The Zionist Israeli-Arab Palestinian Conflict. Contemporary and Historical Analysis
Historical Background
The creation of the independent state of Israel is directly related to the activities of the Zionist movement, whose sole and main national-political goal was the creation of a state for the Jewish people in the territory of Palestine. When organized Jewish emigration from Europe to Palestine began in 1882 for the creation of Israel under the auspices of the Zionist movement, about 3% of Jews lived in Palestine at that time.[1] Jewish migrants established their own agricultural settlements called kibbutzim, with a steady increase in the number of Jews in urban settlements.
The Ottoman authorities, who at that time had Palestine under their administrative control, hindered Jewish-Zionist colonization of Palestine, but in principle unsuccessfully due to British support for the Zionist policy of settling European Jews in Palestine. It is estimated that by the beginning of the Great War in 1914, only 85,000 Jews lived in Palestine.
In the Great War, Britain occupied Palestine in 1917, and since then, Ottoman rule has no longer existed in this part of the Middle East. At that time, the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour declared on 2 November 1917 (in writing) on behalf of the British government (the Balfour Declaration) that Great Britain would support the establishment of an independent Jewish state in Palestine. After the Great War and the peace treaties, Palestine, as a protectorate, was given to Great Britain in 1922 as a mandate area of the League of Nations. At the same time, the League ratified the Zionist Balfour Declaration and earmarked the western part of Palestine for the creation of an independent Jewish state, even though Palestinians at that time constituted the vast majority of the population. At the same time, Jewish settlers created in 1920 an illegal military organization, the Haganah, which was tasked with protecting their possessions in the Palestinian environment and supporting secret Jewish emigration to Palestine.
Jewish emigration to Palestine increased steadily, especially after 1933, when Hitler and his National Socialists (NSDAP) came to power in Germany and began persecuting Jews. However, in Palestine itself, armed conflicts occurred in 1929, 1933, and 1936–1939 between Jewish settlers and the local indigenous Palestinian (Muslim-Arab) population, who realized that the Jewish colonizers were increasingly taking away their land. On the eve of World War II, there were already 400,000 Jews in Palestine. During World War II, Palestinian Jews formed a brigade that fought in North Africa and Italy as part of the Allied forces.
After 1945, relations between Jewish settlers and Palestinian natives in Palestine became increasingly strained, leading to more and more open armed conflicts. Great Britain, due to its geopolitical interests in the Middle East, which supported Jewish immigrants, contributed to the escalation of the conflict. On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution terminating the British mandate in Palestine, which at that time had a population of 1,935,000, of whom only 608,000 were Jews. The same resolution divided Palestine into an Arab (11,000 sq. km) and a Jewish (14,000 sq. km) part, of which the Jews received the majority of the territory of Palestine, and were in a distinct minority, as new settlers, which both the Palestinians and the surrounding Arabs perceived as a gross seizure of their land, so they did not accept this division. After a Jewish terrorist attack on the British forces at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Great Britain announced the withdrawal of its forces from Palestine on May 15, 1948, and the Jewish Zionists declared the independent state of Israel in Tel Aviv the day before (May 14), with the state symbols of the Zionist movement from the late 19th century. Let us recall that the Zionist flag (i.e., the flag of Israel) symbolizes Greater Israel from the Euphrates River in the north to the Nile River in the south (two blue lines between the Star of David).
The Arab League states rightly did not recognize Israel, so on May 15, 1948, the (first) Israeli-Arab war began, in which the Arab League states suffered defeat primarily thanks to the wholehearted assistance to Israel from the USA, Great Britain, and the USSR, as well as some states in Europe (e.g., Tito’s Yugoslavia) that sent weapons to Israel or allowed those weapons to be transported to Israel through their air, water, and land space. In this war of 1948‒1949, Jewish Zionists occupied about 6700 sq. km. of the Arab part of Palestine and thus further expanded their part of Palestine, i.e., Israel, while about a million Arab inhabitants of Palestine were expelled or fled to neighboring Arab countries, so that the percentage of Jews in Palestine increased drastically. This led to a serious problem related to Palestinian refugees, which has not been solved to this day because the Zionist authorities in Israel do not allow their return, and moreover, Jewish immigrants, mainly from Eastern Europe and the USSR, are settling on the land of the expelled or refugee Arabs.
