestinians suffered from an agreement that only took their interests into consideration in a cursory manner.  Soon after the treaty was concluded, Israel undertook an aggressive policy of building Jewish settlements in the West Bank that has resulted in more than 600,000 Jews currently living in the Occupied Territories (almost all of whom have moved there since the 1967 war).  Most Arabs felt that Egypt had betrayed the Palestinian cause and Egypt was expelled from the Arab League until 1989.  Arthur Goldschmidt Jr summarizes the impact of the Camp David Accords in the following way: “The Palestinians felt betrayed, and a real chance for peace had foundered mainly because Israel was determined to keep the West Bank and Gaza”  (Goldschmidt, A Concise History of the Middle East, 2016, 333).

From Intifada to Gulf War

The 1980s was a tumultuous decade in Israel and the Occupied Territories.  The decade began with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the expulsion of the PLO to distant Tunis.  With the PLO out of the way, Israel attempted for several years to co-opt Palestinian leadership in the Occupied Territories so as to facilitate Israeli control of the population.  Meanwhile, the Reagan administration in the United States sought to negotiate a peace agreement between Israel and Jordanian King Husayn, whom they had designated as the spokesman for the Palestinians.  Since the majority of the Palestinian population did not view him in that light, however, no progress for peace was attained.  Israel continued to restrict Palestinian movement in the Occupied Territories even as it built more and more Jewish settlements on confiscated Palestinian land.

The stalemate in peace negotiations, coupled with their deteriorating situation in the Occupied Territories eventually led to the Palestinian uprising generally known as the Intifada.  This outbreak of mass protests took place in the Occupied Territories (Gaza Strip and West Bank) from the end of 1987 to the end of the Gulf War in 1991.  The Intifada “was a spontaneous rebellion fueled by the anger of the discontented young people of the occupied territories” (Cleveland and Bunton, A History of the Modern Middle East Sixth Edition, 453).  By 1987, Israel had occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip for over twenty years, enough time for a whole generation of young Palestinians to group to maturity under Israeli occupation.  For these young Palestinians, the occupation meant poverty, limited employment opportunities, the inconvenience of having to pass through military checkpoints on a regular basis and deal with curfews and other restrictions upon their freedom.  As years passed by with no peace agreement in sight, and yet increasing numbers of Jewish settlements being built throughout the occupied territories, the anger and frustration of these youths only increased.  It finally led to an outbreak of hostilities, which consisted mostly of stone throwing at Israeli soldiers by teenaged boys and young men, erection of road blocks, general strikes, and the like.  The Intifada was under way.

Although the Israeli government initially blamed the PLO for this outbreak of unrest in the occupied territories, most historians have concluded that it “was not inspired by the external PLO leadership in Tunis” (Cleveland and Bunton, A History of the Modern Middle East Sixth Edition, 455).  Vastly outnumbered in firepower and administrative strength, the Palestinians had no real hope of forcing Israeli troops out of the occupied territories.  Nevertheless, some important results did arise from the Intifada.  For one thing, the Intifada made it clear that Israel had failed to win any Palestinian support for its occupation, and that many Palestinians had become so frustrated that they were willing to resist the occupation through whatever means they could muster.  Secondly, as Israeli soldiers fired into crowds of Palestinian women and boys, and Palestinian death rates soared, Israel’s international reputation took a beating and it began to look more and more like an oppressive occupying power.

The Rise and Fall of the Oslo Peace Process 

On September 13, 1993, an event took place on the White House lawn that shocked the world.  Before a large crowd at the White House and a worldwide audience over the television, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with PLO leader Yasir Arafat, pledging that the two of them would work together for peace.  In the heady days following the Oslo Accords, it seemed possible to onlookers that we were finally witnessing the beginning of the year to the longest ongoing conflict of the twentieth century.  Within a year, Israel had negotiated a peace treaty with Jordan and a strong effort was being made to achieve a similar agreement with Syria, which would have meant that Israel would have signed accords with all of its immediate neighbors in the Middle East.  But, alas, peace did not materialize as expected.  Terrorist attacks by both Jews and Palestinians created doubts about the effectiveness of the accords in ending the conflict.  Although a second agreement (dubbed Oslo II) was signed by the two parties in September 1995, the assassination of Rabin on November 4 of that year dealt a serious blow to the peace process.  Rabin’s assistant, Shimon Peres, sought to keep the process going, but he was defeated in an election for prime minister in May 1996 by hardliner Binyamin Netanyahu, who had opposed the Oslo Accords from the beginning.  Despite U.S. President Bill Clinton’s attempts to push forward the peace process, momentum had been lost.  By the end of Clinton’s term in December 2000, the Oslo process was all but dead, replaced by another Palestinian uprising, dubbed “the al-Aqsa Intifada.”

Why did the Oslo peace process, which began with such promise, turn out to be such a complete failure?  The road to the Oslo Peace Accords had included the Intifada and the 1991 Madrid peace talks, and there were promising beginnings that inspired hopes for peace on both sides.  However, Israelis eventually became convinced that the Oslo Accords were not resulting in improved security for the country, as suicide bombings and other violence continued unabated throughout the 1990s.  On the other hand, Palestinians concluded that the process was not providing them with real autonomy, but was isolating them in sealed off zones under a corrupt “Palestinian Authority” in an arrangement that reminded many people of the apartheid situation in South Africa.  In addition, Cleveland and Bunton point out, “the deteriorating economic situation in the occupied territories after 1993 further alienated the Palestinian community from the peace accords” (Cleveland and Bunton, A History of the Modern Middle East Sixth Edition, 4827).  Economic problems were exceptionally bad in the Gaza Strip which had become an overcrowded, poverty filled place where residents were increasingly attracted to the hard-line message of the Islamist group Hamas.  The election of Netanyahu slowed the process even more, and even the rise of Ehud Barak as Israeli Prime Minister in 1999 failed to revive the moribund peace process.  The poorly prepared Camp David II negotiations only resulted in accusations by each side blaming the other for the failure to reach an agreement.  In the Taba discussions of January 2001, it seemed once more that the two parties were not far apart, but the election of Ariel Sharon in February 2001 brought all negotiations to a halt.  With a new Intifada underway, and the world’s attention drawn in other directions by the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was at another dead end.

Primary Source Documents

The documents linked below are primary sources connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  The first is UN Resolution 181 which proposed a division of Palestine into two states in 1947.  The second is the Israeli Declaration of Independence in May 1948.  The third is the 1967 Khartoum Resolution, issued by the Arab states following the Six Days War.  The fourth is UN Resolution 242, also issued after the Six Days War.  The fifth is the Palestinian National Charter, issued in July 1968.  The sixth is the Camp David Accords of 1978.   The seventh is the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt signed in March 1979.  The eighth is the Israeli agreement with the PLO in 1993 (the so-called Oslo Accords).  The last is the so-called “Road Map for Peace” agreed to during the presidency of George W. Bush (2003).

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/res181.asp

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/israel.asp

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/khartoum.asp

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/un242.asp

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/plocov.asp

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/campdav.asp

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/isregypt.asp

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/isrplo.asp

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/21st_century/roadmap.asp