Palestine - The twice-promised land

I think you could do with a potted history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Yes there was a Jewish state - two in fact - in biblical times. But most of the Jews were dispersed all over the place by the Romans after some serious revolts against Roman rule. The Romans in Palestine were ultimately succeeded by the Byzantines, then the Arabs. Christian crusaders occupied parts of the area for a few centuries at the time of the crusades, but were eventually driven out. The Arabs were in turn driven out by the Ottoman Turks who ruled Palestine until the British kicked them out in 1917-18. 

Until the late 19th century, there had been for many centuries very few Jews living in the area, mostly just a tiny minority or orthodox ultra religious Jews. The vast majority of the inhabitants were Muslim Arabs. Most Jews were scattered all over the world, experiencing in varying degrees discrimination and persecution. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries this persecution tended to be at its worst in the Tsarist empire, taking the form of murderous pogroms. In this climate, and in the age of nationalism, Theodor Herzl formulated the ideology of Zionism, that the Jews should return to their ancient homeland of Palestine. This idea had some appeal to those suffering persecution and, aided by funds supplied by wealthier Jews in western nations, a steady trickle of mostly persecuted Jews began arriving in Palestine, buying up land fair and square from local Arabs.. Their numbers though were never great enough to trouble the Ottoman empire unduly.

World War 1 wrought many changes, and the roots of the modern conflict lay in decisions made by the British out of expediency in their desire to win the war. They encouraged the Arabs to revolt against the Turks under the effective leadership of a charismatic British officer, the legendary Lawrence of Arabia. The Arabs were led to believe that they would be given control of the entire Arab area including Palestine, though in fact the British and French in the Sykes-Picot agreement planned to divide most of it up between themselves. But also in order to win the support of wealthy and politically influential Jews in the United States, Britain made the Balfour declaration promising the Jews a national home in Palestine.

Thus both Arabs and Jews thought they'd been promised Palestine, though in fact it was the British themselves who took over. The vast majority of the local inhabitants were Muslim Arabs but a steady stream of Jews influenced by Zionism were coming in, often fleeing persecution, and buying land from the Arabs to form settlements of their own. Whilst some Arabs with land were happy to sell it to the Jews, many Muslim Arabs who lacked the land to profit from such transactions and thought Palestine ought to be theirs by right, grew increasingly hostile as Jewish migration into Palestine increased. There were riots and much intercommunal violence between Arab and Jew, the root cause generally being Arab hostility to Jewish migration into what they saw as their land. The Jews though could rightly claim that they had been promised a national home there by us, and those of a religious bent were inclined to view the area as the promised land gifted to them by God. 

Clearly Arabs and Jews in the area were already on a collision course. The British tried to restrict Jewish emigration into the area to dampen down Arab unrest, just at the time when the early stages of what would be the most terrible persecution and murder were taking off in Nazi Germany.

World War 2 changed everything again. The Holocaust took place. Millions of innocent Jews were ruthlessly murdered in a deliberate attempt to wipe them all out. The clamour amongst survivors to get to Palestine became intense. Most of them no longer had any other home to return to, the communities they knew mostly having been destroyed. And the horror of the holocaust filled humanity with an intense sympathy for the Jews and their suffering, and their desire for a home of their own. The USA for one thing came down fully in support of the need for the Jews to have their own state where they could be safe. In the aftermath of the holocaust, public support for the Jews was immense, sympathy for the Arabs pushed aside. Britain initially still tried to stop mass Jewish migration into Palestine, but we were swimming against the tide and could no longer really afford the obligation. That Jewish extremists had also initiated a campaign of terrorism against the British didnt really help either. So we cut our losses and handed the territory over to the UN to resolve. As we left, the Jewish leaders declared the existence of the new state of Israel, with borders originally defined by UN-mandated partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas. Arab hostility to the Jews had already resulted in much fighting between Jew and Arab inside Palestine.

When Israel came into existence and was recognised by the USA within minutes, the surrounding Arab Nations of Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Iraq, and Egypt, immediately attacked it. Israel was fighting a desperate war for survival, aided by whatever arms they could obtain from abroad. There were many instances of Arabs being forcibly expelled from their villages because they were deemed to pose a strategic threat, and some notorious massacres committed by Israeli extremists like the Stern Gang, most notably the Deir Yassin massacre. These expulsions and massacres led to many Arabs fleeing in fear, and in the belief that Israel would soon be destroyed and they could return. This never happened of course and Israel never allowed them back in. Instead they and their descendants for many decades thereafter lived in so called refugee camps, nursing a sense of grievance which was to fuel terrorism in future years. As for the Arab invaders, the Jordanians succeeded in gaining control of what would later be known as the west bank, populated mostly by Arabs, and annexed it to their country. The Egyptians gained and took control of the Gaza strip. But that was about all. Elsewhere the Israelis expanded their state..

Israel has been subject to terrorist attacks from groups of disaffected Arabs, especially Palestinian ones, ever since. It was also threatened by its Arab neighbours, fighting them in 1956, 1967 and 1973. The first two of these were pre-emptive attacks, but the third - the Yom Kippur War of 1973 - was a surprise attack upon Israel itself by the Syrians and Egyptians. The 1967 War itself laid the groundwork for later difficulties. Because it resulted above all in the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, whose people have felt oppressed and occupied ever since. 

Israel since then appears to have lurched rightwards politically which has coloured some of their actions and responses. Yet in return for giving Sinai back to the Egyptians, they proved able to form a lasting peace with Egypt. In the west bank however there have been constant Israeli settler land thefts of ever more territory, illegal under international law but defended by the Israeli armed forces. The last Jewish leader to actively seek peace on the basis of a two state solution and cessation of all new settlement construction in the Arab lands was assassinated by extremists on his own side.

Since then we have had the vicious feedback loop of constant Israeli intransigence and land thefts fuelling Arab terrorism, and Arab terrorism fuelling Israeli intransigence and diminishing ever further any desire to stop the settler land thefts. The main achievement of the latest Hamas terrorist attacks and Israeli responses to them appears to be the reinforcement of intransigence, hostility and hatred on both sides for each other.

This probably means peace is unlikely anytime soon, unless outside powers were to pressure them into it. But the only ones capable of applying the necessary pressure on organisations like Hamas are the Iranians, whilst only the USA has enough clout to apply the necessary pressure on Israel. So the first prerequisite of peace in Gaza is probably some sort of meaningful dialogue between Iran and the USA.