After nearly 100 years, the Zionist movement had come full circle in 1948, declaring Israel
an independent state.
However, this was amidst chaos and claimed upon land that already had people living there.
How do we get from this period to today?
That’s our subject for today.
Hi, I’m Tristan Johnson, and this is Step Back History.
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So we left off the story last week when the British ended their period of control over
Palestine, and Israel declared its independence.
The British pulling out resulted in the first full-scale war in what would be several.
Today we call this the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria all invaded into the area of the British mandate.
They reason that they recognised no government in the area, and with the British pulling
out they would move in to establish a state in Palestine with a right to self-determination.
In response, those Jewish paramilitary groups began to conduct raids on Arab communities,
forcing them out of the area and creating a massive diaspora.
The war’s result was a decisive Israeli victory, with Israel annexing territory, even
more than that laid out in the UN decision.
The small remains of Palestinian land were two regions, the Gaza Strip, and the West
Bank.
The two have not been reunited to this day.
These regions came under the control of Egypt and Jordan, as well as Jordan annexing the
eastern part of Jerusalem, the Arab majority part of the city.
This short but bloody war created over 700,000 Palestinian refugees.
They either ran away from the conflict or were forced out by Israeli forces.
Today these people are called the Palestinian refugees.
People without a home.
The Israelis who took their homes refused to let them return after the war, and no other
states, except for Jordan, would give them citizenship.
The Arab countries didn’t want to make any movements that might be perceived as recognition
of Israel.
The Israeli government eventually was pressured into allowing 100,000 of them to return home
to reunite families, but most of these displaced peoples live in refugee camps to this day.
The Arab states want to send them home, and the Israelis want to resettle them in the
to this day ever-shrinking Palestinian territories.
In response to the war, about 800,000 Jews either left or were kicked out of various
countries in the middle-east and North Africa, with most moving to Israel.
Arabs who remained in Israel were allowed citizenship, but for the next several decades
were under martial law.
They eventually restored legal equality, but openly practice forms of racial profiling
that keeps Palestinian Arabs, regardless of religion, and non-white Jews as second-class
citizens.
After the war, violence was an ongoing way of life in this region.
Palestinian groups, as well as militaries of other Arab nations, attacked Israeli civilians,
Israeli army and paramilitaries reciprocated in kind to Palestinian communities.
One key event that would lead to another was in 1955 where Israel pushed a raid on an Egyptian
outpost in the Gaza Strip.
They killed 37 Egyptian soldiers, and from then on Egypt began to support Palestinian
commandos or terrorists, or irregulars, or whatever you wanna call them in Israel.
Organizations like the Palestine Liberation Organization or PLO were founded in this period.
This continued until 1967 when Israel launched a preemptive strike against the Egyptian militarisation
of the Sinai peninsula here.
This would come to be called the Six-Day War.
In this very short conflict, the Israeli army invaded and conquered the Gaza Strip, the
West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
By the way folks, this is why the Idea of Jerusalem being the Israeli capital is so
controversial.
After the war, the Arab leaders met up and agreed on a hard line.
There would be no recognition of Israel, no peace while they occupied Palestinian lands
and no negotiations with the Israeli government.
They called this the three nos.
Palestinians now had to struggle for independence and self-determination under Israeli occupation,
and help from their neighbours would be much harder to come by.
They had to rely on only themselves for their freedom.
This is when the PLO elected their new leader Yasser Arafat and began a campaign of guerilla
war against Israel.
Oh, and at this time Jordan had become a chaotic place.
Because of the displacement of the Palestinian people, something like 70% of the population
of Jordan was Palestinian.
The PLO was exiled to Jordan after a failed attempt to take back the West Bank, and they
became agitators against King Hussein.
They were eventually defeated and pushed out along with a lot of Palestinian refugees without
a home and forced to settle in Lebanon.
From Lebanon, the PLO then began to enter into the realm of insurgent attacks on Israel,
and aeroplane hijacking.
This peaked with horrible incidents like the Munich Massacre, where members of a Palestinian
terrorist group called Black September captured eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team
in West Germany in 1972.
A failed rescue led to the death of all 11 athletes.
Israel responded with an assassination spree on PLO leaders in southern Lebanon.
In 1973, Syria and Egypt attempted a surprise assault on Israel known the Yom Kippur War.
Despite an auspicious first few days, the Israelis won another decisive victory.
