The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict_A Very Short Introduction

by Martin Bunton

  In this vein, it has also been argued that Palestinian rejection of the 1923 legislative assembly (see Chapter 2) was the largest of the missed opportunities: had the proposed constitutional machinery been accepted, Palestine, and Palestinians, would have been represented by a semblance of legislative government that would have made the post-Second World War task of partition vastly more difficult. Indeed, Palestine, the only Middle Eastern state not to have a legislative assembly during the interwar period, remains the only one to have been partitioned. However mistaken Palestinian rejectionism can be seen to have been in hindsight, one must nonetheless try to understand the factors that contributed to it. One was the evident unfairness of the political offers and the widely held feeling that better ones had to be achieved. Second was the apparent failure of the leadership of the notables: fierce rivalries between, and among, competing family members undermined the attempts by individual Palestinian leaders who saw the need to negotiate, but feared the opportunity it presented to their opponents to vilify them for compromising.

  When the fighting ended in 1949, the armistice lines carved out for the new state of Israel added much more territory than had been envisaged by the UN plan. The new state now comprised 78 per cent of the land of mandate Palestine. It was not until the 1987 intifada that the Palestinian leadership officially embraced Palestinian statehood as conceived by the partition solution—that is, ceding to Israel the 78 per cent of Palestine on which it was created. By the terms of that compromise, Palestinians accepted what remained of the UN plan to partition Palestine, but they would insist on 100 per cent of that 22 per cent.

  Chapter 4

  Atzmaut and Nakba 1947–67

  In 1947 the United Nations (UN) mapped out new boundaries for the mandate territory. Its plan awarded over half of the land, including the fertile plains and valleys, to the Yishuv who at the time made up one-third of the population. In Palestine, the day following the vote was marked, understandably enough, by Jews rejoicing and Arabs bitterly protesting. When the situation deteriorated into a civil war, international observers began to worry about what would come next. Diplomatic efforts at the UN to secure the implementation of the plan were futile. Many delegates were distressed by Britain’s refusal to help impose the partition plan, but Britain officially held that those who had voted for it ought to step up and face the consequences. Secretly, British officials tended to favour the absorption by Transjordan of the mountainous parts of the UN’s proposed Palestinian Arab state. With events spinning out of control on Britain’s watch, the United States became increasingly worried about the violence and instability; in March 1948 the Truman administration shifted away from partition, advocating instead for a temporary international trusteeship. But the unravelling had already gone too far.

  Fighting on the ground broke out on two fronts. First, from November 1947 to May 1948, there was a civil war within Palestine between the Yishuv and Palestinian Arab society. Secondly, following the final withdrawal of British forces on 15 May 1948, a regional war broke out between the new state of Israel and its Arab neighbours. Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq sent expeditionary forces, while token contingents were also dispatched from Saudi Arabia and Yemen. By the time armistice agreements were signed in early to mid 1949, the independent state of Israel was established within expanded boundaries that comprised 78 per cent of mandate Palestine, including the western part of Jerusalem (see Illustration 8). Israel’s victory was hailed by the Jews as the War of Independence (in Hebrew, milhemet ha’atzmaut), a revolutionary overthrow of the British imperial yoke and a hard-fought victory over the new state’s Arab enemies. The 6,000 deaths suffered by the Yishuv constituted 1 per cent of its population. Convinced by the justice of Zionism, and proud of their resounding victory, Israelis celebrated a heroic end to centuries of suffering and powerlessness in the diaspora. For the next two decades, the state of Israel focused its attention on economic consolidation, the absorption of another wave of immigrants (which doubled its Jewish population within three years), and maintaining its defences against belligerent Arab neighbours.

