By Lina Anand – India and the United States of America
Introduction
In recent weeks, we have seen the influx of content about the Israel and Palestine conflict but there is much more to it than what meets the eye. It is hard to know exactly what is going on with so much information being sourced from a variety of different sources. To put it simply, the issue is over land, both sides have a claim to the area and sharing it is not working, so what happens now?
Conflict Origins
The conflict is said to have started around the time of the First World War in the early 20th century. However, the original issue begins almost two thousand years before this. Judea - which is now referred to as Israel - was a predominantly Jewish community amongst a mix of many others. When the Romans came and conquered Judea, the Jews were persecuted and pushed out resulting in many large Jewish communities settling in other areas of the world.
Throughout the years after the Jewish expulsion, the intensity and severity of antisemitism grew. Jewish people had constantly been discriminated against, denied citizenship and civil liberties since the times of Medieval Europe. Between the 1800s and early 1900s, there was a growth in what became known as ‘pogroms’ today in the Russian empire. Pogroms were violent anti-Jewish riots and were often encouraged and aided by the government and police forces. These riots peaked during the Russian revolution with an estimation of 1326 pogroms taking place which left half a million Ukrainian Jews homeless. It also killed around 30,000 to 70,000 people in the timespan of the years 1918 and 1921. This increase in antisemitism included the horrors of the holocaust that took place during World War Two which led to the mass migration of Jews into Historic Palestine. It was also a large push amongst Jewish communities for a Zionist movement.
Zionism
The main belief of Zionism is that Judaism is a nationality as well as a religion. It is also the belief that Jewish people deserve their own state in their ancestral homeland. It is the idea that they have a claim to this land the same way that Chinese people have China as their ancestral land. This Zionist push, driven by discrimination and intense persecution of Jews in Europe, meant that large numbers of the Jewish community had already started to move back to the area that used to be Judea.
The main issue
This land, over the last two thousand years since the Jews had fled, became populated by the Arabs and Muslims compared to a majority Jewish people as it was before.
It was under control of the Ottoman empire, then the British Empire after the collapse of the Ottoman empire. This area was now known as British – Palestine. In November 1917, Britain’s Foreign Secretary (Arthur Balfour) wrote a letter to a figurehead in the British-Jewish community. This letter committed the British government to the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” granting the land of the Palestinians to the Jewish. The letter became known as the Balfour Declaration - a letter in which a European power promised the Zionist movement a country where the Palestinian-Arab native made up more than 90% of the population. In 1923, a British Mandate was created that lasted up until 1948 - during the time the British facilitated mass Jewish immigration. Many of the migrants were fleeing Nazi persecution and the British began to seize Palestinian lands to hand over to Jewish settlers.
Arab Discontent
From a period between 1936 – 1939 there were a series of Arab revolts. They began in 1936 with a general strike, where taxes were withheld and Jewish goods were boycotted to protest colonialism and immigration. Within 6 months, the strike was repressed by the British who responded with a series of mass arrests, punitive home demolitions, and destruction of Palestinian developments, a practice that Israel continues to implement today. By the second half of 1939, Britain had amassed 30,000 troops in Palestine. Curfews were imposed, villages were bombed from air, homes demolished, administrative detentions and summary killings were widespread. The Jewish settler community collaborated with the British to form armed groups where British soldiers led Jewish fighters, also known as the Special Night Squads. During the 3 years of revolt, five thousand Palestinians were killed, 15,000 – 20,000 were wounded and 5,600 were imprisoned (What’s the Israel, 2023). This led to an ongoing conflict that would span for over 70 years.
By 1947 the population of Jewish people in Palestine had expanded to 33% yet they only owned 6% of the land. To resolve this, the United Nations called for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. Before this, the Palestinians owned 94% of historic Palestine and composed 67% of the population. The proposed plan would grant 55% of historic Palestine to a Jewish state and 42% to a disconnected Arab state. The remaining 3% was the area of Jerusalem which remained under international control.
Officially, the British Mandate expired on May 14th, 1948, but even before this, Zionist paramilitaries were beginning a military operation to destroy Palestinian towns and villages to expand the borders of the coming Zionist state. Between 1947 and 1949 more than 500 Palestinian villages, towns and cities were destroyed and an estimated 15,000 Palestinians were killed, mostly by massacres. The Zionists captured 77-78% of historic Palestine, with the remaining 22% being divided into what we now know as the West bank and Gaza strip. Due to this, more than 700,000 Palestinians were uprooted, creating an unsolved refugee crisis (What’s the Israel, 2023). Whether or not the Palestinians were forced from their homes, or they fled is dependent on your viewpoint in this conflict. Palestinians and Arabs along with most sources, viewed this as a Jewish attempt to ethnically cleanse Palestinians; it was given the name Nakba, meaning ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic. However, the opposing view stands at spontaneous Arab fleeing, Arab armies, or unfortunate wartime accidents given that, in mid-May 1948, just after Israel declared its establishment, a war broke out between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Many Israeli sources like to use this claiming their country's innocence. In January of 1949 the first Arab-Israeli war ended with an armistice between the countries. Today, the descendants of these refugees lie at around 6 million with people living in the neighboring countries in unseemly camps, not only putting those displaced through more hardship but also placing burden on the countries hosting them.This leads to the main factor of peace agreements being a right to return for all the refugees. However, Israel has refused this as if the refugees were to return, the Jewish citizens will no longer hold the majority of the population in the area. Accepting the right to return forces Israel to abandon either its Jewish identity or its democratic identity.
