Two peoples; one patch of land
The birth of Israel
I once had in my class both a boy called Mohammed and a boy called Jesus (and, would you believe, a boy called Christian). The three of them, in different ways, were very sweet boys with very supportive parents. But, I’m from Liverpool, and with our sense of humour, I wasn’t going to let this coincidence slip by without having some fun with it, and we did. There was no harm in it, I didn’t push it any further than isn’t this crazy. I tell this story to show that we can get on without trying too hard. And, of course I tell it because I’m going to spend a few weeks looking at the Israeli-Palestinian issue, the Jewish-Hamas issue – if I can put it that way.
Now, I have held back my little series explaining the BRICS Bloc because this is such a big issue, a regional issue and a world issue because it has always been an issue with the potential to escalate. In the past it became a Cold War issue, and today, with Iran backing both Hamas and Hezbollah, and with Iran’s ties to both the Russian Federation and China as they pivot against America and the West generally, there is still the nightmare scenario that major powers might get dragged in. As it stands, for both Israelis and Palestinians it is an issue that has to be sorted out. There has been too much life lost. And I have to say as a teacher of history, I am painfully aware of the need for those of us living in more settled parts of the world, to appreciate that throughout the Middle East, history is alive and influences the present on a day-to-day basis. The past is very much a part of the present, and today’s pain is a consequence of that past.
So, let’s try and look at this issue from both and Israeli and a Palestinian-Arab perspective. Back in the seventh century Arabs had created an empire that at its height stretched from the Pyrenees separating Spain and France, along the North African coast, through the Middle East and their heartland, the Gulf, and into central Asia. Those of us only brought up on the great European empires that lasted from the late-sixteenth century well into the twentieth century, and maybe the Roman Empire, might not realise that there were any number of other great empires overseen by other civilizations.
Indeed, it was the collapse of another great empire, the Ottoman Empire, after WW1 where anything close to a proper explanation of the current crisis in the Middle East should begin. Because the collapse of the Ottoman Empire didn’t lead to Arab independence but to yet more British and French colonialism which thwarted not only Arab independence but Arab unity. After WW2, largely as a consequence of the collaboration of Vichy France with Nazi Germany, French influence reduced considerably, though not altogether. British influence increased, however, and so, too, did Russian influence. Americans were not yet the bad guys, but it wouldn’t take long!
Now, in 1917 Britain walked into a problem of mega proportions, and it did so with its eyes wide open. For, whilst it wanted to be on good terms with the Arabs (because it wanted to maximise its profits from their oil as well as keep its valuable military and naval bases on their territory), it’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, issued a declaration that would forever bear his name: the Balfour Declaration. And what it declared was Britain’s support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and at the same time. “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.” So that, when after WW1, Britain took up the League of Nation’s mandate to administer the affairs of Palestine and Jordan in 1920, it would find itself slap bang in the middle of an issue that is still dominating the world’s attention today: how to reconcile two peoples, Palestinians and Jews, with very different cultures and very different religions, on the same patch of land. And if that wasn’t already going to be difficult enough, this is also very much holy land for those two communities, Muslims and Jews, and for Christians too, with Jerusalem the holy city at the heart of it.
For Jews, and this is before the Holocaust, Palestine seemed to be the best solution to their craving for a homeland (a movement we refer to as Zionism). They encaptured their feelings in the phrase: ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’, though in doing so they betrayed their disregard for the Palestinians living in that ‘land without a people’.
Jump to 1937 and Britain tried what came to be called the ‘two state’ solution, partitioning the land between the Palestinians and the Jews with Britain maintaining control of the holy sites in Jerusalem and Bethlehem as well as some access to the sea. It proved unworkable then, as it still does today (even if for many it still seems to be the only solution that can work). So, instead, in 1939, with the need for cooperation from the Arab states and their oil in the fight against Hitler playing a large part in the decision, Britain stopped further Jewish migration to the region (the Jewish population at that point had risen from 10% of the total population to 30% under British control). This at the same time as Nazi persecution of German Jews was reaching new heights: they had had their German citizenship removed (and so their rights) in the Nuremburg Laws of 1935, Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, in which Jewish synagogues, businesses and homes were attacked took place in 1938, Jewish children had been banned from schools and Jewish children were not allowed to play with non-Jewish children, while Jews could legally be evicted from their homes. All things Britain was aware of (and I have to say, much of which the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians today).
After the war, and so, after the Holocaust – the mass murder of around six million Jews by the Nazis – America picked up the cause of a Jewish home in Palestine and pressured the British to allow Jews to migrate once more to Palestine: 100,000 was the target number, the number of Jews it was thought had survived the Holocaust and that were currently sitting in refugee camps. Meanwhile, the British in Palestine were subjected to terrorist attacks by Jewish paramilitary groups (do we call them terrorists?) such as the Irgun under Menachem Begin and the Lehi under Yitzhak Shamir, who were beyond the control of the official Jewish authority, the Jewish Agency in Palestine (and I should point out that both leaders would be future Israeli prime ministers – we will come across Begin again). For example, in 1946 the hotel where Britain had its administrative headquarters was blown up in Jerusalem with 91 people indiscriminately killed, and the following year, in retaliation for the execution of some of their men, two British soldiers were hanged and their bodies boobytrapped, both atrocities the responsibility of the Irgun (sounds familiar?). Britain again proposed a ‘two-state’ solution but at this point the Americans rejected the idea and the Jews refused to negotiate with the Palestinians. Even the legitimate Jewish authorities were resorting to sabotage.
Now, there is something very important to say about the violent acts, undertaken by Jews against the British, acts of terrorists we would say today. And its not to make a cheap dig at Jews and accuse them of being terrorists. Its much more important – it is that when people don’t have legitimate power there only resort, well nearly always “only” resort (I’m reminded of Ghandhi’s commitment to passive resistance), is to resort to acts of violence, acts of terrorism. It is there only way of making people listen. And we should think about that when we consider the state of play today in the land of two people’s – one of them were driven off their land 75 years ago, and not only has the world not been able to resolve the problem, it has rarely been a priority.