This pretty much ended the attempts from other Arab states to do something about the Palestinians
living under occupation in Israel.
By the Mid-70s, a right-wing, ultra-nationalist Jewish group called Gush Emunim began to build
settlements in the Palestinian territory under Israeli occupation.
Israel initially tried to dismantle Jerusalem, but over time decided to look the other way.
These settlements began to grow and to this day are now a sign of slowly erasing Palestine
off the map.
In 1978, a group of 12 PLO guerillas hijacked an Israeli bus killing 37.
The response from the Israeli Defence Force, or IDF, was to invade Lebanon to conquer the
lower portion and put an end to the PLO’s stage of operations.
They succeeded, pushing the PLO further into Lebanon, but as soon as the IDF began to withdraw,
the fighting continued.
In 1981 Israel was coaxed into a ceasefire by the US.
This ceasefire would only last about a year, however.
There was an assassination attempt on the Israeli ambassador to the UK by an ostracised
splinter group of the PLO.
Israel responded by invading Lebanon once again in 1982.
During the war, allied groups of the IDF carried out massacres on the Palestinians in southern
Lebanon, killing as many as 3 and a half thousand unarmed Palestinian civilians.
The IDF assisted in this by blockading the Palestinian communities, with tanks.
Something we would call a war crime, except we don’t because….
Anyway, it caused a bit of a controversy in the Israeli military as it turned out that
awareness of this massacre was rather widespread, even known by the defence minister Ariel Sharon.
No one took any moved to stop it, and Sharon resigned as defence minister over it.
Don’t worry though, this didn’t prevent him from becoming Israel’s prime minister
in the early 2000s.
The war resulted in a small force of Israeli troops occupying southern Lebanon as a security
buffer zone.
The PLO’s leadership was exiled to Tunis, and after the hijacking of a cruise ship,
the IDF actually bombed them there as well.
The cycle is pretty familiar to this day.
Palestinian resistance fighters commit acts of terrorism and guerrilla warfare.
Israel responds with a giant invasion, a few war crimes, then backs off when international
finger-wagging gets a bit much for them.
Repeat until…
well, I’ll let you know if this cycle ever stops.
During this whole process, Israel also secretly began to revoke the citizenship of any Palestinian
who committed crimes such as studying abroad.
This program has resulted in about a quarter of a million people having no citizenship,
and the program seems to continue to today.
Now we get to intifadas, a term for uprisings.
The first intifada happened in 1987.
The rebellion occurred on its own, but the PLO quickly jumped into a leadership role.
The Israeli army attempted to suppress this uprising meeting thrown rocks with bullets
and bombs.
During this first intifada, we saw the founding of a new Palestinian organisation called Hamas,
that to this day is the de facto government of the Gaza strip.
Since the first intifada, they have been fighting what they call armed resistance against the
Israelis, but what most would probably call terrorist attacks against civilians.
The PLO declared Palestinian independence from their new new headquarters in Algeria.
This has been recognised the world…
somewhat.
They are still under occupation by Israel.
Hence why you might have heard it referred to as Israel and the occupied territories,
but they have in 2012 gotten non-voting observer status in the UN if that means anything.
The US got involved in 1991 and led along with the USSR a conference in Madrid to end
the intifada.
During the Gulf War, Arafat took Saddam Hussein’s side, which caused him to burn bridges with
a lot of the PLO’s Oil producing allies as well as Egypt that supported the US invasion.
Many of these states cut off their funding for the PLO.
A couple years later in secret, the PLO and Israel sent negotiators to Norway.
Arafat sent the Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin a letter saying that the PLO recognised
Israel’s right to exist, and renounce terrorist acts.
This massive breakthrough in negotiations led to a seven-year-long process known as
the Oslo peace process.
Both sides attempted to find a two state solution.
It was well-intentioned but ultimately unsuccessful.
It did result in the creation of the Palestinian Authority.
It’s an organisation that acts as an official government for Gaza and the West Bank and
allowed for Israel to hand over some autonomy to Palestine.
This allowed for a formal organisation to build government institutions for the region.
Where things broke down was when evidence surfaced that this Palestinian Authority was
funding terrorist activities.
Palestinians argued that this happened because Israel was not giving Palestine enough independence
to win over the ordinary people in the region.
Israelis began to lose faith in the Oslo process.
In 1994, a man named Baruch Goldstein, a part of a Jewish ultranationalist party in Israel
carried out a mass shooting of Palestinians in Hebron.
