Palestine, Modern - MSN Encarta

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Introduction; Palestine Before 1948; Palestinians Since 1948

The Arab Revolt of 1936-1939

Arab resistance to the British occupation of Palestine and the mandate had from the beginning been expressed through rioting and small-scale attacks on British installations and Jewish settlements. Riots on Easter Sunday in April 1920, when a group of Arabs attacked Jewish property in Jerusalem, resulted in the deaths of five Jews and four Arabs. A British commission of inquiry blamed the riots on “Arab disappointment at the non-fulfillment of the promises of independence” and the “Arab belief that the Balfour Declaration implied a denial of the right of self-determination.”

Disorders in May 1921 in Jaffa left 47 Jews and 48 Arabs killed. A commission of inquiry headed by Sir Thomas Haycraft reported the cause to be Arab discontent with Jewish immigration “and with Zionist policy.” The Churchill white paper of 1923 declared that the number of immigrants should “not exceed the economic capacity of the country … to accept new arrivals.” Nonetheless, Jewish immigration was allowed to grow in the 1920s and to surge in the 1930s.

As Jewish colonies expanded the outbreaks intensified. A series of Arab attacks that began with clashes in August 1929 at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and then spread to Jewish settlements in Hebron, Safad, Jerusalem, and Jaffa left 133 Jews and 116 Arabs dead. This time a commission led by Sir Walter Shaw reiterated the findings of Haycraft, citing Arab “disappointment of their political and national aspirations and fear for their economic future,” and went on to recommend a curb on “excessive [Jewish] immigration” and better means for the “safeguarding of the rights of the non-Jewish communities.”

In October 1930 a specially commissioned report from Sir John Hope-Simpson found that even if all the cultivable land in Palestine were divided among the Arab farm families there would not be enough to provide every family with a decent livelihood. The report recommended a halt to immigration and Jewish settlement. Simultaneously, a new British policy statement, the Passfield white paper, declared that British obligations to the Jews and the Arabs were “of equal weight,” that there was “no margin of land available for agricultural settlement by new immigrants,” and that there should be stricter controls on immigration and land sales to Jews.

However, in February 1931 British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald yielded to Zionist protests and in a public letter to Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, stated that the British government had no intention of tightening controls on Jewish immigration or prohibiting land sales to the Jews. This further angered and frustrated the Arabs, who saw their country slipping away from them as the British aided the Zionists.

With the surge of Jewish immigration that began after the coming to power of the National Socialists (Nazis) in Germany in 1933 and with the deepening worldwide depression of the 1930s, tensions mounted and by 1936 were ready to explode. Early in 1936 the British Parliament refused to respond to the demands of the Palestinian Arab political parties for an elected legislative assembly with real powers, an end to Jewish immigration, and a halt to the eviction of Arab tenants living on land sold to Jews. Then, in April, a minor incident led to severe rioting in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. The British authorities imposed a curfew and declared a state of emergency throughout the country.

The Arab Higher Committee called for a general strike, and Arab workers, already suffering from the curtailment of exports to the Depression-hit West and from the failure of the local citrus crop in 1935, responded. By July 1936 the strikers were being supported by armed bands of Arab peasants. Operating out of Galilee and in the central hills, they sabotaged oil pipelines, mined roads, and bombed police stations, railroad tracks, and other government installations. The British counterattacked with planes and light tanks.

In 1937, in response to Arab terrorist attacks on Jewish settlements, armed Jewish settlers of the Irgun began terrorist counterattacks against Arabs. The Arab Higher Committee had yielded to requests from Arab monarchs and called off the strike in October 1936. However, the rebels continued to be supported by Arab peasants and by unemployed Arabs in urban areas, where, as a result of natural population growth, the land shortage, the expulsion of Arab cultivators from land purchased by the Zionists, and the collective punishments imposed on Arab villagers by British troops, there was a large and growing class of Arabs without regular jobs.

The Arab Revolt was eventually quelled by massive British military force, but not until 1939. By the end of 1937 an estimated 1,000 Arab insurgents had been killed. British military and police costs in Palestine had more than doubled since 1935, but the revolt was continuing. By the autumn of 1938 the rebels were in effective control of the countryside outside the main urban areas. There, they abolished rents and taxes, canceled all debts to landowners (Arab and Jewish), and prohibited the sale of land to Jews. As time went on, the superior power of the 80,000 troops that Britain brought in prevailed. Palestinian losses were enormous: about 5,000 Arabs killed and many thousands wounded, more than 5,000 men detained, and great damage to property in British demolitions of villages where the insurgents took refuge.

With the start of the Arab Revolt yet another commission had been assigned to investigate Arab grievances. In June 1937 the Peel Commission reiterated earlier findings and proposed that Palestine be partitioned into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish state would comprise the hills of Galilee in the north and the coastal plain down to south of Jaffa. The Arab state would comprise Transjordan, the hilly central region of Palestine, and the Negev. The Peel Commission also proposed a British zone including Jerusalem and Bethlehem, a corridor to the coast near Jaffa, and Nazareth. The Arabs rejected the partition proposal, while the Zionists accepted it.

