The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict_A Very Short Introduction Read online

  In 1897, at the World Zionist Organization meeting held in Basel, Switzerland, Zionist leaders identified Palestine as the land in which to build a Jewish national home and secure for Jews their own state. In 1917, the Zionist movement was then provided the necessary catalyst 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, the land of Israel. But Zionism’s geographic definition of a homeland has been problematic, pragmatic, and fluid. Facilitated by British rule over Palestine during the interwar period, Zionist settlement patterns focused strategically on Palestine’s agriculturally rich valleys and coastal plains, largely disregarding the centres of ancient Jewish civilization that were located in Palestine’s central hilly regions. This geographical division between the plains and the hills led to a profound redefinition of the territorial location of the Jewish homeland in the first half of the 20th century. When the 1937 Peel partition plan and the 1947 UN partition plan proposed a Jewish state be established in Palestine, they mapped out the coastal and valley areas, where Zionist land purchases were highest relative to the landholdings of the indigenous Arab population. Zionist leaders pragmatically built support for the idea of partition on strategic reasons, not religious ones: ‘Erect a Jewish State at once,’ wrote David Ben Gurion, ‘even if it is not in the whole land.’ Thus, when Zionist leaders celebrated in 1947 their most prominent diplomatic achievement—the two-thirds majority vote in the UN General Assembly in favour 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.

  The boundaries established by the 1947 UN partition plan were rejected by the Palestinian Arabs. They viewed all of mandate Palestine as their national patrimony, a belief based on their long-standing presence as an overwhelming majority at the time of the 1917 British occupation. Denied the promise of self-determination following the First World War, when they constituted 90 per cent of the population, Palestinians found themselves under a British imperial administration whose commitment to Zionism was perceived as a grave threat to their national identity. 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 1937 Peel partition plan envisaged 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.

  The 1947–49 war for Palestine created a refugee problem of immense proportions and, for the next few decades, Palestinians rejected any official recognition of the new state of Israel. But a new set of political equations was created by the 1967 war and the 1987 intifada. Israel finally came to be accepted by most Palestinians as a permanent presence. Palestinians’ support for a diplomatic compromise with Israel was driven by a commitment to having their own sovereign, independent country. In 1988, the Palestinian leadership officially accepted partition of what was mandate Palestine as offering the necessary chance for a peaceful resolution to their century-old conflict with Zionism. Acceptance of Israel on 78 per cent of mandate Palestine was put forth as a historic compromise. They claimed 100 per cent of the 22 per cent that remained.

  Israel, however, viewed the Palestinian compromise as the start of negotiations, not an end. The reason for this was that, following Israel’s 1967 conquest and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, increasing numbers of Israelis demanded expanded control beyond Israel’s borders. Now that they controlled the hilly lands steeped in Biblical antiquity, some Israelis argued a God-given right to establish a dominant Jewish presence there. The post-1967 growth of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian occupied territories was seen by the rest of the world as a contravention of international law (which prohibits the transfer of people from the occupying state to the occupied area). But in the battle for Israeli public support, the pro-settlement lobby described themselves as the present embodiment of the Zionist settlement movement: how, they asked, can Jewish rights to the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron or Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem, and other ancient sites located in the hills of the West Bank (what they referred to as Judea and Samaria), be less than to the plains and valleys which decades earlier defined the borders of the Zionist state? This profound struggle for the definition of Israeli society, and for the meaning and borders of a Jewish state, continues to this day, and in its outcome rests the future of Palestinians as well.

  As the title suggests, the focus of this Very Short Introduction is the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. Of course, the conflict has from the start been at the centre of international attention and embroiled in the designs of foreign powers for strategic and economic influence. Up to this day, four key phases of international relations can be differentiated: the Ottoman, the European, the superpower, and the American. Of these, the period of European rule has been of paramount influence. Britain’s rule over Palestine lasted only three decades, 1917–48. It was long enough, nonetheless, for both the establishment of a state government and, concurrently, the elaboration of ethno-religious fractures that would contribute to the state’s eventual partition. Following the Second World War, the process of European decolonization, as was happening around the world, offered opportunities to the two new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, to expand their influence. Renewed rounds of fighting between Israel and its Arab neighbours played a decisive role in embroiling the Middle East in the Cold War competition for global supremacy.

  Equally, the conflict has been entangled in regional issues. Since 1937, various Arab regimes and ideological movements have offered their support to the Palestinian national cause. Though only a small proportion of the Arab peoples, the Palestinians have carried a disproportionate influence. Shibley Telhami has described the occupation and suffering of the Palestinian people as ‘an open scar that is a reminder of a painful period in Arab history’. But it is important to note that the position of Palestinians in the Arab world has always been a complex one, caught between forces of cooperation and competition. To be sure, the ongoing conflict with Israel has offered useful opportunities for Arab regimes to bolster their own legitimacy by championing the Palestinian cause. But the festering resentment also played into the hands of militant Islamists and dissidents whose objectives were to overthrow those Arab regimes.