  In contrast, Palestinian Arab society was largely destroyed, its population dispersed throughout the region. During the course of the fighting, approximately 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes. It was an unimaginable catastrophe (in Arabic, al-nakba) that became synonymous with their dispossession and expulsion from the land of their ancestors. Their suffering as refugees set the primary context for the evolution of Palestinian national identity. Denied the right to return to their homes, Palestinian refugees deeply resented Israel’s hurried efforts to develop and settle their former lands, and some fought to obstruct it. But, until the 1967 war, the international community viewed Palestinians more as a humanitarian problem than as autonomous political actors.

  8. The 1949 UN armistice lines

  The Palestinian defeat in the 1947–9 fighting transformed the conflict from a struggle between the Arab and Jewish inhabitants of Palestine into also an interstate rivalry widely referred to as the Arab–Israeli conflict. In the most populous Arab states, this period was a time of great domestic instability. Arab regimes would be so discredited by the losses inflicted on their armies that ruling elites were swept aside in rapid succession. In addition to bitter self-criticism, the defeat also intensified Arab anger against the Western powers that had fragmented the Arab world after the First World War and then supported Zionism. As was happening around the world, the process of European decolonization offered opportunities to the two new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, to expand their influence during the 1950s and 1960s. The tension-ridden armistices of 1949 led to renewed rounds of fighting which played a decisive role in embroiling the Middle East in the Cold War competition for global supremacy.

  Nakba: Palestinian catastrophe

  Reeling from the losses suffered during the 1937–9 revolt, and still paralysed by political factionalism, Palestinian Arabs lacked the necessary political and military structures with which to confront the well coordinated forces of the Yishuv. When intercommunal clashes broke out in the winter of 1947–8, many Arabs, especially the wealthy and middle-class families, fled the fighting, with plans to return once the situation was safe again. Then, in April 1948, Haganah authorized a campaign known as Plan D, which gave Haganah officers authority to undertake the ‘destruction and expulsion or occupation’ of Arab villages, as deemed necessary to secure the interior of the emergent Jewish state. In effect, the atrocities that occurred during the implementation of Plan D intensified the fears of the Arab population and led to the irreversible momentum of panicked flight from successive villages and towns. Among the most notorious attacks was the killing in April 1948 of over a hundred Palestinian residents in the village of Deir Yassin by Irgun and Stern Gang extremists. Within days, Arab fighters retaliated by killing almost eighty members of a Jewish armed medical convoy on its way to Mount Scopus, on the edge of Jerusalem. As news of such massacres was widely broadcast, fears of further retribution and atrocities forced more Arabs to flee their homes in territories under Jewish control.

  Of the 750,000 refugees, approximately 400,000 fled to Jordan and 150,000 crossed the borders to Lebanon and Syria (see Illustration 9). Meanwhile, 200,000 refugees found themselves enclosed in a small strip of land—approximately 50 kms in length and 6–12 kms in width (360 km2)—around Gaza, which was already home to 88,000 residents. In December 1948, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194 recognizing the refugees’ right to return to their homes. In December 1949, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was established to provide temporary assistance in the refugee camps. The Palestinians who had fled the fighting expected to return home once it had ended. But Israel refused to let them do so, arguing that the Arab states had been responsible for creating the problem by initiating hostilities. In the absence of a political resolution, their numbers kept growing. Today the number of registered UNRWA refugees is over fo
ur million. UNRWA, for its part, continues to provide assistance for housing, health care, and education in the camps, which over time began to resemble permanent townships and shanty towns.

  For both political and economic reasons, Arab host states have failed to integrate the Palestinian refugees in any meaningful way. Lebanon, whose government was highly apprehensive about fundamentally altering the country’s complex sectarian balance, placed the strictest regulations with regard to residence, travel, and employment. The Egyptian army effectively imposed emergency law in Gaza, though Syria was more relaxed in its approach to the refugees and provided for some support and integration. The only country to grant citizenship was Jordan (Transjordan became Jordan in March 1948), which did so as part of its absorption of Palestinian territory. Although Jordanian nationality was granted to all of its Palestinian inhabitants, in exchange Palestinians were prohibited from using the term Palestine. Officially, Jordan now had two provinces: one on the ‘west bank’ of the Jordan River and the other on its ‘east bank’. By thus annexing Palestinian territory into his kingdom, King Abdullah was following up on the First World War ambitions of his father to establish Hashemite rule over the whole Arab east (ideas that had been further elaborated upon by the Peel Commission plan of 1937).