In November 1938, however, the Partition Commission, which was supposed to decide on boundaries, said the proposal was unworkable. Two of its four members recommended that the entire north, from Galilee to the coast, and the Negev, along with the Bethlehem-Jerusalem-Jaffa corridor, remain under the mandate; and that the rest of central Palestine be divided between a Jewish state, confined to the coastal area around and above Tel Aviv, and an Arab state. The British government thereupon rejected the principle of partition altogether and in February 1939 convened a meeting in London of representatives of the Arab and Jewish communities and of the neighboring Arab states. When they were unable to come to any agreement, the government, anxious to prevent the Arab rulers from siding with Germany in the approaching world war, issued the white paper of 1939 calling for an end to immigration of Jews except for a total of 75,000 over the next five years and for an “independent Palestine state” within ten years.

The Yishuv, reacting to Britain’s new tilt toward the Arabs, called an immediate general strike. The Irgun began attacking British installations. The limit on immigration, Jewish leaders felt, was intolerable given the worsening condition of Jews in Europe. The Arab Higher Committee also rejected the 1939 white paper, on the ground that Britain had reserved the right to postpone independence. Only the National Defense Party, led by the Nashashibis, accepted its general proposals. When World War II broke out in September 1939, British control over the Arabs had been restored. The Irgun attacks on the British were suspended. But Palestine was still in a mood of civil war.

World War II and the Establishment of Israel

During the war British emergency measures prohibited political activity. However, the Arab and Jewish communities both secretly armed themselves for a resumption of conflict when the war ended. The British provided military training to elite regiments of the Haganah that volunteered to fight with the Allies. Revisionist Zionists who objected to the Irgun’s truce with the British formed a separate paramilitary organization in June 1940, and it continued to fight the British until the capture and execution of its leader, Avraham Stern, in February 1942.

In May 1942 the Zionists met in New York City at the Biltmore Hotel and agreed on the so-called Biltmore Program, calling for an end to the mandate and the immediate establishment of a Jewish “commonwealth” in all of Palestine west of the Jordan. In 1944 the Stern Gang (whose leaders now included Yitzhak Shamir) and the Irgun (led by Menachem Begin) resumed their attacks on government installations and British police and army posts. In November the British minister of state, Lord Moyne, was assassinated in Cairo by two members of the Stern Gang. The Haganah avoided such tactics during the war, but afterward it formed for a brief time a secret association with the Irgun and the Stern Gang and took part in the armed violence that was intended to drive the British out.

After the war, as the world learned of the Nazi murder of some 6 million European Jews, the Zionist demands for a revision of the 1939 white paper received unprecedented sympathy. In the United States, President Harry Truman and leading members of Congress called for an immediate end to restrictions on Jewish immigration and for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine in order to provide permanent refuge for the several hundred thousand stateless European Jews who had survived the Holocaust (many of whom were held in displaced persons camps as countries in Europe and North and South America refused to admit them).

In 1946 a joint Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry called for the immediate granting of 100,000 immigration certificates to European Jewish refugees and the lifting of restrictions on land sales to Jews, with the continuation of British rule in Palestine. But in February 1947 the British government, stymied by the relentless political and military offensive of the Zionists and the continued refusal of the Arabs to relinquish Palestine to them, decided to let the newly formed United Nations settle the Palestine conflict.

In November 1947 a two-thirds majority of the UN General Assembly, including both the United States and the Soviet Union, passed a resolution calling for an end to the British mandate and for the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem to be placed under international administration. The Arabs rejected partition, arguing that the UN had no right to give more than half of Palestine to a minority of the population and that they should not be forced to pay for Europe’s crimes against the Jews.

The Zionist leaders accepted the plan but retained hopes that the borders of the Jewish state might be extended in the future, an eventuality that they prepared for in secret negotiations with King Abdullah of Transjordan, who shared with them an opposition to the creation of an independent Palestinian state. On May 14, 1948, the National Council of the Yishuv proclaimed the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel, and on May 15 the last British troops sailed out of Haifa.

Palestinian Civil War and Arab-Israeli War

Fighting between Arabs and Jews in Palestine broke out almost immediately after the UN resolution on partition. The Palestinian Arabs, however, had not yet recovered from the harsh British suppression of their 1936-1939 revolt, and within a few months the Zionists had won the upper hand. By the end of April 1948 the Zionists had put into operation their plan for a general offensive, Plan Dalet, to conquer the Arab city of Jaffa and the mixed-population cities of Haifa and Tiberias and dozens of Arab villages in their environs and near Jerusalem, most of which were in territory allotted to the Palestinian Arab state under the partition plan.

Neighboring Arab states, which had helped set up the Arab League in 1945, formed a joint Arab military command to support Palestinian irregulars organized by the Second Arab Higher Committee, but its help was sporadic and ineffective. In April 1948 the joint Arab military command drew up an invasion plan for the regular armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. It was put into effect on May 15. However, the joint command was divided by rivalries among the Arab rulers, with most of them suspicious that King Abdullah of Transjordan wanted to dominate Palestine. As a result, Israeli forces were able to repel the Arab armies and make further important territorial gains that expanded the frontiers of the Jewish state well beyond those demarcated in the partition plan, and beyond the areas the Zionists had already seized from Palestinians before May 15.

