Growing up in an evangelical Christian church and family in the 1980s and 1990s, most of what I was taught about Israel came from the Bible. I learned that Jews were the rightful inhabitants of Israel (the Bible told me so), and that I should support them. The fact that the Jewish people got a homeland in Israel after suffering the horrors of the Holocaust in World War II was something to be celebrated as a kind of miracle, or even the fulfillment of some biblical prophecy.
Although I didn’t learn much about Palestinians or Arabs growing up, I remember catching the occasional news story about Arab enemies of Jews, usually with the Arabs cast as terrorists and the Jews as either victims or heroic defenders of their homeland.
The seemingly never-ending conflict between Arabs and Jews was seen as something as old as the Bible, as old as time, and thus something to be accepted as a kind of unfortunate but unresolvable dilemma. As an American Christian, I knew whose side I was on.
As I got older and went to college, I eventually lost my faith. It was replaced by a kind of skeptical/curious agnosticism. As the years went on, I would occasionally catch a documentary or read an article that cast some doubt on the good vs. evil story I’d been told as a child about the state of Israel and the Palestinian people who also lived there in seemingly poor conditions.
Because it was a problem that didn’t really seem to affect me directly, I continued on with my life, never really taking the time to fully educate myself about the situation.
And then came the Israel-Hamas War, and suddenly everyone was talking about this issue, often in a very polarizing way.
So I decided to try to actively educate myself. I bought a college-level textbook called The Israel Palestine Conflict: a History by James L. Gelvin, professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at UCLA. While I realize that reading one textbook does not make me fully educated on this issue, I do feel like I have a slightly better handle on it, and I plan to learn more.
One of the best ways I retain knowledge is through writing, so I have decided to present here a book report on what I learned, with the hopes that sharing this knowledge might make for better-informed conversations.
The land in question includes the current state of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip (or simply, Gaza).
“The problem is, simply put, a dispute over real estate,” Gelvin writes. “Jewish immigrants and their descendants, guided by the nationalist ideology of Zionism, and the Palestinian Arab inhabitants among whom the Zionists settled both claim an exclusive right to inhabit and control some or all of [the land]...The struggle for control over some or all of the territory…pits two nationalist movements against each other.”
Although the struggle between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism is really only about a hundred years old, both groups claim a much older, historic “right” to the land.
The Jewish Zionist narrative is usually derived from the Bible, and begins with Abraham and his descendants immigrating to the land in the second millennium B.C. and reaching its high point with the 10th century BC reigns of King David and King Solomon.
After the death of Solomon, the Jewish community fragmented. After the Romans conquered and destroyed Jerusalem, the Jewish diaspora began, in which Jews were scattered, with many settling in Europe. The Zionist movement, which began in the 19th century, sought to reunite Jews in their ancient homeland.
For Palestinians, their claim to the land rests with the fact that they have lived there for hundreds (if not thousands) of years.
“The land of Palestine was one of the areas first conquered by Arab Muslims following the emergence of Islam in the seventh century,” Gelvin writes. “In 1516 the Ottomans began their conquest of the Middle East, establishing an empire that would last until 1918…The Ottoman Empire lasted for over 400 years.”
Thus, from the 1500s up until World War I, the area known as Israel/Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. During this time, Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived there, although it was majority Muslim.
The Rise of Zionism
“Zionism emerged in the late nineteenth century for two reasons: Zionism was a reaction to European anti-Semitism and various nationalist movements that excluded Jews from political communities in the process of formation,” Gelvin writes.
Diaspora Jews living in Europe during the Middle Ages and early modern period faced much discrimination, with many of them living in “ghettos.” Many were not granted full citizenship in the countries in which they resided until the 19th century.
In the 19th century, about three quarters of the world’s Jews lived in Eastern Europe, with most of those living within the Russian Empire.