  Wherever possible, close consideration will be given in this book to the significance of foreign intervention and regional trends. But the primary focus here is on the stubborn core of the conflict, the mutually exclusive territorial claims of two competing nationalisms, Palestinian and Israeli.

  List of illustrations

  1 Relief map

  2 Relief cross section

  3 Ottoman administrative divisions

  4 The boundaries of the Palestine mandate

  5 Jewish land purchases

  6 The 1937 Peel Commission partition plan

  7 The 1947 UN partition plan

  8 The 1949 UN armistice lines

  9 The main Palestinian refugee camps

  10 The 1967 war

  11 Jerusalem since 1967

  12 Map of Oslo areas A, B, C

  13 Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif (present day)

  © Image Source—Fotolia.com

  14 Map showing walls and barriers in the West Bank

  The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted they will be happy to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.

  Chapter 1

  Ottoman Palestine 1897–1917

  On 29 August 1897, Theodor Herzl convened the f
irst Zionist Congress in the Swiss town of Basel. Over 200 delegates, most of whom had travelled from eastern Europe, gathered to discuss his nationalist plea for the creation of a new state in which Jews would form a majority of citizens. As a journalist working in Paris in the early 1890s, Herzl witnessed the appeal of anti-Semitism campaigns to French nationalist sentiments. This experience convinced him that even an assimilated Jew could never be accepted as an equal citizen in Europe. In 1896 he wrote Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), setting out how the creation of a Jewish state would put an end to the prevailing anti-Semitism of Europe. The goal itself was not new. Earlier calls for a Jewish homeland had been made following the Russian pogroms of the early 1880s. The special achievement of Herzl’s Basel programme was to establish the organizational structure necessary for the implementation of that goal. Delegates agreed to establish the World Zionist Organization as a permanent administration to direct the Zionist cause. They defined Zionism as ‘the creation of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine’.

  Palestine, however, was already inhabited. Many in Europe who hailed Zionism as a grand and noble project conceived of Palestine as empty. The Basel programme was launched at a time of great intellectual ferment, sparking bitter arguments among the leaders of Zionism about its secular nature, its dependence on the diplomatic support of imperial powers, and its relations to Jewish ancestral heritage in the land of Biblical Israel, referred to as Eretz Israel. But the delegates showed little interest in the goodwill of the Palestinian inhabitants, and it is this myopic thinking—‘A land without a people for a people without a land’ rang one prominent slogan—that lies at the heart of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. Had Palestine in fact been empty, there would be no conflict as we know it. Some Jewish leaders did recognize this: Ahad Ha’am, for example, visited Palestine and observed that ‘it is difficult to find fields that are not sowed’. He warned prophetically: ‘If a time comes when our people in Palestine develop so that, in small or great measure, they push out the native inhabitants, these will not give up their place easily.’

  This chapter examines the late 19th- and early 20th-century context in which two emerging national communities—Zionist and Palestinian—first collided over their mutually exclusive desire for the same piece of land, not much larger than Wales (approximately 16,000 square kms). Identifying 1897 as the beginning of the history of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict is significant. It underlines the fact that this hundred (or so) years’ conflict is neither rooted in ancient and religious animosities nor even are its origins so much Middle Eastern as European. Just as European Jews were responding to the nationalist spirit spawned by the conditions in 19th-century Europe, so too was the identity of the indigenous Arab population about to be reshaped by the sharpening of a specifically Palestinian consciousness that formed around the inhabitants’ resistance to the threat that Zionism posed to their own patrimony. It was in this context that Jewish immigrants from Europe struggled to find ways to successfully settle the land of Palestine, improvising and developing strategies that would have a huge impact on the future trajectory of the Zionist project.

  ‘Political’ versus ‘labour’ Zionism

  While the 1897 Basel Congress may be commonly accepted as marking the emergence of a coherent and political programme, Zionism has never been a monolithic movement. Herzl’s conception of Zionism as primarily an international diplomatic, or political, initiative met with opposition from a number of groups. One challenge was posed by Jews who, in the decade prior to the First World War, dispensed with diplomatic niceties and emigrated to Palestine. Generally referred to as labour Zionists, they advocated the importance of settlement work over international diplomacy. A second important challenge would emerge in the 1920s when Vladimir Jabotinsky founded the Revisionist Party with the explicit goal of attaining statehood by military force.