  9. The main Palestinian refugee camps

  The main victors in the war for Palestine were Israel and Jordan. Facilitated by prior negotiations that had secretly taken place between the two sides, Israel and Jordan agreed in 1949 to armistice lines that drastically modified the 1947 UN partition plan. The mountainous area on the west bank of the Jordan River (which comprised the ancient Biblical regions of Judea and Samaria) was annexed by Jordan (and renamed as the ‘West Bank’). However, neither Israel nor Jordan had wanted the UN’s plan for the internationalization of Jerusalem, and the fight to control the city was fierce. By early 1949, a line of barbed wire, concrete walls, and fortified posts divided the holy city. Jordan had secured control over the old city (including the Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif) while Israel held the newer parts in the western sector, with only a single road linking it to the new state of Israel. Although the UN failed miserably in its attempts to implement a corpus separatum for Jerusalem, as called for in the 1947 plan, the international community never recognized the de facto division of the city into western and eastern sectors.

  Abdullah’s success in achieving significant territorial gains speaks to the conflicting and self-serving agendas that throughout the fighting undermined pan-Arab support for Palestinians. Although all neighbouring Arab states agreed to send troops into Palestine once Britain had withdrawn, their armies were small, ill-trained and ill-equipped, and unable to coordinate military strategies. The total number of Arab troops committed to the war was approximately 25,000, whereas the Israeli Defence Forces (official successor to Haganah) raised 35,000 troops. So disorganized were Arab forces that each country’s army fought separately, thus allowing Israel to concentrate its forces where they were most effective. As historian Avi Shlaim concludes:

  the picture that emerges is not the familiar one of Israel standing alone against the combined might of the entire Arab world but rather one of a remarkable convergence between the interests of Israel and those of Transjordan against the other members of the Arab coalition, and especially against the Palestinians.

  Abdullah was assassinated in East Jerusalem in July 1951. Indeed, the leaders of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq were all swept away in the decade that followed the war for Palestine. Removing the corrupt and self-serving elites so closely tied to the colonial era and its social and political inequities was seen as a step in avenging the ‘catastrophe’ of 1948. The most far-reaching of these regime changes was the military coup that in 1952 overthrew the Egyptian monarchy and brought to power Colonel Gamal Abd al-Nasser, a soldier who had personally suffered the humiliation of defeat in the Palestine war.

  Atzmaut: Israeli independence

  On 14 May 1948, David Ben Gurion declared Israel’s independence as a ‘Jewish state established by and for the Jewish people’. With both the Soviet Union and the United States quickly recognizing Israel, the new state nonetheless had to fight hard for its survival against the Arab forces which immediately attacked it. Born in a hostile regional situation, the Israeli state confronted daunting challenges, especially with regard to demography and security.

  When the regional war came to an end in mid 1949, the state of Israel had a population of 800,000, of whom 160,000 (or about 20 per cent) were Palestinian Arabs who remained in, or close to, their homes. Although they were given Israeli citizenship, they were also regarded as a fifth column and placed under military government that dated back to Britain’s harsh mandatory emergency regulations. Even after the military administration came to an end in 1966, certain exclusionary practices towards the Arab population continued, prominent among them budgetary inequality and the discrimination involved in being prohibited from buying or leasing land.

