Overview: Palestinian-Israeli Relations

 “When I was a boy I somehow got the impression that the river Jordan was four thousand miles long and thirty-five miles wide,” wrote Mark Twain in 1867.  “It is only ninety miles long, and so crooked that a man does not know which side of it he is on half the time.”  A century and a half later, the crooked Jordan winds through a landscape of conflicting rights and compounded wrongs--a territory so weighted with mythic expectations, it can seem nearly impossible to excavate what the conflict is truly about.

 

It’s about identity

Generations of Jews have repeated the promise of the Passover seder, “Next year in Jerusalem.”  But it was not until the late 1800’s that European anti-semitism and increased recognition of small nations’ rights sparked the drive for a Jewish homeland.  Despite much early skepticism, millions of Jews would eventually exchange timeless dreams for the call by the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, to “be a free people in our own land.” Jews voted with both their checkbooks and their feet for the establishment of a Jewish state. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who pledged financial support to building a Jewish settlement in Palestine, between 1882 and 1948, when the modern state of Israel was founded, over 500,000 Jews made aliyah (lit. ascent—immigration to Israel).  Another 684,000 followed between 1948 and 1951.

 

If Israeli national identity stems from historic longing and contemporary political realization, a sense of Palestinian peoplehood stems from indigenous settlement.   Though Palestinian nationalism developed a generation after Zionism, Muslim and Christian Arabs who identify as Palestinian root their nationality in centuries of continued residence in the land they call Palestine, and Jews call Israel.

 

Both Israelis and Palestinians, to varying degrees, have rejected the legitimacy of their neighbors’ national identity.  The problems of European Jewry in the modern period are not their concern, insist many Arab leaders; the Middle East belongs to the Arabs, or to Islam, and Jews had no more right to settle there than the British did in India. Conversely, rejectionist Israelis scoff at Palestinian claims of distinctiveness.  They echo Golda Meir’s 1969 contention that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people”--that the nation now called Jordan is the proper national home for the Arabs of Jaffa or Hebron.

It’s about land

In the aftermath of WWI, the European powers awarded Britain the right to determine Palestine’s fate.  The 1917 Balfour Declaration promised to work toward a Jewish “national home” in Palestine.  But by 1937 the British were desperate to separate the feuding Jewish and Arab communities, and set up a Royal Commission on Palestine to determine a solution that would bring peace to the area. The commission deduced that the Arabs feared that the establishment of a Jewish national home would eliminate their national aspirations and political rights was at the root of Arab opposition to a Jewish presence in Palestine. The commission recommended partition of Palestine into two sovereign states, Arab and Jewish. The Arabs rejected this proposal, unwilling to cede what they felt was Arab land to yet another “colonial” power.

 

Following the Holocaust, Jewish refugees from Europe and Arab lands streamed into Palestine, and Jewish-Palestinian conflicts intensified.  When partition was suggested a second time in 1947, Palestinians and surrounding Arab nations were ready to go to war for complete control of the territory.  Jews, by now almost a third of its population, were prepared to defend their embryonic state. 

 

The ensuing War of Independence (called by Arabs al-Nakba, “the catastrophe” in Arabic) saw hundreds of thousands of Arabs flee the territory now under the Israeli flag. The area designated for Palestinian sovereignty was conquered by Jordan’s Arabian monarchy.  Jerusalem was left a war zone, and an independent Palestinian state never emerged.  Responsibility for the refugees’ flight remains hotly contested; Palestinians believe that forced expulsion entitles them to a “right of return.” Israelis reject the right of their attackers to return to territory they fled, and blame neighboring Arab countries for encouraging Palestinians Arabs to do so.

 

The simmering conflict over Palestinian refugees and Israel’s right to exist exploded in the 1967 war, when Israeli counterstrikes took over all of Jerusalem and captured Gaza and the western bank of the Jordan.  Israel’s ambivalence over control of the territory once set aside for a Palestinian state developed into a policy of building settlements in strategic and historic areas.  Jews who moved into the historic districts called Judea and Samaria believe in their right to all of Palestine promised in 1917, with modern boundaries following the God’s biblical promise to Abraham.

 

In  1987, the Palestinian Intifada (uprising--literally "shaking off'  in Arabic) brought the issue of the territories to a head. The Israeli use of force to combat the uprising, which spread from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank/Judea-Samaria, resulted in considerable controversy within Israeli society. Pressure on the government to find a solution to the problem of the territories mounted. In the context of the current (second) Intifada, the devastating affect of continued terrorist attacks within Israel proper has both increased the pressure to find a solution to the ongoing conflict, and polarized those with differing views about what that solution might involve.

It’s about religion

The boundary between Israel proper and the territories captured in 1967--the so-called “Green Line”--remains the deadliest issue in the conflict.  Moderate Palestinian leaders formally accepted the existence of a Jewish state within the pre-‘67 borders, enabling the 1993 Oslo Accords.  And Israeli leaders at many points have clearly been willing to trade land for peace.  But religious militants on both sides reject shared sovereignty anywhere in the region, and most especially where the Green Line crosses the ancient walls of the Temple Mount. The Temple Mount is layered in religious meaning. For Jews it is the site of the original, ancient Temple and thus a political symbol of their claim to the land. To Muslims, it is the site of two great mosques, the religious center for Palestinian Muslims, and a political symbol of their claim to the land. In fact, it was a visit to the Temple Mount by then Likud leader Ariel Sharon in September 2000 that served as a catalyst for the second Intifada, the beginning of a cycle of violence that continues to this day.