The UN proposed a variant on the ‘two state’ solution, a kind of federated economic union with Arab and Jewish segments and with Jerusalem under international control. This time, both America and the Jews accepted the idea, indeed the Jews had lobbied for it, and the Soviet Union accepted it too, only for the Arabs to reject it and for fighting to break out. And this was the state of play when Britain, clearly unable to control the situation on the ground, relinquished its mandate in 1948, having already declared their intent the previous year, and handed the problem to the United Nations.
Troops from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq fought to prevent a Jewish state being formed, but they didn’t co-ordinate their forces and, in fact, Jordan, which had the most modern army, had already done a deal with the Jews – a Jewish state in return for land for Jordan on the west bank of the river Jordan. In truth, the Arab states were driven to act as much by pressure from their people as anything else – much the same situation as exists today, much the same as has always been the case. Whereas the Jews were united and very well organised, and received arms from Czechoslovakia with Stalin’s blessing and fighter planes from France. The British and the Americans had tried to enforce an arms embargo for both sides.
The Jews also fought with a commitment the Arab forces were not close to matching. But at Deir Yassin, one of the Jewish paramilitary groups massacred between 100 and 250 Palestinians: men, women and children. And more than 150 Palestinian civilians were massacred in the town of Lydda (today’s Lodd) after an Israeli soldier made a hole in the wall of a mosque where they were sheltering and shot an anti-tank shell through it. The victims were blown onto the wall of the mosque by the blast and crushed against it. Ari Shavit, an Israeli journalist, in his book, ‘My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel’, writes “Lydda is our black box. In it lies the dark secret of Zionism.” Such atrocities led to a flood of Palestinians fleeing their homes, over half a million by the end of the year. the Arabs call it “the Nakba,” the catastrophe. And here we have something close to a direct comparison with the absolutely appalling slaughter of Jews by Hamas. We must understand – history is not an academic exercise in this part of the world; it is living and it drags people down as well as lifting them up.
So, it was in this circumstance that the state of Israel was proclaimed in May, 1948 by David Ben-Gurion who would become its first prime minister. The borders of the new state would include the territory Israel had gained in the fighting and separate armistice agreements, made in the first half of 1949, were made with Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon (Iraq, as it didn’t border Israel, was now unable to do anything). America immediately recognised the state, within minutes, in fact, and the Soviet Union quickly followed. They saw it as a way of weakening Britain’s status in the wider region. But the Arab states refused to make peace with the new state, nor even to recognise it. Instead, Egypt closed the Suez Canal to Israeli shipping and to goods going to or from the country, no matter who’s ships were carrying them. As for what had become somewhere around 750,000 refugees (85% of the Palestinian-Arab population) by the time it was all over, the Israelis refused to either allow them back or to compensate them. And those who remained in Israel as citizens were discriminated against, deprived of many basic civil rights. Much of their land was expropriated and they were deliberately kept poor.
So it was that the Israeli state came into existence. The result of the long, long history of discrimination against Jews of which the Holocaust was the deadliest, the most horrific, but by no means the only example (the Jews had suffered centuries of atrocities all over Europe from Britain in the West to Russia in the East; and so, too, the sympathy, or guilt, of Europeans and Americans, and, too, the tenacity of Jews.
Israel was immediately made aware that it lived in a hostile world, at least as far as its neighbours were concerned, but that it could rely on American support. And so, the West was forever linked with this unwanted intrusion into the Arab world, an intrusion that had already left 750,000 Palestinian-Arabs homeless, congregated in refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria, with each new generation born in the camps raised on a hatred of both Jews and the Israeli state, dreaming of a victorious war that would return them to their homeland.
Whilst Israel destroyed some 350 Arab villages and leased abandoned land to Jewish farmers, and gave abandoned Palestinian homes in the towns and cities to incoming Jewish settlers. And with the 1950 Law of Return (note that last word), it committed itself to welcoming every Jew, no matter where from, who wanted to join them. So that by the end of 1951, the Jewish population almost doubled. Two peoples, one patch of land: Zionist nationalism versus Palestinian-Arab nationalism, with extremism rampant in both camps.
The Suez Crisis, the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War
In the wake of the “the Nakba” regimes fell from power in the Arab world. In Syria there was a lengthy period of instability with the Ba’ath Party eventually coming to power (we’ve come across them before in Iraq) in 1963. In Jordan, having turned his emirate into a kingdom, King Abdullah was murdered by a Palestinian militant in 1951 as he entered the El Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem – there were rumours that he was about to sign a treaty with Israel. And the Egyptian monarchy was overthrown in 1952 and General Gamal Abdel Nasser became prime minister and eventually president in 1956, though he had been in sole control since 1954. He was a fervent Egyptian-Pan Arab nationalist and was to the fore in forming the Pan Arab League, in which Egypt was joined by Iraq, Jordan Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen, and he set out to lead the Arab world. But it would always be Egypt first and in any case, the lack of Arab unity was always likely to thwart any pan Arab ambitions.
I’m not going to digress into the reasons behind Arab disunity (but there was an awful lot going on in the Arab world and they had not long shaken themselves free from British and French control), nor for that matter, the reasons behind the Suez Canal crisis, topics for another time. I want to stay focused on Israel. But that does mean we need to look at why Israel got involved in the British and French plan to seize back control of the canal after Nasser’s nationalisation of it in 1956, and even more so, what Israel gained from the whole affair. And in the process, you will see that clearly, nothing had been settled in 1948.