“Most Jews lived in poverty in small towns and villages (shtetls), targets of pogroms–periodic violence inflicted by their non-Jewish neighbors, and spoke Yiddish–a blend of mostly German and Hebrew with a smattering of Slavic and even Old French,” Gelvin writes.
In the decades preceding the onset of World War I there was a great period of international migration: “Between 1881 and 1914, more than 2.5 million Jews–about 40 percent of the total population of eastern Europe–left their homes for good…A vast majority made the United States, not Palestine, their destination of choice.”
In the context of nationalist movements in Europe, the ideology of Zionism (Jewish Nationalism) was born.
The father of Zionism was Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), a journalist living in France. After witnessing virulent anti-semitism, Herzl began to believe that what Jews needed was a homeland of their own.
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| Theodor Herzl, father of Zionism. |
Herzl published The Jewish State, in which he wrote: “We are one people–our enemies have made us one in our despite, as repeatedly happens in history. Distress binds us together, and thus united, we suddenly discover our strength. Yes, we are strong enough to form a state, and a model state.”
Herzl organized the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897. The program read as follows:
The aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law. The Congress contemplates the following means to the attainment of this end:
The promotion, on suitable lines, of the colonization of Palestine by Jewish agricultural and industrial workers.
The organization and binding together of the whole Jewry by means of appropriate institutions, local and international in accordance with the law of each country.
The strengthening and fostering of Jewish national sentiment and consciousness.
Preparatory steps towards obtaining government consent, where necessary, to the attainment of the aim of Zionism.
The Beginnings of Zionist Colonization
As more joined the Zionist cause, the movement took two forms–Political Zionism, which involved diplomatic efforts to achieve a homeland, and Practical Zionism, which involved Jewish settlement and colonization of Palestine, even before a state was established.
There were various waves of Jewish immigration to the land known as Palestine. The first, in 1882, was triggered by the pogroms that broke out in Russia. About 25,000 Jews emigrated.
Baron Edmond de Rothschild, of the famous banking dynasty, invested 1.5 million pounds to Jewish agricultural settlements in the late 19th century.
In 1900, the Jewish Colonization Association was created by German financier Baron Maurice de Hirsch. During the FIrst Zionist Congress, a Jewish National Fund was established to purchase land and hold it in trust for the Jewish nation.
In the second and third waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine in the early 20th century, two key ideas emerged: conquest of land (acquiring land) and conquest of labor (Jews doing the work themselves and not relying on Arab/Palestinian labor).
These settlers founded political parties, one of which eventually became the Mapai (formed in 1930), which became part of the Labor Party of Israel. They formed the first Jewish militia, the Haganah, which would eventually form the postindependence army, the Israel Defense Forces.
These immigrants formed agricultural settlements called kibbutz and moshav.
The fourth wave of Jewish immigration (1924-28) consisted of many fleeing anti-Jewish legislation in Poland. Many of these immigrants found their leader in Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of what came to be known as Revisionist Zionism.
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| Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky, father of Revisionist Zionism |
Militarism was the touchstone of Jabotinsky's ideology. His followers formed the Irgun Zvai Leumi, an underground militia.
“Along with the Stern Gang, an Irgun spin-off, the Irgun perpetrated some of the most appalling terrorist atrocities committed in modern Palestine, including a campaign of “reprisal” bombings in 1937 in Arab markets (during which close to 80 Arabs were killed) and the wholesale massacre of an estimated 100 to 250 innocents in the village of Dayr Yassin in 1948.”
The ideological descendants of Jabotinsky would be today’s right-wing Likud Party in Israel, of which Benjamin Netanyahu is a member.
World War I and the Palestine Mandate
The impact of World War I on the middle east was profound. It brought about the end of the Ottoman Empire, which was subdivided into smaller political units, which would eventually form the modern states of the middle east.
After World War I, Britain and France took direct administrative control over the territories that are now Palestine/Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. These were strategic territories for Britain and France’s colonial empires.
