Feb 13, 2024 6 min read

By Kent James

The first of three parts.

On Oct 7 last year, Hamas militants invaded Israel and killed more than 1,300 people, most of them civilians. While some argue that resisting by force is justified, purposefully killing civilians is terrorism. It was the latest chapter in a long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Both Jews and the Palestinians have historic claims to the land of Israel. Antisemitism, especially in Europe, inspired a Zionist movement that began at the end of the 19th century to find a place where Jews would be safe. In the 1890s, Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, advocated establishing a Jewish state in Palestine that would match “a people without a land with a land without a people.”

When the Ottoman Empire, which had controlled what is now Israel, sided with the Germans in World War I and lost, the League of Nations gave Great Britain a mandate to govern the areas relinquished by the Turks. In an effort to build support for the effort to fight World War I, and especially to appeal to Americans, the British promised to provide the Jews a safe haven in Palestine. Lord Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, told Baron Lionel Walter, a Jewish peer, “His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

But this declaration neglected to consider the Arabs already living there, who weren’t keen on European Jews taking over land they had occupied for centuries. Friction between the Arabs living in Palestine and the Jewish immigrants led to violence between them, as well as against the British.

The British created the Peel Commission in 1937 to resolve the disputes, and the commission found the differences to be irreconcilable, and suggested a two-state solution. Winston Churchill, in testimony before the Peel Commission, gave voice to his beliefs about the qualities of the people there, and the racism underlying the colonial project generally: “I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time.”

Because of Arab protests, the British limited Jewish migration to Palestine in the 1930s, which shut off a potential escape route for Jews trying to flee Adolf Hitler’s genocide. This inspired a terrorist campaign by the Jews against the British, including the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed 90 people.

Weakened by World War II, the British gave up the Mandate for Palestine as part of their effort to downsize their colonial empire. The newly created United Nations approved Resolution 181 on Nov. 29, 1947, which stated that “independent Arab and Jewish states…shall come into existence in Palestine…not later than October 1948.”

At the time, Palestine was two-thirds Arab and Arabs held 80% of the land, and they objected to the UN proposal that gave Jews half the land. On May 14, 1948, the British mandate ended and David Ben-Gurion, who became Israel’s first prime minister, declared the independence of the state of Israel.

The new state came under immediate attack from the Palestinian population and Arabs of the surrounding countries, including Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. The newly created Israeli Defense Force (IDF) was able to defeat the Arab forces, which led to the Nakba (“Catastrophe”), when 700,000 Arabs were forced out of Israel. These displaced Palestinians and their descendants have been looking to return ever since. All the Arab nations accepting the refugees denied them the right to settle permanently, with the exception of Jordan.

In 1967, after its Arab neighbors made clear their intention to attack Israel, and blockaded Israel’s only port on the Red Sea, which created a casus belli for Israel, Israel pre-emptively attacked, and catching Egypt, Syria and Jordan by surprise, crushed their armies and expanded Israeli territory to include the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. The UN approved Resolution 242, which called for an exchange of these captured lands for peace. The Arab League refused to recognize, negotiate or live in peace with Israel.

Arab states surprised Israel when they attacked on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur in October 1973. After initially making gains, Israelis defeated the Arab states, this time with the support of the United States. In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter helped Egypt and Israel reach a historic peace agreement, which began the process of Arab nations accepting the presence of Israel. In 1981, the Egyptian president who made the deal, Anwar Sadat, was assassinated by Islamic radicals upset by his efforts.

In the decades since, there have been gradual steps towards peace, with the process often undermined by people on both sides who do not want to accommodate their enemies. In 1995, Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, was assassinated by a young Jewish radical who did not support Rabin’s efforts toward peace with the Palestinians.

The main issues between Israelis and Palestinians have been the right to a Jewish state in Palestine, the status of Jerusalem, with many sites holy to each side, the right for Palestinian refugees to return, and the status of Jewish settlements on occupied territory.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) ultimately agreed that Israel had a right to exist, but that lost them support of more radical Palestinians, who turned to Hamas, which seeks the destruction of Israel.

One reason Hamas gained power was they saw the promised two-state solution that got the PLO to recognize Israel as slipping away. On the Israeli side, the construction of Jewish settlements on land that was theoretically to be returned to the Palestinians has been a policy of right-wing Israeli governments, which makes the Palestinians believe that the Israelis have no intention of ever returning that land.

The Hamas attack in October was primarily an attempt to disrupt the gradual consolidation of the Israeli state, with the normalization of relations with neighboring Arab countries, and continued settlement construction in the West Bank.

Kent James is a member of East Washington Borough Council.