11/23/23
11/23/2023The Israel-Palestine conflict is among the world’s oldest, longest-lasting, and most intractable. Now officially 75 years old, dating from the creation of Israel in 1948, its actual origins predate that year by many decades, going back at least to the late 19th Century.
And its causes continue today for essentially the same reasons as when they began. No attainable solution appears yet on the horizon.
For 400 years, from the early 1500s to the early 1900s, the Ottoman Turkish empire governed Palestine and most of the Middle East. By World War One’s onset in 1914, the Ottoman regime had weakened considerably, and the empire’s leaders fatally allied themselves with Germany and Austria-Hungary (the Central Powers) in that conflict.
The powerful British military drove the Ottomans from power over the next few years, and in the fall of 1918 the Turks capitulated to the alliance of Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, as did the other Central Powers.
Against the Ottomans the British had enlisted many of the region’s Arab tribes, who were only too glad to throw off the Turkish yoke. Britain had promised the Arabs that for their help, they would secure their independence from foreign domination in the war’s peace treaty.
But the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, drawn up by Britain and France in 1916,
indicated something entirely different. Sykes-Picot divided up the now-defunct Ottoman empire, outside the Arabian peninsula, between Britain and France in the form of so-called “mandates.”
France took charge of Syria, Lebanon, southeastern Turkey, and nearby environs.
Britain gained control of Jordan and southern Iraq—and Palestine. When the new Bolshevik government in Moscow revealed the secret agreement in November 1917, the British were embarrassed and the Arabs were furious.
But perfidy wasn’t Britain’s only problem in Palestine. Another was the rise of Zionism in eastern Europe.
For several centuries antisemitism had been a fact of life in Russia, especially after the Tsars steadily acquired portions of Poland, which had a relatively large Jewish population. Consequently the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II, for which Jews were wrongly blamed, sparked widespread anti-Jewish pogroms across Russia.
The pogroms and Russia’s repressive policies drove some 2 ½ million Jews to western Europe and America in the 35 years before the outbreak of World War One. In addition, the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine captured the dreams of increasing numbers of Russian and Polish Jews, and Jewish emigration to Palestine grew accordingly.
In 1917 British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued a statement calling for establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” The result was predictable. Palestinians, overwhelmingly Muslim, vociferously resented British creation of a Jewish state on Palestinian territory, especially after Britain had reneged on its pledge of Arab independence.
Palestinian resentment exploded in 1936 into a full-scale revolt against British rule. The Brits responded harshly, deploying over 100,000 troops, who employed imprisonment without trial, whip lashings, house demolitions, and collective punishment against villages and families. Jewish paramilitary groups assisted British forces.
Estimates calculated that 10 percent of the adult Palestinian male population was killed, wounded, deported, or imprisoned. The revolt was crushed and Palestinians were left without local leadership.
World War Two, which in Europe began in 1939 (the Asian sector of the war had begun early in the 1930s), brought the Holocaust with its unimaginable German cruelty to the Jewish people. Sympathy for Jews grew steadily within the Allied nations, giving impetus to the concept of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Meanwhile violence between Arabs and Jews in Palestine grew more widespread. Its intensity weakened Britain’s governing control over the territory, and the creation of the United Nations after Germany and Japan’s defeat gave Britain the opportunity to divest its mandate responsibilities.
In early 1947 the British government announced its wish to terminate the mandate, and asked the United Nations to discuss the future of Palestine. Britain said it would not accept any solution that didn’t have buy-in from both the Arab and the Jewish communities there.
In November 1947 the U.N. General Assembly recommended portioning Palestine into an “independent Arab state alongside a Jewish state, and the special international regime for the city of Jerusalem.”
Zionist leaders accepted the plan, Palestinian Arab leaders rejected it, and all independent Muslim and Arab states voted against it. Violence erupted immediately, with hundreds of Arabs, Jews and British killed over the next several months.
As was to become the result of the many, many such outbreaks in subsequent years, the Jewish forces proved victorious. Some 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes.
In May 1948 Jewish leaders in Palestine declared the establishment of a Jewish state, to be known as the State of Israel. U.S President Harry Truman announced American recognition of the new nation the next day. Subsequent fighting resulted in 350,000 more Arab Palestinians leaving newly conquered areas.
A number of short-term wars between Israelis and their Palestinian and neighboring Arab national opponents took place over the next several decades, each ending in an Israeli victory and strengthening Israeli geographical control, as well as domination of Palestinian life by Israeli regulations.
Israel continues to build Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank, an activity opposed by nearly all members of the United Nations, including the United States.
Last month’s brutal Hamas attack on Israelis and foreign nationals in southern Israel, together with the taking of some 240 hostages back to Gaza, is the latest iteration of the violent 75-year conflict. Neither side appears ready to negotiate the crucial sticking points of disagreement; in fact, they seem more hardened in their positions.
If any progress toward peace has been made since Britain gave up its mandate in 1948, it’s pretty hard to see. ♦
