Palestine: Where it all began
Thanks to Instagram and Twitter, when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict starts making headlines, everyone seems to have such strong loyalties for one side or the other. It's difficult to find any other conflict which generates such divisive emotional reactions from people who don't even have any stake in the outcome of the conflict.
Instead of throwing just another emotionally charged opinion into the void, I figured I'd write this post as an easy read for anyone who's been seeing Israel-Palestine all over their feed but struggles to sift through all the conflicting information about how or why this conflict began.
I'm not going to pretend that I'm a completely neutral arbiter in this situation; I have my own opinions on this conflict. But by writing this post I'm primarily trying to reach out to those of you blindly caught out in the crossfire of ignorance between two sides throwing strong opinions at each other.
Zionism
This is probably a term you've been hearing a lot recently with regards to the Israel-Palestine conflict. In short, Zionism is an ideology that advocates for the creation of an independent state that will serve as a homeland for the Jewish people. Before the creation of Israel in 1948, no such state existed for the Jewish people, but the desire for one grew stronger as Jewish people repeatedly suffered persecution around the world where they lived as minorities in other countries.
The ideology of Zionism has been around for a while, but geopolitically it held very little significance until 1917 when the Balfour Declaration was signed.
The Balfour Declaration
The signing of the Balfour Declaration was the first time that any major political entity declared its support for the Zionist movement. Below is a picture of the original document.
If it wasn't already obvious, this document was issued by the British government.
If you look closely you'll see that the document says that the British government are in favour of establishing a national home for the Jewish people "in Palestine".
And so begins the conflict.
In Palestine
The region that the British knew as Palestine has a long and violent history. So long that going into it would turn this post into an entire book. Suffice to say, the region has changed hands a lot of times throughout history, at various times being under the control of Muslims, Christians or Jews. Throughout its history, the city of Jerusalem has been completely destroyed twice, besieged 23 times, captured and recaptured 44 times and attacked 52 times. This region holds incredible religious and historical significance for all three of these religions and others too.
When the Balfour Declaration was signed, this region was under control of the Ottoman Empire, an Islamic empire based out of modern day Turkey. By this point, Palestine had been under Muslim control for over 500 years (though not always under the Ottomans). Over 90% of the population were Arab Palestinians who were overwhelmingly Muslim or Christian, though there was also a small minority of Jewish Arabs too. In the decades prior to the Balfour Declaration, Jewish migration to Palestine had slowly been on the rise as those supporting the Zionist movement sought to establish their Jewish state in the land that held religious significance to them and had once been the site of a Jewish kingdom about two thousand years earlier.
Palestine was not exactly its own state at this point, just a region of the Ottoman Empire, however that empire was on the verge of collapsing. The Arabs had made a deal with the British that if they helped them in overthrowing the Ottomans in World War I, the British would guarantee the establishment of an Arab state, one primarily run by the Muslim majority.
As you can imagine, the British government then declaring their intention to establish a homeland for the minority Jewish population didn't go down well with the Palestinians whose input had not been taken into account when the Balfour Declaration was signed, a mistake that the British government later acknowledged in 1939.
About the British Empire
As much as I relish the opportunity to criticise the British Empire, I do need to clear up a few things here since this is probably the area where most of the misconceptions stem from.
From reading the Balfour Declaration, it might seem like the British just straight up sold out the Palestinian people in favour of supporting the Zionist cause to establish a homeland for the Jewish people.
The reality however, is much more complicated.
The signing of the Balfour Declaration was very controversial in parliament, and there was genuine concern from many MPs about infringing on the rights of the Palestinian people and breaking promises they had earlier made to the Arabs. This is why the wording of the declaration is incredibly vague, only promising a Jewish homeland "in Palestine" rather than outright promising to give all of Palestine to the Zionist cause.
Regardless, the short sightedness of this declaration shouldn't be understated. For the British Empire, this is arguably one of the most disastrous policies that they ever pursued. Nobody in Britain could really agree on how to implement the promises made in the Balfour Declaration without angering the Palestinians. The British Empire's lack of proper planning turned both the Palestinians and the incoming Jewish migrants against them.
Two British Sergeants were hung from a tree by members of the Irgun. The Irgun was a paramilitary Zionist movement declared a terrorist organisation by MI5. They carried out attacks on British soldiers in response to the British showing too much preference for the Palestinians.
Over the next 20 years, communal violence intensified as the Palestinians and incoming Jewish migrants committed acts of terror against each other, as well as against the British whom they both saw as showing too much support to the other side's cause.
The British tried to maintain order for a while. In 1939, in response to Arab frustrations, the British issued the White Paper, which restricted Jewish migration to Palestine. This of course, only further radicalised Jewish groups who doubled down on their attacks on the British. The picture above is one of more notorious examples which generated outrage in Britain.
1939 is also, of course, the year in which World War II started, another conflict which almost brought the British Empire to the brink of collapse. Once the crimes of the Holocaust came to light and Jewish life in Europe was almost destroyed, Jewish migration to Palestine intensified, which made the British efforts to limit their migration look like an inhumane rejection of refugees.