  It is worth considering in some detail the divergent roles played by the adherents of both political and labour Zionism. For Herzl’s part, his insistence that assimilation in Europe was impossible, and that Jews could only be secure in a state of their own, was motivated more by modern nationalist ideologies than by traditional religious associations. His principal strategy was to secure the political support of a great power and the financial assistance of European Jewry. Indeed, he closely modelled his plans along the lines of contemporaneous European colonizing initiatives. A large-scale endeavour of overseas settlement such as was envisaged by the Basel programme could never be successful, Herzl argued, until it secured a ‘charter’ from a great power. He devoted a great deal of his time to organizing audiences with high-level government officials across Europe (including the Russian Tsar and the Ottoman Sultan), but nothing substantial came of his efforts. Notably, in 1903, his determination to find an immediate refuge for Jews in danger of a new wave of pogroms led Herzl to consider a British offer to colonize parts of East Africa. This deal split the Zionist movement, alienating those Zionists who sought settlement only in Palestine. The East African scheme died with Herzl in 1904, following which the successful search for a powerful patron would have to wait for new diplomatic avenues forced opened by the First World War.

  In the meantime, more practical figures set to work laying the foundations for a Zionist community on the land in Palestine. By 1914, approximately 85,000 Jews resided in Palestine, of whom about 35,000 had arrived in recent decades. This period of immigration consisted of two waves of settlement, known in Hebrew as aliyot (a single wave is an aliyah). The concept of aliyah (ascent) is fundamental to the Zionist principle that a Jewish state serve as a homeland for all the Jews in the world: emigration from Israel is referred to as yerida or ‘descent’. Settlement conditions in Palestine were tenuous, and the first aliyah (1882–1903) encountered serious difficulties. Many settlers ended up leaving after a brief stay. Those communities that survived did so mainly due to their reliance on relatively cheap Arab labour and to the philanthropy of wealthy European Jews. In contrast, the more significant second aliyah (1904–14) gradually became more committed to the creation in Palestine of a separate society built on Jewish labour. These two groups tended to clash.

  The main problem faced by the labour Zionists of the second aliyah was how to establish farming enterprises that were sufficiently viable to support a standard of living high enough to induce a continual flow of immigrants from eastern Europe. The second aliyah’s response took time to work out but the solutions eventually arrived at were critical in laying the foundations of the Jewish state four decades later. In his book Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914, Gershon Shafir describes how, on the one hand, competition with lower-paid native workers and, on the other, the goal of finding jobs for Jewish immigrants led the leaders of the second aliyah to try to separate the Arab and Jewish societies and economies. From this strategy evolved the kibbutz movement, a programme of settlement based on cooperation among Jewish immigrants.

  Generally referred to as ‘the conquest of labour’, the replacement of Arab workers by Jews was also justified by the need to form a new common Jewish identity linked to the soil. In the Zionist nationalist ethos, reclaiming the land was a way of rejecting the experience of life in the diaspora. The ‘conquest of labour’ was closely accompanied by the idea of a ‘conquest of land’. In order to acquire—or, to use the quasi-religious terminology employed at the time, ‘redeem’—the land of Palestine, the fifth Zionist Congress, held in Basel in 1901, set up the Jewish National Fund (JNF). Shafir quotes Menachem Ussishkin, president of the JNF and a major force behind Jewish land acquisitions:

  In order to establish autonomous Jewish community life—or, to be more precise, a Jewish state, in Eretz Israel, it is necessary, first of all, that all, or at least most, of Eretz Israel’s lands will be the property of the Jewish people. Without ownership of the land, Eretz Israel will never become Jewish, be the number of Jews whatever it may be in the towns and even in the villages, and Jews will remain
in the very same abnormal situation which characterizes them in the diaspora.

  The JNF negotiated the purchase of Arab landholdings that would henceforth be regarded as inalienably Jewish. The scope of land purchase remained limited (in part due to restrictions implemented by the Ottoman government), and the agrarian ideal failed to be reflected in the emerging reality of a mostly urban Jewish population (by 1944, less than 25 per cent of the population was rural). Nonetheless, these efforts did shape the future of the Zionist project. The necessity of buying land was never a source of contention among the settlers; the more fundamental question was where to find it, and the answer would be found more in land that held economic promise than religious significance. Zionism’s need to buy agricultural land had the singular importance of defining, or redefining, for Zionism the geographical location of Zion.

  Most notably, the areas of Biblical significance known as Judea and Samaria, located more prominently in Palestine’s mountainous areas, were shunned for the coastal plains and valleys. Part of the reason for this may have been a lack of religious interest: for example, David Ben Gurion, a leader of the second aliyah, centred labour Zionism’s political and economic activities in Tel Aviv (he evidently did not visit Jerusalem until three years after his arrival). Some early Zionists adopted an agricultural identity as tillers of the soil as part of consciously turning their back on the diaspora. The bigger reason for purchasing land in the plains and valleys was the legal and economic opportunities that the landscape there offered. And to explore the implications of this further we need to turn our attention to Ottoman Palestine, and the changing political and social contexts in which labour Zionists sought to carve out their self-sufficient settlements.