During the earlier fighting in the spring of 1948, Zionist attacks on Arab cities and towns provoked an exodus of the Palestinian civilian population. The slaughter of 256 Palestinians by Irgun troops in the village of Deir Yassin in April 1948 became emblematic of the war, terrorizing tens of thousands of Palestinians who believed they might be the next victims. The exodus continued into the summer, as the Israeli army pushed back the Arab armies. In some areas, such as Ramla, Lydda, and parts of Galilee, Israeli troops forcibly expelled the Palestinians. By the time of the armistice in 1949, this combination of forcible expulsions, psychological warfare, and panic had forced more than 700,000 Palestinians to flee to Arab-controlled parts of Palestine or neighboring Arab states.

The Arab Legion of Transjordan, led by a British officer, took control of central Palestine in accordance with a plan negotiated secretly between Transjordan’s King Abdullah and the Israeli leaders with the acquiescence of the British government. Egyptian troops held the Negev for a time but were pushed back to the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula.

Armistice agreements between Israel and Transjordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria were negotiated under UN auspices between February and July 1949. In 1950 King Abdullah formally annexed the Old City of Jerusalem (East Jerusalem) and central Palestine, which became known as the West Bank, and renamed his kingdom Jordan. Egypt retained military control of the Gaza Strip. Israel, which under the UN partition plan had been allotted 56 percent of Palestine, kept control of additional areas in Galilee and other parts of the north, center, and south of the country that had been allocated to the Arab state, as well as the New City of Jerusalem. As a result, Israel, with less than one-third of the population, now held more than three-fourths of the land area of Palestine. Only 160,000 Arabs remained in the Israeli-held area. The name Palestine had disappeared from the map, and the Palestinians were dispersed or living under foreign rule.

III

Palestinians Since 1948

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Results of the 1947-1949 War

The Arab state of Palestine called for in the UN partition plan never came into being. Instead, after the Palestine War ended, Israel held 77 percent of Palestine, while Jordan occupied and annexed the West Bank and Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip.

Although some Palestinian leaders tried to form an “All-Palestine Government” in Gaza immediately after the war, they lacked territory, legitimacy, and popular support. They also faced many enemies. Israel and Jordan, both beneficiaries of the Arab-Israeli War, were hostile to the idea of Palestinian independence. Indeed, King Abdullah of Jordan and the leaders of the Jewish Agency had quietly agreed on preventing the emergence of the Palestinian state called for in the UN partition plan. In spite of some Arab sentiment in favor of the Gaza government, it soon faded away.

Palestinian Refugees and Palestinian Diaspora

Palestinians first had to confront the catastrophic effects of their expulsion and dispersal, and of the destruction of the prewar fabric of their society. Out of about 1,300,000 Palestinians in 1948, 726,000 had been made refugees by the war. Of these, more than 400,000 had been driven from the areas allotted to the Jewish state under the UN partition plan. The remainder had been forced out of cities and towns like Jaffa, Lydda, Ramla, Isdud (Ashdod), Majdal, and Bir al-Sabe (Beersheba), and from villages in Galilee, the triangle region, and the southern coastal areas, all of which were supposed to have been part of the Arab state called for in the partition plan. About 160,000 Palestinians remained within the expanded frontiers of Israel. Within the expanded state, 385 abandoned Arab villages were destroyed or taken over to house new Jewish immigrants, and land owned by Arabs in these villages was confiscated.

The Palestinian refugees originally from the southern coastal regions found themselves in the Gaza Strip; the refugees from Ramla, Lydda, and other areas adjoining the West Bank fled there; refugees from Galilee and from Haifa and Jaffa ended up in Lebanon and Syria. A fundamental demographic shift had taken place. The Palestinians were still located largely within the frontiers of their homeland, but were now concentrated in the hilly regions of central Palestine, in the Gaza Strip, and, inside Israel, in Galilee. Many Palestinians were outside of Palestine, and the number and proportion were to increase as the search for education and jobs drew many Palestinians to the oil-producing states of Arabia and other parts of the Arab world. Further expulsions in 1967, when Israeli troops occupied the West Bank and Gaza, and afterward increased the number of refugees. By the early 21st century more than 55 percent of the almost 6 million Palestinians lived outside their ancestral homeland.

Significantly, over this period the proportion of Palestinians living in refugee camps declined drastically as Palestinians acquired education and skills and moved out of the camps. In 1949 one in two Palestinians was in a refugee camp. By the early 1990s fewer than 1 in 6 of the almost 6 million Palestinians still lived in camps, mostly in Gaza (where 70 percent of the around 600,000 Palestinians remained in camps), the West Bank (less than 15 percent out of almost a million), and Lebanon (about 100,000 to 150,000). From a refugee camp population with recent rural roots and a low rate of literacy, the Palestinians transformed themselves into a literate, educated, skilled, highly mobile, urban population. These changes did not diminish Palestinian nationalism, however, and in many ways they enhanced it.