In the year 1900 the State of Israel did not exist and nor, officially, did Palestine.
Instead, it was the Ottoman Empire which ruled over the place that, today, the seemingly
ever-in-conflict Israelis and Palestinians both call home.
So, the most pervasive myth about the Israeli-Palestinian
dispute is that it was caused by ancient clashes
between the primary religions of the two communities.
And that isn’t completely untrue.
The holiest site in Judaism and the third-most holy in Islam are right next to each other
in Jerusalem.
Which naturally causes tensions, but it didn’t cause problems like today’s during Ottoman
times.
Really, Israeli-Palestinian bad blood can only be traced back for about a century and
a half at most, and while religion does play an important role, especially as it encourages
hardliners on both sides to dig their heels in even further, it cannot be understated
that the conflict between Israel and Palestine has always been, first and foremost, a fight
between two nations over the same land.
So under Ottoman rule Palestine was an unofficial,
regional term which loosely covered the territories
of Israel and Palestine today, and then described parts of several different Ottoman provinces.
The city of Jerusalem, holy to Jews, Muslims, and Christians, was directly ruled by the
Sublime Porte, or the Ottoman central government.
According to Ottoman records from 1878, the then population of Palestine was about 87%
Muslim, 10% Christian, and 3% Jewish.
Followers of the three religions lived together in relative peace, though not prosperity (the
region was literally dirt-poor), they used Arabic as a lingua franca, and in Jerusalem
especially they would work together and sometimes even participated in each other's holidays
and festivities.
The Sublime Porte, through its millet system, was fairly tolerant of non-Muslims, and it
allowed for matters of “personal law” to be handled by local communities.
But by the turn of the 20th century the Ottoman Empire was on its last legs (actually it had
been for a while at that point), and the disaster that would finish it off was World War One.
During the war, the Ottomans had two main opponents in the middle-east; Britain and
France, and it was they who determined the fate of Ottoman Palestine.
Though they didn’t do it very well.
First Britain promised that the land would be a part of a wider Arab state, if the Arabs
rose up against the Ottomans, which they did.
Then in 1917, through the Balfour Declaration, the British promised to make Palestine into
a homeland for the Jewish people.
Though, they didn’t actually end up doing either of those things, as a year earlier
they’d secretly signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement with the French, and had agreed to split the
Ottoman middle-east between themselves.
Palestine, like about a quarter of the world has at some point, became a part of the British
Empire in 1920 as a League of Nations mandate under their protection (theoretically that
was only valid until Palestine could govern itself.
In reality, it was a colony).
But British presence heralded significant change to these demographics.
Jews had been moving to Palestine in small numbers even before Britain took it over (mostly
either due to a desire to live in their ancestral
homeland or more practically, to escape anti-semitism
in Europe), but after the ousting of the Ottomans, the British did keep their word, or at least
they somewhat kept to the spirit of the agreement, in regards to the Balfour Declaration, and
until 1936, Jewish migration to Mandatory Palestine was permitted en masse.
Notably, many Jews were motivated by a new political movement called Zionism.
Founded in 1897 by Austro-Hungarian Jew Theodor
Herzl, Zionism called for the creation of a “publicly and legally assured home”
for the Jews in Palestine, and to increase the Jewish population there so that, for the
first time in 2,000 years, Jews could have a country in which they’d be a majority.
Importantly, Zionists also wanted to further develop Jewish identity; to have it cease
to only be a religion and for it to more concretely
become a nationality or ethnicity.
That included reviving the Hebrew language.
By 1938 over 300,000 Jews, almost all of them from Europe, had moved to Mandatory Palestine
where they now made up some 30% of the population.
Though, they weren’t the only ones developing an ethnic identity.
Arabs in Palestine, in the face of British rule and increased Jewish immigration, were
beginning to see themselves not just as Arabs, but specifically as the Palestinian nation.
It didn’t help that Jews who would arrive in Palestine would often purchase land, with
Britain’s blessing, and then force Palestinians off of it.
So, in 1936 the Palestinians revolted against the British and their new Jewish neighbours,
and while they were crushed, they did get, at least a little, of what they wanted as
Britain started to limit new immigrants to Palestine.
That only served to annoy the Jews though, especially as around that time it was becoming
particularly dangerous to be a Jew in Europe, and a safe-haven was needed more than ever.
So, they revolted in the 1940s and were also put down, but Britain, having just survived
WW2, wasn’t really interested in dealing with the problem any more,so they kicked it
over to the recently-established United Nations.
The UN passed Resolution 181 in November of 1947.