Israel was suffering from raids across its southern border which made farming in that region a highly precarious activity and which Israel had to do something about. The Fedayeen and Al Fatah (meaning conquest or victory), with Yassir Arafat one of its co-founders, were the leading Palestinian organisation at this point, operating from Gaza which was then administered by Egypt. There were retaliatory raids by Israel into Gaza but Israel needed an end to the affair or its population wouldn’t be safe settling in the area (what bitter irony when we look at what happened on October 7th). Anyway, if the Suez plan was successful, it would mean Israel could secure its southern border. It would seriously weaken Egypt which could only be good for Israeli security. But Israel was also desperate to reopen The Suez Canal to Israeli shipping and the Gulf of Aqaba and the Straits of Tiran at either end of the Red Sea which led out to the Indian Ocean.
Again, I’m not going to go into detail as to the plan to deal with Nasser and what unfolded, except where it affects Israel. And Israel did very well in the operation and improved its position as a result. Israeli forces moved across the border, defeated the Egyptian army in the Sinai peninsula, captured the whole peninsula and so, Sharm al-Sheikh, thereby giving Israel strategic control over the Straits of Tiran. And in so doing, Israel demonstrated, to itself as well as to its enemies, that its military outmatched Egypt’s.
What is more, Israel stood up to America, ignoring President Eisenhower’s demand that it withdraw from both Gaza and Sharm al-Sheikh. Indeed, Ben-Gurion threatened to annex the whole of the Sinai peninsula. It took four months of intense diplomacy before an agreement was reached with the Israelis. The Israelis didn’t get the Suez Canal opened to their shipping (and it remained nationalised by the way) but it did get passage through the Red Sea via its port of Eilat guaranteed. And a United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) would occupy the Sinai peninsula, including Gaza, and in so doing, guarantee Israeli security and the passage of its ships through the Straits of Tiran. However, as the Israeli’s withdrew from the peninsula, they systematically destroyed roads, railways and telephone lines, completely destroying two villages.
Other results important to note is that, though Nasser suffered complete military defeat at the hands of the Israelis, in standing up to Britain and France, his standing in the Arab world was immensely enhanced, indeed he now led it. Whereas Britain and France’s standing was at an all-time low and henceforth America and Russia would be the key players in the region. And Israel was already on its way, again with French help, to becoming a nuclear power. So, a messy situation had the potential to get a whole lot messier. And, indeed, it did.
But whilst its southern borders had some protection, elsewhere its borders, still only cease fire lines, were not recognised by any of the Arab states, indeed Israel still wasn’t recognised, and those borders remained difficult to defend. It was suffering from raids from Al Fatah groups operating from Jordan and Lebanon but with backing from Syria, responding with raids on Jordan and Lebanon villages (geographically, Syria was more difficult to deal with). And Israel was about to stir up Palestinian-Arab feelings again with its construction of a pipeline to divert the river Jordan waters in the Galilee region in the north to the Negev desert in the south. It has to be said that an American plan to ensure a fair distribution of these waters had been rejected by the Arabs. Whereas for Israel, the scheme was a tremendous success: the desert bloomed.
In response, at a conference of Arab countries held in Cairo in 1964, a plan was agreed to divert the waters of two of the river Jordans tributaries and to set up a unified Arab High Command to protect the scheme. And what is just as significant, the conference agreed to recognise the Palestinian rights and agreed to set up a Palestinian Liberation Organisation with an army. Its headquarters would be in Gaza.
Again, we mustn’t exaggerate Arab unity – Jordan was very worried about a Palestinian state taking land it had gained, whilst Jordan, Lebanon and Syria were all very uneasy about the thought of having Egyptian forces on their soil. And again, there was an awful lot going on in the Arab world. And what is more, though the rhetoric coming from the Arab states was just as fiercely anti-Israel as it had always been, the reality was that they were coming round to accepting the Israeli state, the rhetoric – as is predominantly the case today – was for their own peoples to hear rather than the Israelis and the rest of the world. While it also had something to do with their leaders vying for leadership of the Arab world (Nasser was no longer the undisputed leader).
And this is how things stood as the Arab world and Israel went to war again in 1967. The water issue aside, and this is not to say it wasn’t an important issue, it was Nasser who really started the slide to war when he ordered UNEF to leave the Sinai peninsula. Two days earlier, Soviet intelligence informed him that Israel was preparing to attack Syria. It wasn’t but Nasser wasn’t to know. Nasser felt if he didn’t act, his standing in the Arab world would sink even lower. So, he moved troops towards the Israeli border and he closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. And in a deal with King Hussein, Jordan’s army was placed under Egyptian military command and Egyptian troops were also moved to Jordan. Nasser was most likely trying to send a message, but in the Israeli government there were some who were seriously worried, and others who saw an opportunity, and Israel responded. In fairness it had to, not to do so would have left it far too vulnerable. Israel mobilised and called up its reserves. And then it attacked.
It destroyed the Egyptian air force as it sat on the ground and its troops were at the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran in just two days. They offered not to attack Jordan if King Hussein guaranteed Jordanian neutrality but either he wouldn’t or couldn’t (it might well have provoked civil war). As it was, the Israeli’s defeated the Jordanians quicker than it had the Egyptians and occupied the whole of the West Bank including the whole of Jerusalem (which had been left divided in 1949). The Israelis then turned on Syria and occupied the Golan Heights, strategically important because it overlooked Israel whereas now the Israelis overlooked Syria. In just six days it was all over. Hence it is known as the Six Day War.
The consequences were profound. Israel had won an awful lot of territory, some twenty-eight thousand square miles (or over 72,000 square kilometres), but this meant Arab states had lost a lot of territory, and Palestinians had lost even more potential territory, the West Bank, which meant Israel had an even larger Palestinian population under its control. Jerusalem was entirely in Israeli hands, too, and it would be impossible for an Israeli government to give it up.