Zionist Israel was admitted to the UN on May 11, 1949. The immigration of Jews to Israel, i.e., Palestine, has continued at an accelerated pace since 1948, while at the same time the autochthonous Arabs, i.e., Palestinians, were forcibly evicted. Pursuing an aggressive policy towards the Palestinians, Israel, together with France and Great Britain, participated in the military aggression against Egypt in 1956, and in 1967, it carried out aggression against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. On that occasion, Israeli military forces occupied the east bank of the Suez Canal, the west bank of the Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. On November 22, 1967, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution on the conditions for establishing peace in the Middle East and on the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the occupied territories. However, Israel has not acted on that UN resolution to this day. In a new war against the Arab countries in 1973, Israel confirmed its military superiority in the region, of course, with comprehensive financial, military, and logistical support from the United States.
What Is the Conflict About?
Nevertheless, the Zionist Israeli-Arab Palestinian conflict today is one of, if not the most significant, global security problems to be dealt with.[2] However, this conflict is not as old as it is a pretty modern issue, dating, in fact, since the First Zionist Congress in 1897. The focal question is: What is conflict about? In other words, what are those two different groups fighting for?
At first glance, it can be understood that behind the conflict reasons is a confession as those two peoples are of different denominations: the Jews are predominantly Judaists, while the Palestinian predominant confession is Islam, but includes Christians and Druze. However, the obvious religious differences are not the fundamental cause of the struggle. In fact, the conflict started a century ago and continued, in fact, to be strife for the land.
Palestine, the land claimed by both sides, was known under this term in international relations (IR) from 1918 till 1948. Moreover, the same term was applied by Islam, Christianity, and Judaism to designate the Holy Land. However, as a consequence of the wars from 1948 to 1967 between the Arabs and Israel, this land (some 10,000 sq. miles) became today divided into three parts: 1) Israel; 2) the West Bank; and the Gaza Strip.
However, both groups have a different background in claiming this land for themself:
- The Zionist Jewish claims to Palestine are founded on the Biblical promise to Abraham and all his descendants. The historical foundations of such claims are based on the fact that on the territory of Palestine have been established the ancient kingdoms of the Jews: Israel and Judea. Politically, this historical claim is backed by the need of the Jews for the nation-state to get rid of European anti-Semitism, especially after the WWII holocaust.
- Arab Palestinians are claiming the same land based on their continuous living in Palestine for hundreds of years and on the fact that they were the demographic majority until 1948. In addition, they reject the confessional-ideological notion of the Zionist Jews that the Jewish kingdoms based on the Old Testament can constitute any rational and moral/scientific foundations to be used for an acceptable modern claim, especially taking into consideration that the Jews left Palestine after the occupation of the Roman Empire in the 1st century AD (for 2000 years!). However, the Arab Palestinians also use the arguments from the Bible and, therefore, claim that Abraham’s son Ishmael is the forefather of the Arabs and that God promised the Holy Land to all children of Abraham, which simply means to the Arabs too (Arabs are Semitic people like Jews). But the crucial issue from the Arab Palestinian viewpoint is that they cannot forget Palestine as a matter of compensation for the holocaust against the Jews committed in Europe (in which Arab Palestinians did not participate at all).
The Palestinians and Diaspora
The term Palestinians, from a very political-historical standpoint today, refers to those people of Palestine whose historical roots are traced to this land as defined by the British Mandate’s borders, being the Arabs of Christian, Muslim, or Druze denominations. It is estimated that recently some 5,6 million Palestinians lived within the British Mandate Palestine’s frontiers, which are now divided into three parts: 1) The State of Zionist Israel; 2) The territory of the West Bank; and 3) the Gaza Strip. The last two were occupied by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War. It is also claimed that today some 1,5 million Palestinians are living as citizens of Israel. Therefore, the Palestinians compose around 20% of the Israeli population. In addition, some 2,6 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, including 200,000 living in East Jerusalem and around 1,6 million living in the Gaza Strip (at least before the current Israeli genocide on the Gazans, which started in October 2023). However, there are around 5,6 million Palestinian people who are living in the diaspora, outside Palestine, mainly in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.
