Arab-Israeli Conflict

I

Introduction

Arab-Israeli Conflict, conflict between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East over the land of historic Israel and Palestine. The conflict has led to several wars, beginning in 1948, between the state of Israel and Arab nations and Palestinian refugees. Since 1979 several peace accords have been signed, addressing parts of the conflict.

II

Origins of Zionism and the Arab-Jewish Conflict

Throughout recorded history the land of historic Israel and Palestine, located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, was conquered many times by invaders. The area is the homeland of the Jewish people, who immigrated to the area beginning in the 13th century bc as Hebrew tribes. The tribes confederated as the Israelites who ruled much of the area from the 11th century to the 6th century bc. The Jews formed an identity as the people of the covenant but subsequently came under the rule of others until they succeeded in establishing an independent Jewish state called Judea in 168 bc. The Romans expelled the Jews from Judea in ad 135. In subsequent centuries many Jews maintained the idea of regaining control of the area, which they considered home. In the 1890s Theodor Herzl, a Jewish journalist living in Austria, advocated reestablishing a Jewish state in Palestine. Early proponents of such a state said Zionism (the reuniting of Jewish people in Palestine) would match “a people without a land with a land without a people.” See also Palestine, Ancient.

Palestine was already inhabited, however. The countryside was home to Arabs, most of them Muslims, while the larger towns contained both Arabs and Jews. Some of the Jews were long established there, while others were religious pilgrims from Europe who had come to live near the holy sites in Jerusalem and other cities. (Because the vast majority of Palestinians were Muslim Arabs, the term Palestinians now usually refers only to them, not to the Jews of Israel. Most Palestinians are Muslims.) The land was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, but the Ottomans saw little of value in Palestine and neglected the area. Consequently, poverty, disease, and malnutrition were widespread. Nonetheless, the area served as a land corridor between Europe, Asia, and Africa and thus had strategic importance. It was also near the Suez Canal, which, when opened in Egypt in 1869, connected the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea. Palestine was therefore important to the British, who occupied Egypt in 1882 and depended on control of the canal for its fortunes.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the Zionist movement gained strength in Europe, and large numbers of Jews immigrated to Palestine. The movement focused on self-reliance through agriculture, and many immigrants settled in the countryside. To do so, Jews had to buy land from local Arab holders of small tracts and from absentee Arab landlords of large areas. As a result, Jews and Arabs came into increasing contact; at times, Jewish purchases led to the displacement of Arab peasants from the land. Although the Ottoman government sought to slow the Zionist movement, Jews established a significant and expanded presence. Their success furthered the world debate about whether and how to establish a Jewish homeland, and it also created apprehension among Arabs.

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III

The British Mandate

With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I (1914-1918), control of Palestine shifted from Muslim to Western powers. In return for their help in the war Britain had promised autonomy to both Zionists and Arabs. In a series of letters known as the Husein-McMahon Correspondence (between Husein ibn Ali of Mecca, who ruled Arabs in the Al Ḩijāz on the Arabian Peninsula, and Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt), the Arabs were promised the right to a new Arab nation in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire. The promise to the Jews came in the form of the Balfour Declaration (named for the British foreign secretary, Lord Arthur Balfour, who communicated the declaration). Issued by the British in 1917, it read:

The British were not troubled by potential contradictions between the Husein-McMahon Correspondence and the Balfour Declaration. They explained that they had not promised all the land of the Ottomans to either the Arabs or the Jews; they had merely promised parts of it to each group. The British did not elaborate on what would happen if both groups wanted the same land. Following the war, Britain sought and received a mandate from the League of Nations to rule Palestine and develop it according to the premise of the Balfour Declaration.

In 1922 the British separated Palestine into two territories: land east of the Jordan River became the Emirate of Transjordan (now Jordan); land to the west, from Lebanon and Syria in the north to Egypt in the south, remained Palestine. It was in this limited territory that Zionists clashed with Palestinian Arab nationalists. Both Jews and Arabs conducted terrorist attacks and intermittent, low-level warfare. Both groups resisted the British, particularly when a British policy was believed to benefit one side over the other. The struggle was reflected in political efforts to control land, institutions, and the economy.

Initially, Britain took several steps to aid the Arab side. For example, before World War II (1939-1945) the British did not allow large numbers of Jews to come to Palestine from Europe, where they were often persecuted. Nonetheless, Zionists gradually gained the upper hand through steady land purchases, slow but continual immigration, and community organization. After World War II the world became aware of the murder of millions of Jews in the Holocaust, and opinion began to favor creating an independent Jewish state.

