As the Israeli-Palestine conflict enters the 48th day, with hundreds of thousands being displaced from their homes especially from northern Gaza to the south, and the 4-day pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas is gaining momentum, one needs to understand the antiquity of the conflict which dates back from ancient days. Israel outlined several reasons for retaining the West Bank within its realm; a claim based on the concept of historic rights to this as a homeland as claimed in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, among others.
Israel and Palestine under the British Rule
In 1917, the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour submitted a letter of intent supporting the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Zionist movement was then provided the necessary partition when Palestine came under the foreign rule of a British government that during the First World War, had allied itself to the Zionist cause. In Hebrew, the territory of Palestine was referred to as Eretz Israel, literally meaning, the land of Israel.
In 1918, when World War I and the Ottoman Empire rule ended, Great Britain took control over what came to be known as Palestine, which is the modern-day Israel, Palestine and Jordan.
In 1922, after the League of Nations approved the Balfour Declaration and the British mandate over Palestine, the Arabs opposed it saying that, a Jewish homeland would mean the conquest of Arab Palestinians. In 1923, tensions between the Jews and Arabs grew leading to acts of violence as they both claimed the land.
The conflict was inevitable, and with every round of violence and negotiations Palestinian Arabs witnessed a gradual but marked recession of the actual portion of land available for the establishment of their state.
The Birth of Israel State
The 1937 Peel partition plan envisioned an Arab state on approximately 75 per cent of mandate Palestine; the 1947 UN partition plan reduced that amount to 44 per cent; and, when armistice lines brought the subsequent fighting to a close in 1949, only 22 per cent was left outside the borders of the new state of Israel.
In 1947, the two-thirds majority vote in the UN General Assembly were in favor of partition. They accepted a state that included neither Jerusalem, which was meant to be internationalized, nor the hill lands of their forefathers (known in the Bible as Judea and Samaria) which were annexed by Jordan’s King Abdullah and came to be known as the West Bank portion of his kingdom.
In 1948, Israel was officially declared an independent state with David Ben-Gurion, the Head of the Jewish Agency, as the Prime Minister. Much as this seemed to be a historic landmark of the Jews, it was also the beginning of violence and conflict with Arabs.
The 1948 Arab-Israeli War
Instantly after Israel was declared an independent state, five Arab nations, among which were Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon instantly invaded the region in what came to be known as the 1948 Arab-Israeli War with an intention to establish a unified Arab-Palestine.
The civil war broke out in the whole of Israel which forced most Jews to scatter in various areas because of fear to be persecuted, but later in 1949, a cease-fire agreement was reached. As part of the temporary resolution, more than two thirds of the historic Palestine, including West Jerusalem, belonged to Israel, while Jordan occupied East Jerusalem and West Bank, while Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip. Consequently, more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from the land on which the lived for centuries on the day they named Al-Nakba literally meaning, the catastrophe.
As more conflicts grew between the two, more wars broke out in the following decades.
The Six-day War
In 1967, the six-day war broke out after a diplomatic friction between Israel and its neighboring Arab states of Jordan, Syria and Egypt. However, the brief war ended with Israel being victorious which gave her control over the Golan Heights from Syria, West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. In 1979, Sinai was however, returned to Egypt under the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty. After the war, most Palestinian refugees weren’t allowed to return to their home.
The story will continue when we will be looking at the First Intifada and Oslo Accords