The British Empire was in a really unfortunate position here, (albeit one they had dug themselves into with their own disastrous policies) and it seemed that no matter what they did, both the Arabs and the Jews would hate them. By 1947, the British were just about ready to give up on Palestine and began turning to the United Nations for a solution to the conflict between the Palestinians and the Jews.
The war begins
You've probably seen this image or one similar to it posted all over social media recently. With regards to how specific the accuracy of this image is, I really can't say, but on a broad level it basically represents how the situation developed after the British left Palestine up until today.
The second image is what the UN planned for the land. The white would have been the state of Israel for Jewish people and the green the state of Palestine for the Palestinians. The yellow is the city of Jerusalem, which would not belong to either state but would be a special international zone since giving the most important city to either side would have seemed unfair.
The Jewish community were overjoyed to finally be offered a state of their own and the state of Israel immediately declared independence the same day that the British left. The Palestinians on the other hand felt betrayed that they were suddenly expected to give half of the land away. They refused to accept the UN's plan and war broke out between the two states.
Several surrounding Arab countries also joined the war on the side of the Palestinians, including Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
This has led to another great misconception. The war is sometimes portrayed as a David vs Goliath situation with the tiny state of Israel defending itself from a coalition of several much larger unified Arab states. The truth is however, many of the Arab countries weren't as dedicated to the Palestinian cause as they made themselves out to be. The Arab countries had much larger populations but contributed relatively few troops to the war against Israel. Furthermore, although many of the Arab countries portrayed their war as a Palestinian cause, some of them only joined the war in the hopes they could annex some of the Palestinian land, something which both Egypt and Jordan actually did at one point.
With regards to this David vs Goliath myth, Israel was nowhere near as defenceless as is often portrayed. With a steady supply of recruits, by the end of the war Israel had an army almost twice as large as the coalition of Arab states, they also received support from European countries sympathetic to the Zionist cause, particularly those in Eastern Europe.
Another enduring myth is that Israel only won the war because of American support. It's true today that Israel's dominance is largely facilitated by undying American support, however in 1948 this relationship between Israel and America had not yet developed.
Al Nakba (The Catastrophe)
Ultimately, the Israelis were victorious. It's difficult to overstate how devastating this was to the Palestinian people. They not only failed to prevent the creation of the state of Israel, but they also lost 78% of the land. Riding on the momentum of their victory, Israel not only took their 50% of the land, but they also pushed into the land which was supposed to be for the Palestinian state. What followed was a huge depopulation of the Palestinian people.
In Arabic this is called النكبة (Al Nakba) meaning the catastrophe. 700,000 Palestinians were exiled from their homes and made refugees, and over 500 Palestinian villages were depopulated or destroyed. Once the war was over, many of these refugees wanted to return to their homes but the state of Israel refused to allow them to return and instead gave away their homes to new Israeli citizens.
The forced exile of Palestinians has been widely condemned by the international community and several UN resolutions have been passed which declare that Israel must allow the Palestinian refugees to return home or otherwise compensate them for the loss of their property and land, but to this day, 73 years later, Israel has refused to do so.
The Situation today
That brings us back to this map again.
The Palestinian people currently do not have an independent state and largely remain as a diaspora.
Since Al Nakba, there have been a few other wars between Israel and the Arab states however the result is always the same, the Arab states fail to achieve their objectives and Israel gains more and more land.
Outside of wartime however, the state of Israel continues to expand anyway. Jewish people from all across the world are automatically entitled to Israeli citizenship, regardless of where they are born or where they come from and the Israeli government generously funds their settlement, often by evicting Palestinians from their homes and giving them to new Israeli citizens.
The power of the Israeli government has expanded greatly since 1948. They receive generous support from the United States military and are currently one of the only countries in the world to possess nuclear weapons. The issue of constant Israeli expansion and settlement on what is internationally recognised as Palestinian land is regularly raised in the United Nations and their annexation of land is widely condemned and unrecognised by the international community.
Unfortunately, condemnation from the international community doesn't mean much when the most powerful nation in the world and their allies continue to support you.
Palestine currently has no central representation. Some of the groups which represent Palestinians are moderate and willing to negotiate with Israel, others are more radical and bent on the complete destruction of the Israeli state and its people.
Over the years as the Palestinian cause has gotten more and more desperate, terror attacks against Israel have become commonplace, which in turn only fuels Israel's hard-line stance against the Palestinians, which then only fuels more angry terrorist attacks.
Hamas, a recognised terrorist organisation, has declared their intention to destroy the state of Israel and basically instigate a second Holocaust in order to secure a Palestinian state. This is surely a step too far, but a radical terror group like this will never come close to matching Israel's military power. The continued existence of groups like Hamas however, allows Israel to maintain that they're only acting in self-defence against terrorists.
The concept of self-defence however, provides no explanation for why Israel must continue to expand its borders and replace the Palestinian population with Israeli settlers.
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