Over the next few years, Egypt took control of the Gaza strip and Jordan began an administrative rule over the West Bank. This was followed by the formation of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and then the Fatah political party. In June 1967, a 6-day war broke out, where Israel occupied the rest of historic Palestine including the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Syrian Golan Heights, and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, fighting against a coalition of Arab armies. Additionally, Jewish settlement construction began in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, creating a two-tier system placing Israeli citizens above Palestinians who lived under strict military occupation.
Hamas Establishment and The First Intifada
After the deaths of 4 Palestinians in 1987, a civil uprising, better known as the first Palestinian Intifada erupted. Protests rapidly made their way into the West Bank where young Palestinians threw stones at Israeli army tanks and soldiers. Overall, the uprisings lead to the establishment of the Hamas movement, an Islamist movement which countries such as the USA and UK classify as a terrorist organization. Hamas would engage in armed resistance against the Israeli occupation. In response, the Israeli army retaliated, using once again methods such as summary killings, destruction of homes, closing universities and deporting those who were protesting. The Intifada was led mostly by young Palestinians; these heavy handed attempts at silencing the uprising were not only an attempt to oppress but to shatter the spirit of the Palestinian community. Israeli militants targeted children and imposed curfews often leading people to running out of food in their homes. People were left using graffiti as a means of communication along the walls of refugee camps.The Intifada included mass protests, civil disobedience, and well-organized strikes. All the unrest created during this time helped raise awareness to and prompt the international community to start searching for a solution.
The Intifada concluded with the signing of the Oslo Accords and the formation of the Palestinian Authority, the Intifada concluded in 1993, allowing a provisional government to rule in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Palestinian liberation organization, internationally recognized as the representative of the Palestinian people, signed agreements with Israel based on a two-state solution giving Israel 60% of control over the West Bank including much of its land and water resources. The Palestinian Authority, provisionally ruling in Gaza and the West Bank, was supposed to provide for the first elected Palestinian government but that has failed to do so.This was followed by the building of an electronic fence and concrete wall around Gaza by Israel in 1995, cutting off interactions between the Palestinian territories.
The Second Intifada
A second Intifada began in September 2000, with the clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli forces leaving five Palestinians dead and 200 injured in the span of merely 2 days. Israel reoccupied areas under the Palestinian Authority and began to construct a separating wall along with flagrant growth in settlement construction, illegal under international law. Despite this, hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers moved to colonies built on Palestinian land, shrinking the space for the Palestinian population, with settlers only allowed on roads and infrastructure. For context, settlements are Jewish communities that have moved into the West Bank, planting their roots in these areas and merging it with Israel.
Five years later, the Second Intifada ended and Israeli settlements in Gaza were dismantled, along with the leaving of 9000 settlers and Israeli soldiers. A year after, the Palestinians had their first general election with Hamas winning the majority. This resulted in a civil war between Hamas and the opposing political party, Fatah, expelling the Fatah party from the Gaza strip yet Fatah resumed control over parts of the West Bank.
Gaza Blockade
In June 2007, Israel imposed a land, air, and naval blockade on the Gaza Strip, accusing Hamas of “terrorism”; now, some countries classify Hamas as a terrorist organization, but others do not, garnering a very mixed view. Hamas’ charter, for many years, called for the destruction of Israel. In 2017, it was revised allowing for the acceptance of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but still refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli state. Hamas led many of the armed resistances to Israeli occupation, with suicide bombings and in recent years shifting to rockets and mortars.
There have been 4 military assaults on Gaza: in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021. In 2008 the assault included phosphorus gas, which is banned weaponry; in 2014 Israel killed more than 2100 people in the span of 50 days. The Gaza Strip is about half the size of London, but has a population of 2.3 million people, and after the events of October 7th 2023 where Hamas gunmen crossed from Gaza into southern Israel and 1400 people were killed. Gaza has been under Israel blockade since 2007, and at the end of October 2023, all 2.3 million people were cut off from food, water, electricity, medicine, and fuel, escalating the humanitarian crisis.
Bibliography:
Aljazeera. "What’S The Israel-Palestine Conflict about – a Simple Guide." Aljazeera, 9 Oct. 2023, www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/9/whats-the-israel-palestine-conflict-about-a-simple-guide. Accessed 7 Nov. 2023.
Narea, Nicole. "A Timeline of Israel and Palestine’S Complicated History." Vox, 19 Oct. 2023, www.vox.com/world-politics/23921529/israel-palestine-timeline-gaza-hamas-war-conflict. Accessed 8 Nov. 2023.
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