A UN resolution called for the withdrawal from territories gained in the war and for the sovereign rights of every nation in the region to be respected. However, the Israeli’s were not prepared to give up an inch of the territory they had gained, unless they were formally recognised by the Arab world and a peace treaty was signed. But the Arabs, even though their forces had just been crushed in just six days, reaffirmed their refusal to recognise Israel or to negotiate with it, whilst asserting the rights of the Palestinians (and another 250,000 of them had fled into Jordan where Palestinians now constituted more than half the population). At an Arab summit held in Khartoum came ‘three no’s’: no negotiations, no peace, no recognition. Consequently, the Israeli position regarding the territory it had gained hardened and settlements in them were quietly encouraged.
Yet Arab unity continued to be a chimera. King Hussein of Jordan was holding secret meetings with Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime Minister whilst the PLO, with Yasser Arafat now its Chairman, in a massive turning point in the history of this conflict, reached the conclusion that if they were going to get a homeland of their own, they would have to fight for it themselves – they couldn’t rely on the Arab states. So, Yasser Arafat conducted his own diplomatic initiatives while at the same time carrying out terrorist activities such as plane hijacks – three planes were hijacked and landed in the Jordanian desert with around three hundred hostages. Egypt, meanwhile, conducted raids into the Sinai peninsula, Israel retaliated with bombing raids, so the Soviet Union provided Egypt with SAM missiles. Arafat tried to overthrow King Hussein but as it was, in September, 1970 it was King Hussein in a bloody battle that lasted ten days, and which almost brought Syria and Jordan to war, drove the PLO out of Jordan (the PLO called it ‘Black September’ and an organisation with that name was formed to take revenge on Jordan). The PLO re-establish itself in Lebanon in 1971. But a key point to make about the PLO and Yasser Arafat, right at the outset, is that theirs’ was very much a secular fight for a Palestinian state. It was not a religious fight.
When President Nasser died of a heart attack in 1970, his Vice-President, Anwar Sadat tried to reach a settlement with Israel. He offered to open up the Suez Canal to Israeli shipping if Israel would partially withdraw from the Sinai peninsula which, of course, buts up to the canal. But Israel refused. He then decided on a huge gamble: a limited war, not with victory in mind but in order to bring about a compromise peace. Sadat built a coalition (and again, it would immediately be a shaky one). This was the Yom Kippur War of 1973, so called because it began on the Israeli Day of Atonement, the most solemn of Jewish holy days when they seek to make amends for their sins and achieve reconciliation with God. After early successes which put Israeli survival in serious doubt, the Israeli’s fought back and it ended in something of a draw though not without a very real scare that America and the Soviet Union might get dragged in (instead they worked together to bring about a kind of peace). As it was, it did bring about an oil crisis, something I deal with in the BRICS series I have set up for you.
The fallout from the war would take time to settle, and a lot of diplomacy – I think this was the first time the term ‘shuttle diplomacy’ was used as Henry Kissinger shuttled (for a number of years, in phases) backwards and forwards between different capitals. The Israeli’s would have nothing to do with any negotiations that included the PLO but they were prepared to negotiate directly with Egypt, as was Sadat with them. In 1977 Sadat went to Jerusalem on the invitation of the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachim Begin (remember Begin had led the paramilitary group, Irgun in the 1940s), and spoke to the Knesset (the Israeli parliament). He called for peace between Egypt and Israel, but also for Israel to withdraw to its 1967 borders and for it to recognise the right for Palestinians to have a state of their own. Tactfully, he did not make direct reference to the PLO. Just as well, Begin, a Polish Jew, referred to them as the Arab SS. It was a tremendous moment, and a brave move on both leaders’ parts (Sadat would pay it with his life in 1981) but the Israeli’s played hard-ball in the talks and refused to give up the territory they had gained. President Carter, however, brought the two leaders to Camp David in 1978 in which an agreement was reached: Israel agreed to a staged withdrawal from the Sinai peninsula (over three years); Egypt recognised Israel and promised access to both the Straits of Tiran and the Suez Canal. And what is more, Israel agreed to open discussions to establish some degree of autonomy for Palestinians living on the West Bank and in Gaza. The issue of Jerusalem, though, was a step too far. In March, 1979, a peace treaty was signed between the two countries, the first between Israel and an Arab state. Begin and Sadat received the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize, when actually it was President Carter who forced them to negotiate. Golda Meir thought they should have both been given Oscars.
But the other Arab states were absolutely furious and Egypt was treated like a pariah (Iran and Iraq would soon divide the Arab world too), needless to say the other Arab states, even King Hussein’s Jordan, firmly stood by the Palestinians and their claims to be recognised as a sovereign state and be given territory for their people. However, the PLO weas losing control with Al Fatah increasingly in control of any Palestinian response. As for the Palestinian people themselves, in 1975 half of them, some one and a half million, still lived in Israel, impoverished and with few rights, 750,000 were in Jordan, 400,000 in Lebanon and 200,000 in Syria. Is it stretching things too far to suggest they had almost become what the Jews had been for centuries, a scattered people, not welcome where they found themselves (they had had a hard time in Jordan and in Lebanon, the militants not helping things it has to be said), just longing to return home.
Israel came into being in 1948, it immediately had to fight for its existence against a coalition of Arab countries. But it was Israel that seized on the opportunity to go to war again in 1956, and then had to defend itself again in 1967 and again in 1973. But a number of points could already be seen by 1973. First, a very difficult situation – two peoples in one patch of land had gotten a whole lot more complex, more difficult to resolve. Second, other than the Sinai peninsula, Israel was not willing to give up the territory it had gained (and it was not just a matter of security). Third, the Arab countries were fighting for their own reasons, as much as for the Palestinians, indeed much more so.
Two Deaths
This week were going to look at the impact of two brave leaders, or at least I think they were brave, their deaths, and the end of a chance for peace for two peoples in one patch of land, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in November, 1995. Muhammad Abdul Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, better known as Yasser Arafat, died, also in November, but in 2004. With their deaths, the leadership of both tribes lurched away from any notion of compromise in their approach to resolving the great conundrum.