Arabs in Palestine and elsewhere continued to resist the idea, but on November 29, 1947, the United Nations (UN) passed Resolution 181, which called for a partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. The Jews accepted the resolution, but the Arabs opposed it. From the Arab perspective the UN had just divided a territory that was overwhelmingly populated by Arabs and had given more than half of it, 55 percent, to a minority group. In contrast, the Zionists were already well prepared for statehood. They possessed the rudiments of a government in the form of the Jewish Agency and the National Council and the structure of an army in the form of a well-organized and disciplined militia known as the Haganah. Soon after the UN resolution passed, Arab guerrilla attacks began on Jewish targets. The leaders of the Haganah argued for an aggressive response, and in December 1947 Palestinian Arab villages came under attack.

Zionist leaders had long recognized that the new Jewish state would have a significant Arab population, and they worried about the so-called demographic problem—that is, the possibility that Arabs would come to outnumber Jews in the new state. Early Zionist leaders, such as David Ben-Gurion, argued that “compulsory transfer” might be necessary and that he saw nothing morally wrong with it. The Zionist leaders also anticipated an armed response by Arabs to the new Israeli state. In March 1948 Zionist political and military leaders agreed on Plan Dalet, which called for clearing the new state of hostile and potentially hostile Arabs by destroying Arab villages and evicting Arabs from cities. From March 1948 to May 1948 Haganah forces occupied about 200 Arab villages and expelled their inhabitants.

On May 14, 1948, the British mandate was terminated, and at midnight the Jewish state of Israel declared its independence. Israel’s declaration of independence pledged that the new state would be based on principles of justice, liberty, and peace as defined by the Jewish prophets of the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament). It also promised full civil and political rights for all its citizens, regardless of race or religion, and it specifically pledged equal rights to Arab citizens. The new state came under immediate attack from Palestinian Arab militias and Arabs of the surrounding countries, including Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon.

IV

The Arab-Israeli War of 1948-1949

In the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-1949 Arab forces (including the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq as well as Palestinian guerrillas) had expected an easy victory over the small and isolated Jewish state, but despite heavy casualties Israel won. Israel had numerical superiority throughout the war and by its final stages outnumbered Arab troops by 2 to 1. Arms supplies from the Communist-bloc nation of Czechoslovakia also gave the Israeli army an advantage in weaponry. Israel also benefited from lack of cohesive unity and strategy among the Arab countries and the willingness of Transjordan’s King Abdullah ibn Hussein to seek an accommodation. After the war Israel increased the land under its control far beyond what it had been given by the partition plan, from 55 percent to 79 percent of what had been Palestine. The region just west of the Jordan River known as the West Bank came under the control of Transjordan (which was renamed Jordan in 1949). Egypt gained control of the Gaza Strip, a small region bordering the southern end of Israel’s Mediterranean coast.

The plan to forcibly expel large numbers of Palestinian Arabs had also been successful. By the end of 1948 more than 500 Palestinian Arab villages had been destroyed and Arab neighborhoods in nearly a dozen cities had been ethnically cleansed. Thousands of Palestinians were massacred in ethnic cleansing operations, often as retribution for Israeli casualties during the war or as recrimination for Arab attacks on Jews during the Arab Revolt of 1936. The war created a population of about 700,000 Palestinian Arab refugees who fled Israel and ended up in camps maintained by the United Nations (UN) in neighboring Arab states. Many of these camps were in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Lebanon. With the exception of Jordan, Arab countries generally refused to allow Palestinians to settle outside the camps or to be granted citizenship. As a result, the conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs continued to fester.

Following the war, a number of Arab countries indicated a willingness to make peace with Israel, but on the issue of the Palestinian refugees, the Arab nations agreed to be bound by an Arab League position that Israel was responsible for resolving the refugee problem. UN resolutions gave the refugees the right to return to their homes or to receive compensation from the Israeli government for their property. Israel, however, rejected these resolutions and maintained that the Arab governments were responsible for the refugees because those governments had initiated the war.

In the mid-1950s the Egyptian government, under the leadership of the Pan-Arab nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser, began to support Palestinian guerrilla raids into Israel from the Gaza Strip in retaliation for an Israeli attack on an Egyptian military unit in Gaza. Egypt also refused to allow Israeli ships to use the Suez Canal and in 1951 blockaded the Strait of Tiran (Israel’s access to the Red Sea), which Israel regarded as an act of war. In June 1956 Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, which had been jointly owned by Britain and France. In late October, Israel in a secret collusion with Britain and France invaded the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, defeating Egyptian forces there. As planned beforehand Britain and France attacked Egypt a few days later. The fighting was brief and Israel eventually withdrew from the Sinai and Gaza after the United States openly opposed the invasion, but the conflict further exacerbated regional tensions.

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