What are the roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict?
Chris McGreal
As with almost everything to do with this conflict, it depends on whom you ask.
[…] the starting point for many people is the United Nations’ vote in 1947 to the partition of land in the British mandate of Palestine into two states – one Jewish, one Arab – in the wake of the destruction of much of European Jewry in the Holocaust.
Neither the Palestinians nor the neighbouring Arab countries accepted the founding of modern
Israel. Fighting between Jewish armed groups, which the British regarded as terrorist organisations, and Palestinians escalated until the armies of Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan and Syria invaded after Israel declared independence in May 1948.
With Israel’s new army gaining ground, an armistice agreement in 1949 saw new de facto borders that gave the fledgling Jewish state considerably more territory than it was awarded under the UN partition plan.
What happened to the Palestinians who were living there?
About 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled – about 85% of the Arab population of the territory captured by Israel – and were never allowed to return.
Palestinians called the exodus and eradication of much of their society inside Israel the Nakba
, or “catastrophe”, and it remains the traumatic event at the heart of their modern history.
Arabs who remained in Israel as citizens were subject to official discrimination. They were placed under military rule for nearly two decades, which deprived them of many basic civil rights. Much of their land was expropriated and Arab Israeli communities were deliberately kept poor and underfunded.
[…]
How did the occupied Palestinian territories become occupied?
In 1967,
Israel launched what it said was a pre-emptive defensive war against Egypt, Jordan and Syria. The attack caught Arab governments by surprise and saw Israel achieve rapid victories including seizing the Sinai peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. The six-day war was a spectacular military success for Israel. Its capture of all of Jerusalem and newly acquired control over the biblical lands called Judea and Samaria in Israel opened the way to the construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which became central to the conflict.
Israel placed the Arab population of the West Bank under military rule, which is enforced to this day.
[…]
Where are we now?
Although western governments still pay lip service to a two-state solution, there has been no progress toward an agreement under Israel’s longest-serving prime minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu, who has repeatedly said he will never accept a Palestinian state.
His present government includes far-right parties that openly advocate the annexation of all or part of the West Bank to Israel and the continued governance of the Palestinians without full rights or the vote. Israeli and foreign human rights groups say Israel has increasingly carved out a form of apartheid in the occupied territories.
Hamas’s killing of more than 1,200 Israelis now moves the conflict into uncharted territory.
Recent events are the culmination of a decades-long clash in the disputed region of the Middle East
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