Yitzhak Rabin had been the principal speaker at a peace rally in Tel Aviv attended by 100,000 Israelis in November, 1995. In his speech he declared Israelis were ready for peace, that the time had come to put away the past (the history) that had dogged them, and that no one should fear peace. His parting words: “Let’s not just sing about peace – let’s make peace.” He had just joined with Miri Aloni, the Israeli folk singer, singing her song, “Shir L’Shalom, A Song For Peace”. But when he walked off the stage he was shot by Yigal Amir, a Right-wing nationalist law student, and died a few hours later. His government would soon die too, and so would the best chance for peace Israel and the Palestinians had had. The assassin had achieved his aim.
Rabin had travelled a long way to be where he was in November, 1995. He had fought as a commander in the 1948 war, he was chief of staff in the 1967 war, he was Defence Minister during the first intifada that lasted from 1988 to 1993 and the Oslo Accords. Meaning “shaking off” in Arabic, the intifada was the result of intensified land grabbing and building both on the West Bank and in Gaza (which was then much bigger) as well as the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (its second, it had also invaded the country in 1978) which resulted in the massacre of up to a thousand Palestinian refugees – by Lebanese Christian forces but aided by the Israelis. There were loud protests in Israel against what their government had allowed and the damage done to Israel’s reputation was immense and it would prove the end of Begin’s premiership. Meanwhile, the intifada began with rioting, progressed to throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails, and on to using rifles and throwing grenades as well as using explosives. The Palestinians were not going to topple the Israeli government but they had caused enough loss of life as well as economic disruption, to make the Israeli’s ready to negotiate, and that’s what Rabin’s government was given a mandate to do.
So, Rabin had repeatedly stepped up to defend his people. But with his people seemingly secure from attack by any of its neighbours’ armies, he saw a negotiated settlement as the only way to secure lasting peace from terrorist attacks. The military option had done as much as it could do, now was the time to negotiate a lasting settlement. And it was his record as a defender of Israel that gave him the credibility with the Israeli people to pursue a negotiated option, an option that would mean concessions on both sides when, previously, both sides had refused to contemplate.
Step away from Israel, the West Bank, Gaza or Lebanon, and peace had been given a chance in Oslo when negotiators met working on Rabin’s and Yasser Arafat’s instructions, and a bigger chance when the two men shook hands on the White House lawn with President Clinton standing behind them, his arms outstretched so that he embraced both of them. Rabin’s words, again, spoke only of peace: “We say to you today in a loud and a clear voice: enough of blood and tears. Enough.” This was September, 1993.
Arafat, Rabin and Shimon Peres (the Israeli Foreign secretarty during the talks) were jointly awarded the 1994 Nobel peace prize.
What was the deal? In essence it was a declaration of principles with the details still to be negotiated. The PLO rejected terrorism, recognised Israel’s right to exist, and accepted the UN’s Security Council Resolution which called on Arab states to accept Israel’s right “to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries”. In return, Israel agreed to withdraw from parts of the West Bank, handing a degree of autonomy to the PLO with the creation of a Palestinian Authority with its own police force. It also led to a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, not a secret deal this time, but a very public one. Both sides made security guarantees, it incorporated a deal to manage and share water resources, the basis for economics relations, and it at least accepted that there were concerns regarding refugees.
And Rabin’s funeral, a little over a year after the accords, showed signs that relations between Israel and its neighbours had indeed improved. It was attended by President Mubarak of Egypt, King Hussein of Jordan as representatives from other Arab countries, surely symbolic of Israel’s acceptance amongst at least parts of the Arab world even if most still hadn’t officially recognised it. And by the way, I think it’s worth noting that Yasser Arafat, who had been asked not to attend the funeral, came to pay his condolences in person to Leah, Rabin’s wife, at their apartment in Tel Aviv. Rabin’s death was both a personal and political blow to Arafat and, according to several associates, including Edward G. Abington, the American consul general in Jerusalem until mid-1997. Arafat “broke down and sobbed over the phone” after learning of the assassination.
But the Oslo Accords had produced two reactions, and from each camp. Whilst on the Left, Israeli’s hailed Rabin as a peacemaker, on the Right he was seen as a traitor and there was a concerted campaign to undermine the deal. Far-Right nationalist rabbis were labelled him a rodef: a murderer who, under Jewish religious law, could be killed to prevent further acts of murder. There were anti-Oslo, anti-Rabin rallies and who was to fore? Benjamin Natanyahu. At one rally he walked at the head of a mock funeral for Rabin. The division in the country was reflected in the Knesset which only ratified the deal by the narrowest of margins: 61 votes to 59. And, of course, most tragically, in Rabin’s murder.
Meanwhile, in the Palestinian camp, while the PLO showed that they were prepared to negotiate with Israel, Hamas totally rejected the Oslo Accords, wanting Israel replaced by an Islamic state and, in an attempt to ensure the Accords failed, both Hamas and Islamic Jihad sent suicide bombers into Israel and onto buses, killing dozens of Israelis. Also, in the wake of Rabin’s assassination, Israel continued to build settlements in the occupied territories, and the Palestinians imported arms and built up their security forces, in violation of the terms of the Oslo Accords which in effect, died along with Yitzhak Rabin.
And Natanhayu, who did so much to stir the personal hatred against Rabin, would be the benefactor of his death. He would win power at the general election held the following year, and would be prime minister three times in total, including, of course, today. But what is more, the Right have been in power for all but twenty months in the more than twenty-five years since Rabin’s murder. It is true to say that Netanyahu has concluded normalization pacts of varying forms with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan, and a deal with Saudi Arabia was in the pipeline, which he argued would make the Palestinians understand that a deal between themselves and Israel would only be on Israeli terms; they had lost what influence they had. But these deals did not win the support of the Arab peoples. Far from it, it has led to a split between the people and their leaders.