Among all Palestinian diaspora groups, the largest one (some 2,7 million) lives in Jordan (not taking into consideration the territory of the West Bank, which legally belonged to the Kingdom of Jordan but is occupied by Israel since 1967). Many of them still live in those refugee camps established in 1949, while others have become town dwellers. Some Palestinian refugees took refuge in Saudi Arabia or other Arab Gulf states, while others moved to other countries of the Middle East or the rest of the world. Among all Arab states, only Jordan granted citizenship to those Palestinians living there. That became, however, the formal reason for some Zionist Jews to claim that Jordan is, in fact, already a national state of the Palestinians and, therefore, there is no real need to establish an independent state of Palestine. On the other hand, nonetheless, many Palestinians claim that the USA is, basically, the national state of the Jews, and, subsequently, Israel in the Middle East does not need to exist (as the second national state of the Jews).
Nevertheless, the situation of the Palestinian refugees in southern Lebanon is particularly disastrous as many Lebanese are blaming them for the civil war that ruined the country in 1975−1991 and, therefore, demand that all Lebanese Palestinians be resettled somewhere else as a precondition to re-establish peace in the country. Especially the Lebanese Christians are very anxious to rid the country of the Muslim Palestinians, as they fear that the Palestinians are undermining the religious balance of Lebanon.
Israeli Palestinians
When Israel was proclaimed as an independent state in May 1948, there were only some 150,000 Arab Palestinians within its borders. On one hand, all of them were granted the citizenship of Israel, which means automatically and with the right to vote.[3] However, on the other hand, they de facto have been second-class citizens (i.e., the ethnic and confessional minority) for the very reason that Israel was officially defined as both a Jewish state and the state of the Jewish people.[4] The Arab Palestinians are not the Jews (even though both are Semites).[5] Most of those Israeli Palestinians were subjected to the military authority before the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, which restricted their free movement, followed by other civic rights like work, free speech, association, etc. The Palestinians were not allowed to be full members of the Israeli trade union federation (the Histadrut) until 1965. However, the focal problem was that the State of Israel confiscated around 40% of Palestinian land to be used for development projects.[6] However, from the majority of such states’ development projects, mostly Israeli Jews profited but not Israeli Arab Palestinians.
One of the basic claims by the Arab Palestinians in Israel is that all Israeli authorities are systematically discriminating against them by allocating very few resources for health care, education, public works, economic development, or resources for municipal governmental authorities to the Arab-populated land.
Another general claim is that Israeli Palestinians are also systematically discriminated against in their right to preserve and develop their cultural, national, and political identity. As a matter of fact, Israeli Palestinians have been up to 1967 totally isolated from the Arab world since 1967, as well as very much understood by other Arabs as traitors who left to live in the oppressive Zionist anti-Arab State of Israel. However, since the 1967 Six-Day War, the majority of Israeli Palestinians have become more self-confident in their Arab Palestinian national identity, especially during the last 20+ years, as Zionist Israeli authorities prohibited commemorating the Al Nakba, which is either the expulsion or flight of at least 500,000 Arab Palestinians in 1948−1949 during the first Arab-Israeli war.
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Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović is a former university professor in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Geostrategic Studies. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Notes
[1] Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, London‒New York: Verso, 2024.
[2] About the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, see in [Martin Bunton, The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Very Short Introduction, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013].
[3] Nevertheless, in some cases, the Israeli Central Elections Committee in practice used very politically coloured criteria to discriminate against those Arab Palestinians whose political views are understood to be unacceptable, especially at the time of the parliamentary elections.
[4] About the ideological-political background of the creation of Israel as a nation-state of the Jews, see in [Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State: The Historic Essay that Led to the Creation of the State of Israel, Skyhorse, 2019].
[5] Semitic peoples are supposed to descend from Shem, son of Biblical Noah. Particularly it is assumed for the Jews, Arabs, Ancient World’s Phoenicians, and Assyrians [Alan Isaacs, et al (eds.), A Dictionary of World History, Oxford−New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, 563]. There is a claim that, in fact, present-day Palestinians descended from the Phoenicians and that the term Palestinians is corrupted Phoenicians.
[6] Israeli Palestinians are commemorating on March 30th Land Day to protest the continuing confiscation of Arab territories by the Israeli government. The first protest on this day was in 1976 when the Israeli security forces killed six Palestinians. Since this incident, the Palestinians either in the diaspora or in Israel commemorate this day as a national day.