It called for an end to the British Mandate and attempted to reconcile the competing forces
of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism by partitioning it into two states.
One, Israel, for the Jews, and the other for Palestinian Arabs.
Jerusalem would not be in either state and instead was to become a special international
zone.
For one group, Resolution 181 would bring about the birth of their nation.
For the other though, it would be the start of the Nakba, the catastrophe.
The Israelis were willing to accept the borders
proposed by the United Nations.
The Palestinians, on the other hand, as well as Israel’s neighbouring Arab states were
not.
As soon as the resolution was announced, Mandatory Palestine descended into a civil
war between Jews and Palestinians.
When the British left completely and Israel declared its independence on May 14th, 1948,
the civil war escalated as the Arab League, consisting of Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria,
Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and North Yemen, declared war to help the Palestinians literally the
very next day.
So, long story short, the Israelis won and when the war came to a conclusion in 1949
they occupied and then annexed about 60% of the land that originally was going to be a
Palestinian state, as well as the western part of Jerusalem.
Most of the rest, known as the West Bank, due to its position near the Jordan River,
which includes the east of Jerusalem, was annexed by Transjordan, while the Egyptian
military occupied the Gaza Strip.
Some 700,000 Palestinians were evicted from the newly acquired Israeli territory and became
refugees in the surrounding Arab countries.
At the same time, about the same number of Jews came to Israel from Europe over the next
three years, while 260,000 fled from Arab countries.
By the 1980s virtually all Arab Jews had moved to Israel.
Tensions would flare up again in the 1960s, 70’s and 80’s as Palestinian insurgents,
now organized into the Palestinian Liberation Organization, launched attacks against Israel,
sometimes operating out of its Arab neighbours.
There were also two short, but deadly, wars of note between Israel and the Arabs.
First, the 6-day war in 1967 which, depending on who you ask, either began when the Israelis
launched a defensive preemptive strike on Egypt, or alternatively when Israel attacked
an unprepared and significantly weaker enemy in an attempt to carry out a land grab.
Either way, Israel won again, and by the end of the war, they had taken the Golan Heights
from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, and Gaza, and the Sinai from Egypt.
Jordan then just sort of chilled out, though hundreds of thousands of Palestinians still
live there today.
Syria and Egypt on the other hand, both led by Arab-nationalists, launched their own war
in 1973, which lasted for a bit longer than the 6-day war, about two weeks, but still
ended in an Israeli victory.
And it was from then that there stopped being so much a wider Israeli-Arab conflict and
became more specifically an Israeli-Palestinian one.
Egypt became the first Arab country to make
peace with Israel following the American-mediated Camp David Accords in 1978.
They also got back the Sinai peninsula.
But the PLO continued to launch attacks on Israel, including against civilians, while
Israel began to settle its citizens in occupied
Palestinian territory, including in East Jerusalem,
something that is illegal under international law.
That led to the First Intifada or Palestinian uprising, in protest of the continuing occupation,
but it also saw a step towards peace.
In 1993 PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo
Accords in which each recognized the right to exist, if not the precise boundaries, of
the other.
In a mark of how controversial that was though, the accords and the Intifada caused a split
within the PLO, and the rise of Hamas, a terrorist organization which refuses to recognize Israel
at all, while Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli extremist in 1995.
However, the Oslo Accords failed pretty miserably to actually solve the land problem.
The last serious attempt at that was made in 2000 at another summit at Camp David.
There, Arafat and Israel’s Ehud Barak spoke for two weeks, and agreed on nothing.
Israel offered the Palestinians a state that would include the Gaza strip and most of the
West Bank.
Perhaps thinking he could get more, Arafat said no, but if that was his goal, it failed
spectacularly, and in the wake of the summit’s failure the 2nd Intifada saw the deaths of
some 4,000 people.
Since then, successive Israeli governments have become less interested in lasting peace,
and more in just managing the problem.
They left Gaza in 2005, soon after Arafat’s death, and now Palestinian governance is split
between the remnants of the PLO in the occupied West Bank, and Hamas which controls Gaza.
Israel has put up walls around the West Bank, which from their point of view are for self
defense, though controversially, they’ve included their settlements within them, which
Palestinians view as a blatant attempt at annexation.
With no one walking along a path to peace, and as both sides remain ready to use armed
force to make their point when necessary, no end to the conflict appears to be in sight.
If you enjoyed this video or if you learnt something from it don’t forget to subscribe
and hit the notification bell below so you don’t miss the next one.
If you’re interested in religious history, find out why the Pope still owns a bit of
Rome in the video to the left.
And as always, I’ve been James, and thank you for watching Look Back History.