Hamas responded with suicide bombings throughout Israel.
This was the first time Hamas used suicide bombers as a method of asynchronous warfare.
After this, it would become a grim regular tactic.
By the time Rabin and Arafat made an agreement that let the PLO move back to the occupied
territories, the chaos was already out of hand.
The deal they made was rejected by Hamas, and a radical Jewish nationalist assassinated
Rabin in 1995.
His successor Shimon Peres tried to keep the peace process moving, but they lost the election
the next year to a right-wing nationalist party called the Likud party led by Benjamin
Netanyahu.
They rejected the peace process and advocated a much more stern approach to negotiations.
Violence by and against Hamas began to escalate.
In response, Netanyahu authorised remilitarisation in the region of Hebron.
Israeli agents tried to use deadly poison to assassinate Hamas’s leader in Jordan,
but it failed, and the agents sent to do it were captured.
A last-minute concession of some poison antidote and the release of Palestinian prisoners led
to a ceasefire.
Israel then got a new leader Ehud Barak, and they even pulled their troops out of southern
Lebanon they had been occupying since the early 80s.
However, this shut down when Arafat rejected a joint Israeli-US offer to the Gaza Strip,
73% of the West Bank, that would increase, and a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem.
This breakdown led to a second uprising in 2000 called the Second Intifada.
The increase in violence continuing until today.
To the Israelis, it’s another terrorist campaign.
To the Palestinians, it is a revolution against occupying forces.
In 2001, Israel got a new leader Ariel Sharon.
Remember that entirely not war criminal from earlier?
He decided to break off the Oslo peace process formally.
He rejected a peace plan proposed by the Arab league.
He also implemented the very Orwellian Operation Defensive Shield, a violent invasion of the
West Bank.
He built a massive wall called the West Bank barrier, or Apartheid wall by its detractors.
Oh, and the wall was definitely built on top of Palestinian territory and displaced anyone
living there.
He did, however, begin a new negotiation with an international team of white countries to
work out a new peace process with the Palestinian Authority.
Eventually, Israel agreed to pull out of Gaza, but kept control of the coast and air, and
even ejected some settlers from Gaza and the West Bank.
In 2004, Yasser Arafat died.
The new president of the Palestinian authority was Arafat's political rival, Mahmoud Abbas.
In the years following his death, it turned out that aid to help the Palestinian cause
was being squirrelled away by Arafat, and a giant pile of money from other countries
was uncovered.
This led to widespread support of the Palestinian authority to wane, and an increase in trust
in Hamas.
The Palestinian government elected Hamas into power, leading to a massive cut in support
to the region.
An internal conflict led to Hamas becoming the de facto government of Gaza.
And we more or less get to where we are today.
Hamas is growing in prominence, and Israel assists them by reacting to small attacks
with overwhelming force, killing massive amounts of civilians.
They’ve reportedly fired on red crescent workers trying to help Palestinians, and used
horrific weapons like white phosphorus on civilian areas.
Palestine continues to struggle for independence, and the international community is quickly
closing in on Israel.
Their list of allies is getting smaller, but with the backing of the US, they might not
need the world.
Where does this struggle go from here?
How do you repair generations of conflict?
What set of endless proposals for borders do you use?
Will it even matter as every day new settlements go up in the west bank, and more Palestinians
leave looking for a more peaceful place to live?
I don’t know the answer, and I bet no one does.
If you do though, I imagine there’s a Nobel Peace Prize in it for you.
Sometimes in streams, I get asked about why I am a pacifist.
I give this answer a lot, and I think the conflict in Palestine and Israel cements it
for me.
When you raise a gun in a revolution, even for the best of purposes, you sew the seeds
of your movement’s own destruction.
For every death, another family is shattered and broken, and will now have a personal vendetta
against your campaign.
They dehumanise you and your people and your cause just a little bit more, and it only
grows over time.
The only way to end such a cycle is a long process of forgiveness, reconciliation, and
healing that could take generations.
But it seems I’m alone in seeing that as a solution.
So if you enjoy this channel and want to hear me talk about inane things all day.
You should check out my twitter.
It’s @TristanPEJ and its a blast.
I hope.
I’d like to thank all these excellent patrons who support Step Back on Patreon.
This video was a stretch goal on there, and the next one is on Iran, so if you wanna see
that video go to patreon.com/stepbackhistory The theme song is by 12tone and come back
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