Yasser Arafat, like Yitzhak Rabin, had a track record that showed he was prepared to ruthlessly take the fight to the other side. Tired of a world that only paid lip service to the Palestinian cause, Arafat oversaw the policy of what we today identify with terrorism: assassinations, kidnappings, explosions, and aircraft hijacking. He and his close friend, Abu Jihad, formed the Fatah guerrilla organisation’s first, five-man underground cell. And on January 1st 1965, militant fedayeen (those who sacrifice themselves), mounted their first operation. It led to both Israel and America refusing to deal with him. Yet during the civil war in Lebanon, the same man used his personal security force to protect the small Jewish community in Beirut. He also went to Tehran to try and persuade Ayatollah Khomeini to release the American embassy hostages, a crisis that lasted from November 1979 to the beginning of 1981. He also intervened personally to prevent the assassination of UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim.
As a guerrilla-terrorist, call him what you wish, Arafat had a number of lucky escapes from death, either at the hands of the Israelis or fellow-Arabs. His first major setback was ‘Black September’ in 1970 when, as we have noted, King Hussein drove the PLO out of Jordan. The PLO decamped in Lebanon only to be driven out by the Israelis in 1982 and again, that is Arafat at least, but this time by the Arabs, the following year. Yet at the same time, he was also pursuing diplomatic means to achieve his dream: a Palestine for Palestinians. However, one tragic result of Black September was that a militant faction of Al Fatah (and so, the PLO) was formed, named Black September, and it was this group that attacked Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics resulting in eleven Israeli deaths. How clear the link between the PLO and Black September was has never been made clear.
But Arafat was also a canny operator. He almost single-handedly made the world aware of Palestine as a distinct entity. And he helped persuade Palestinians to think of themselves as a people with a right to sovereignty. In 1974, Arafat the diplomat spoke at the UNs first full debate on the Palestinian question since 1952, that’s how much the issue had been sidelined. Indeed, he was the first leader of any “national liberation movement” to do so. But such a “high” was followed by a long period of “lows”: attacked in Lebanon by Syria’s President Assad’s forces in late 1976, in 1982 Israel’s attacked his Lebanese base targeting him personally. He and his men were forced to decamp to Tunis in 1983, staying there until 1993, sneaking back into Lebanon only to be chased out again by both the Israelis and by Syrian forces.
It was in this period that the first intifada or uprising changed the shape of things again. Israel had regarded the Palestinian population under its control as largely pacified, even as it went on expanding Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, expropriating Palestinian land in the process, at the same time as Palestinians were used as a cheap source of labour inside Israel. The intifada, which is an uprising, consisted of little more than young Palestinians throwing stones at the Israeli army which responded with large-scale arrests and collective punishments. But the intifada is largely recognised as a success for the Palestinians, helping to solidify their identity independently of neighbouring Arab states and forcing Israel into negotiations. And it also strengthened Arafat’s authority, giving him the confidence to proclaim himself in favour of the “two-state” solution, which would mean the Palestinians’ renouncing 78% of their original homeland. In so doing, of course, he recognised Israel’s right to exist. And this began a tentative dialogue with America, what he called the Palestinians’ “passport to the world”. It would be a tortuous path though. The Israelis would have nothing to do with him and it would take a long time before they came around. But Arafat was always able to cling on, he was always the man for the long game. And he would begin the talks that led to the Oslo Accords and “that” handshake on a White House lawn.
This would lead to his triumphal return home and one of the provisions of the Oslo Accords was for Palestinian elections which took place in early 1996, and Arafat was elected President of the Palestine Authority, winning 88% of the vote, so making him the undisputed leader of his people. But it was to a much-shrunken Palestine, basically it was two patches of land: one around Gaza, the other around Jericho. And despite that vote, he returned as a collaborator as much as a liberator. What is more, the Oslo Accords were only ever the starting point for a “two state” solution, and the tide would turn against Arafat and the Palestinians in the negotiations that were to come. Because following the murder of Rabin, they were mostly conducted with the Right-wing Likud, headed by Netanyahu, or else coalitions of Right-wing parties. As an Israeli commentator put it: “when one looks through all the lofty phraseology, all the deliberate disinformation, the hundreds of pettifogging sections, sub-sections, appendices and protocols, one clearly recognises that the Israeli victory was absolute and Palestine defeat abject.”
And while the talks dragged on an on, governance in Palestine was dragged down and down. So that nepotism and corruption was rife with racketeering and blatant extortion. For the ordinary Palestinian life was not getting any better, far from it. The squalor of the refugee camp remained the norm with more and more Palestinians living below the poverty line. And more people were dying, under torture and maltreatment, in Palestinian jails than in Israeli ones. While all the time, Hamas was getting stronger.
And when President Clinton brought the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak and Arafat together at Camp David in July, 2000, no deal was reached and the two sides (and America) all talked bitterly about what unfolded. Indeed, it is difficult to know what unfolded partly because the negotiators were closed off from the rest of the world and partly because any offers that were made, were done so verbally. Whatever in fact did unfold, the two leaders were not in a strong position domestically: Barak’s government had lost popularity and would lose the next election, Arafat as we have noted had already faced criticism from his own people for negotiating with the hated enemy.
But we do know that Arafat had shown that he would accept a reasonable deal when he negotiated with Rabin. Whilst Barak had been just as slow to implement agreements made in Oslo but not so slow in expanding Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land as Peres and Netanyahu had been. And whatever was offered by the Israelis, it would still have left a fractured West Bank with Jewish enclaves, a Jerusalem controlled by Israel and Gaza separated from the West Bank. And the Israelis continued to refuse point blank to consider the right of Palestinians to return to their homes lost in Israel in 1948 and the years after as it would radically change the demographic profile of the Jewish state.