  By the terms of the 1950 Law of Return, Israeli citizenship was guaranteed to Jews from around the world. By 1951, the population of Israel had almost doubled, to over 1.3 million. Approximately half of these new immigrants were European (Ashkenazi) Jews, and the other half Mizrahi (also known as Sephardic, or Oriental, Jews) arrived from Arab countries. The reasons behind the exodus of Jews from the Arab world were varied—some were attracted by Zionist ideals or encouraged by Israel to emigrate; others (particularly in Iraq) fled anti-Semitism and systematic persecution—but the result was the same: ancient Jewish communities in cities such as Baghdad all but disappeared. Although attempts have been made to link, as part of an overall ‘population exchange’, the property claims of the Mizrahi immigrants to those of the Palestinian refugees, some observers have questioned the fairness of politicizing the issue in this way. While Palestinian claims for compensation are against Israel, Jewish claims are not against Palestinians, but rather against other Arab countries, which were either not involved in the war for Palestine (Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya, for example) or were caught up in their own complex process of decolonization (for example, Algeria).

  The challenge of absorbing the surge of immigrants into the new state of Israel was twofold: on the one hand, the government needed to find them housing and jobs; on the other, it sought to imbue a common sense of citizenship. Certainly, Israel’s remarkable economic growth during the first decade or so smoothed the task of settling the new immigrants. The government was able to pursue highly ambitious and interventionist spending programmes thanks to the massive amount of money transferred to it in the form of donations from world Jewry, reparations for the Holocaust from the West German government, and some defence aid from countries such as France and the United States. The government’s control over the urban and agricultural property that had belonged to Palestinian Arab refugees also helped a great deal, as new Jewish immigrants, for example, moved into abandoned Arab homes.

  For a number of reasons, Mizrahi immigrants entered Israeli society as an underclass, alienated from the Ashkenazi elite who were overwhelmingly made up of the descendants of the second and third aliyot from Europe. Mizrahi Jews arrived with fewer resources, and large numbers of them were housed in the poorer urban quarters or sent to settle the new development towns along the borders. The striking gaps between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews, in such areas as government representation and average per capita income, persisted until the 1970s, when the political influence exercised by the Mizrahi community eventually brought about a dramatic upheaval in Israeli politics (as witnessed in the 1977 elections).

  Upon independence, the new state was determined to establish a democratic government (at least for Jews). Power was vested in the 120-seat parliament known as the Knesset. As elsewhere, the parliamentary system provided for strong party control over its members. Seats were distributed to any party that received 1 per cent (in 1992 raised to 1.5 per cent) of the votes. Given this electoral system, the parties that won the most seats typically fail
ed to secure an absolute majority and were thus forced to build coalition governments, a process of negotiation and compromise that often disproportionately empowered smaller parties. In the first decades, David Ben Gurion’s Mapai party took advantage of its strategic place near the centre of the political spectrum to form stable coalition governments with a combination of religious and leftist parties. As a result, Ben Gurion played an especially influential role in the early state-building process. For example, as a new Israeli Defence Force (IDF) was being moulded from the diversity of pre-state militias, the revisionist organization led by Menachem Begin, Irgun, continued to act independently of the new government. Determined to bring the organization to heel, Ben Gurion (who held the post of defence minister as well as prime minister) ordered the IDF to take action. In June 1948 it fired upon and sank a ship, the Altalena, carrying arms for the Irgun, several members of which were killed in the fighting.

  The hostile atmosphere in which it was born meant that the IDF absorbed a large proportion of the nation’s resources. Moreover, Israel’s reserve army was based on two years of military conscription for men and one for women (raised in 1975 to three and two years respectively). In his attitude towards the Arab world, Ben Gurion adopted a highly activist approach, sometimes called ‘Ben Gurionism’. Based on the belief that a constant show of Israel’s military superiority would eventually force the Arab world to accept Israel’s presence, this attitude ensured that no attack on Israel would go unpunished. Indeed, it was made clear that Israel would retaliate with disproportionate force. While the policy of severe retaliation may have served at some level as a deterrent, the policy also contributed to heightened enmity and a repeating cycle of violence in which both Arabs and Jews saw themselves as innocent victims acting against injustice.