After the talks collapsed, in September, 2000, Ariel Sharon, of the ultra-conservative Likud Party and the man who, as Minister for Defence, had overseen the invasion of Lebanon (he was known as the ‘Butcher of Beirut’ by Palestinians, and was a vociferous advocate of the Israeli’s West Bank settlements policy, visited the Jerusalem Plaza outside Al Aksa Mosque. It was a deliberate act intended to demonstrate Israeli sovereignty over what Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary. Palestinians erupted in violent protest, igniting what came to be called the second intifada, a popular revolt lasting until 2005, much more violent and more deadly than the first, against the Israeli occupation, against the manner in which the hope that the Oslo Accords had brought had been destroyed by the change in the Israeli stance, but also against Arafat and the Palestine Authority which was seen to have failed them. Hamas and other Islamic militant groups were heavily involved. It would lead to Israel reoccupying the West Bank and parts of Gaza, though removing its settlements in Gaza at least, and to the building of a barrier in the West Bank, matching that erected in Gaza in 1996. It would also have an influence on 9/11 as President George W. Bush refused to restrain Sharon or to open up another peace initiative with Arafat until too late. Arafat survived but the Palestinian Authority lost credibility and many Palestinians turned to Hamas which won 74 of the 132 seats in the 2006 elections for the second Palestinian Legislative Council (Fatah only winning 45 seats). And for them, nothing but complete liberation, i.e., the end of Israel, would suffice.
And it was the same with Israel as, in 2001, Ariel Sharon, headed Israel’s most extreme, belligerent government in its history. Sharon re-took much of the West Bank, subjected Arafat to a humiliating almost three-year siege in his headquarters in Ramallah. President Bush pronounced Arafat unfit to rule.
But was Arafat, along with Rabin, the last men standing prepared to reach an accommodation and give peace a chance? What has happened since would suggest so, certainly no one of similar stature, on either side, has been able to raise a voice loud enough to be heard.
And so next week we will look at how things deteriorated – with Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad and their like, and their sponsor, Iran, and too, with the hardening Israeli position, particularly its determination to build more and more settlements on the West Bank.
New Dimensions – Israeli occupation, Abraham Accords, Iran, Hezbollah (2006), Islamic Jihad and Hamas
Since the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War the biggest threat to Israeli’s, though not Israel itself, has come from various militant groups supporting the Palestinian cause, not from Arab states, though a Persian state, Iran lurks ominously in the background of what the likes of Hezbollah and Hamas do. Whilst Israel has done its cause no good whatsoever in the court of world opinion as it set out on a policy to build more and more settlements on the West Bank, while at the same time treating the Palestinians both in the West Bank and in Gaza with little regard for their human rights.
The West Bank was divided into three zones by the Oslo Accords: Area A (18% of the territory) where the Palestinian Authority, itself a creation of the Oslo Accords) administers civil and security matters; Area B (just 22% of it), where it administers only civil matters; and Area C (60%) where Israel maintains full control. But if you look at a map of these zones you will see that in fact the Palestinian controlled areas are little more than islands surrounded by a sea of Israeli controlled territory. And most of the West Bank’s natural resources are found in the Israeli-controlled zone, yet 70% of Palestinian villages in that zone are not connected to the water grid. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that the Israeli government is conducting a policy of apartheid in the occupied territories. What is more, the Israeli military operates as it sees fit in all three zones.
After the Yom Kippur war there were something like 10,000 Israelis on the West Bank, today, there are hundreds of thousands,: a few hundred thousand are living in East Jerusalem and about 450,000 in what is referred to as Area C. While at the same time there are currently about two million Palestinians still living in Israel (a little over 20% of Israel’s total population), three million on the West Bank, two million plus in Gaza, about two million in Jordan, half a million in Syria and the remainder scattered elsewhere.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has repeatedly declared he will never accept a Palestinian state and the present government openly advocates the annexation of all or part of the West Bank to Israel and keeping Palestinians without full human, never mind, civil rights including the vote.
As for Gaza, the narrow strip of land sandwiched between Israel and the Mediterranean Sea, just 25 miles (41kms) long and about 6 miles (10kms) wide, the two million plus people crammed into it makes it one of the most densely populated places in the world. And since 2006, when Hamas came to power, both Israel and Egypt largely closed its borders, in so doing restricting the movement of goods and people in and out of the territory, essentially it is a military blockade by land, sea and air. No wonder Gaza is frequently referred to as the world’s largest open prison.
This means that Israel controls everything about life in Gaza from food to medical supplies and electricity supply. It has left perhaps as many as 80% of its people reliant on international aid, around half do not have enough food to eat and 95% of the population do not have direct access to clean drinking water – and this is before the current crisis.
Since the blockade began, Israel has undertaken four large-scale military assaults on Gaza, not including this current attack. Hamas regularly launches rockets into Israel, and Israel retaliates in kind.
Hamas (the Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement”) enters this troubled history in 1987 during the first intifada. It was originally a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political and social movement originating in Egypt, but in recent years, Hamas has distanced itself from the Brotherhood. In 1988, Hamas published its charter, calling for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic society in historic Palestine. It began its history of suicide bombing and other terrorist attacks as the negotiations for the Oslo Accords were reaching their culmination in 1993 – it wanted nothing to do with an negotiated agreement.
It has since moderated its stance and issued a new charter, the Hamas 2017 Charter, which accepts a Palestinian state based on the borders that existed in 1967, consisting of the West Bank, Gaza and all of Jerusalem. But its tactics and the new charter still leaves it some distance away from anything Israel is likely to even consider. And in a dig at the West but also the Arab states, Hamas’ charter describes the Palestinians as “a people who have been let down by a world that fails to secure their rights and restore to them what has been usurped from them, a people whose land continues to suffer one of the worst types of occupation in this world.”
In 2006, Hamas won the Palestinian elections, in part because they had been behind the provision of much of the social services Palestinians had needed for their survival, in part because Hamas seemed to offer more hope as the dream of a Palestinian state seemed to be fading away, and in part as a response to corruption in the Fatah-PLO administration. But neither Israel nor Fatah accepted the result. The Israelis began arresting Hamas members of the Palestinian parliament and Fatah retained control of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank. In Gaza a civil war broke out, though lasting only a week, which Hamas won. Palestinian elections for a legislature have not been held since 2006 and for a president since 2008 as both the Israelis and Fatah fear further Hamas success. And some political scientists go as far as to say it has suited Netanyahu as it has allowed him to argue that negotiations over a solution for the Palestinians cannot be undertaken while they are so divided.
And let me just go back to the last episode and say that this is why I see the deaths of Rabin and Yasser Arafat as so important as, though Arafat’s influence had weakened before he died in 2004 and corruption existed under his leadership too, together the two men still seem to represent the last hope for a peaceful solution. Perhaps Mahmoud Abbas, the current chairman of the PLO and president of the Palestinian Authority, offers a glimmer of hope – he would be prepared to negotiate a workable deal but he doesn’t carry the support of the Palestinian people (hence no elections since 2006) and there is certainly nobody on the Israeli side of the stature of Yitzhak Rabin prepared to negotiate a deal. But things can quickly change, we’ll have to see.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, Hamas has ruled in an authoritarian manner and has been stricter with regard to Sharia law. For example, in the early years of its rule it imposed strict dress codes for women and insisted on the separation of men and women in public. Hamas as an international organisation has its leadership based in Qatar though it is thought it also has a presence in Turkey. And it is funded, and heavily influenced by, Iran. In recent years, Iran has provided military hardware to Hamas, particularly missiles, and some Hamas operatives have been to Tehran for training and to learn about missile technology.
Indeed, the issue of two peoples; one patch of land has completely changed since 1973. It is not the Arab-Israeli conflict over land and nationhood as it once was (though it still is for the Palestinian and Israeli people of course). Instead, it has become a religious issue – Muslim against Jew – something Iran needs, not just to defeat the Jews but to export its Shiite Islamic Revolution, the minority Islamic faith, from Persian Iran to Sunni Arab states. A common enemy is seen as vital in achieving that. And Israel is that enemy. Yes, the Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini was annoyed by Israeli’s ties to the Shah’s regime and yes, Iran hates the West and Israel was, still is, supported by the West but Israel is a useful enemy for Iran. For decades, Israel feared Arab nationalism but now, its biggest threat comes from the religiously-inspired Hamas and Hezbollah, and from Iran. The Palestinians, just as they were with the Arab leaders, are just pawns in the game. Meanwhile, Arab countries have reached some accommodation with Israel, Egypt first, later Jordan, and more recently, through the Abraham Accords, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco, with Saudi Arabia having been expected to join the camp until the attack on October 7th.
But if that’s why Iran pivots so strongly against Israel, why has America so consistently and, on the surface at least, so unwaveringly, pivoted towards supporting Israel. Well, we have covered sympathy/guilt for the Holocaust when we looked at the troubled birth of the Israeli state – and that sympathy/guilt is understandable, I should add. Though I would have you know that the Ku Klux Klan was anti-Semitic as well as anti-Black American. And today, there is a genuine fear that criticism of Israel by the American government would encourage anti-Semitism in America.
Then, there was the Cold War and with the Soviet Union supporting Egypt, America was even more determined to back Israel. A factor that continued throughout the Cold War and since, muddied by events like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian Revolution, 9/11 and the Gulf War, the Syrian civil war and much else. Indeed, America relies a lot on Israeli intelligence.
But there is also American domestic politics, notably its electoral process. The Christian Right, and its millions of followers, has thrown itself behind supporting Israel, and they have considerable political clout with the Republican Party as well as considerable influence in the media. Of course, Jewish organisations have mobilised their considerable resources too and they are an influence in the media and American politics even if this is not as much as some commentators would have us believe (though in tight electoral races they can be the difference). In actual fact, the arms industry carries more weight when it comes to the power of their lobby, and they lobby for America to continue selling arms to Israel and other Middle East allies of America, sales whose worth is measured in billions of dollars.
Now, I would say that America has been to the fore in trying to initiate a lasting settlement between Israel and the Palestinians and has long been proposing a two-state solution as the only solution, the efforts of presidents Carter and Clinton are, I think, praiseworthy. But it has never stood up to the Israelis and forced a proposal through when the Israelis benefit hugely from American aid: $3.3 billion worth in 2022 alone; 99.7% of which was for military purposes, and $318 billion in total since the Israeli state came into being.
So, there you are, something of an explanation of how we got to where we are today in the one patch of land claimed by two peoples, surely the saddest patch of land in the world. The birth of Israel in 1948. The half-hearted attempts by Arab states to reclaim Palestine in 1967 and 1973 which left the Palestinians in a much worse position and gave the Israelis the excuse that they needed to keep what they had gained in order to defend themselves. Then the one real chance of a two-state solution and peace seemed to die with Yitzhak Rabin’s murder and Yasser Arafat’s humiliation and isolation in Ramallah enforced by Ariel Sharon and the Israeli’s. Until we reach the point with Netanyahu prime minister, the man who had walked at the head of a mock funeral for Rabin and the man who has repeatedly declared he will never accept a Palestinian state, the two state solution has never been an option. And now we have Palestinians talking about another Nakba and another generation of children ready to step into their father’s and grandfather’s shoes and join the ranks ready to take the fight to Israel.
But such has been the cataclysmic events of October 7th and what has happened since, who knows? Maybe Israeli’s will see that they can never be safe without a satisfactory agreement with the Palestinians (and that is not to justify what Hamas did on that tragic day). Maybe the Palestinians will find a leader to negotiate on their behalf. And maybe the world will see that now it owes the Palestinians a homeland as it felt back in 1948 that it owed the Jews one. Of course, that still leaves the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah to deal with and that needs the world to reach an accommodation with Iran, the Muslim world as well as the world at large, so let’s not hold our breath.
Whatever way this goes, there is a lot more grief to come before there will be any sign of hope.