“Britain and France managed these territories through a new form of rule that lay midway between colonial annexation and complete sovereignty: the mandate,” Gelvin writes. “As the world’s dominant economic power, the British were fixated on free trade and security for investments in the region. There was also the paramount imperial concern: protecting the route to India.”
Most notably for Israel/Palestine, the Zionist movement was supported by Great Britain.
In 1917, the British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour published what became known as the Balfour Declaration, which stated:
“His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done wich 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.”
Under the mandate system, the British shared administrative duties with the Jewish Agency, a Zionist body which controlled colonization and settlement activities, founded schools, hospitals, and agricultural and medical research centers.
At this point, Jews were still a minority in the area that the British called Palestine. Eighty-nine percent of the population was non-Jewish (i.e. Palestinian).
“Most leaders of the indigenous [Palestinian] community did not believe that their community should participate in a political order imposed on them without their consent–and certainly not one that appeared intent on establishing an alien presence in their midst.”
The Rise of Palestinian Nationalism
Although Palestinians had lived in the area that, after World War I, was known as Palestine for hundreds, if not thousands of years, the idea of a Palestinian nation didn’t really gain traction until some Palestinian leaders saw their land being threatened by Zionist colonization.
“Palestinian nationalism emerged during the interwar period in response to Zionist immigration and settlement,” Gelvin writes.
In 1920, the first Palestine General Congress was organized. At that time, they affirmed that “Palestine is an integral part of Syria. We demand that it remain so, and shall use all measures to the last drop of our blood and the last breath of our children to achieve this end.”
The Congress also proclaimed: “We consider the Zionist danger to be directed against us and against our political and economic existence in the future. We shall therefore throw back the Zionists with all our force. If the allies continue to let them pursue their activities we shall oppose them by all means possible…”
A few years later, the boundary separating French-mandated Syria from British-mandated Palestine was established. The French cracked down on Syria-based nationalist organizations.
While Jewish nationalists (Zionists) were able to work with the British mandate government to further their goals of a Jewish state, Palestinians were far less inclined to work with the British authorities.
The Great Revolt
As more Jews came to settle in Palestine, conflict between Jews and Palestinians grew, ultimately culminating in the first period of extended violence between the two groups, known as “The Great Revolt,” which lasted from 1936-39.
“By 1931, Zionist land purchases had led to the expulsion of approximately 20,000 peasant families from their lands,” Gelvin writes. “Over the course of the next several years, approximately 30 percent of Palestinian farmers had become totally landless.”
Some Palestinians migrated to cities, “where they were often relegated to the lowest rungs of the economic ladder and dwelt in shanty-towns.”
It was in this context that the Great Revolt broke out in April 1936.
“By the autumn of 1937, 9,000-10,000 Palestinian and non-Palestinian Arab fighters–or mujahidin…roamed the countryside, attacking British and Zionist settlements and generally wreaking havoc,” Gelvin writes.
The British brought in an army of 20,000, who worked with Zionist militias to fight the Palestinians.
“Employing all the usual tactics of counterinsurgency, including those all to familiar to Palestinians today–the collective punishment of villages, targeted assassinations, mass arrests, deportations, dynamiting homes of suspected guerillas and sympathizers–the British and their allies eventually snuffed out the rebellion,” Gelvin writes.
In 1937, during a pause in the fighting of the Great Revolt, the British government appointed a royal commission under Lord Peel, the secretary of state for India.
“The commission…concluded that the mandate was unworkable and proposed that Palestine be divided into three parts. Twenty percent of Palestinian territory would go to a Jewish state. Most of the rest would go to an Arab Palestine that would be united with Trans-Jordan,” Gelvin explains.
Neither Jewish nor Palestinian leaders, nor the British government, accepted this proposal, which was the first attempt at a two-state solution.
World War II
In 1942, during World War II, a Zionist Conference convened in New York. What came out of this became known as The Biltmore Program, which noted the catastrophe facing Jews in Europe (the Holocaust), and sought to establish a Jewish state in all of Palestine.
The tragedy of the Holocaust also created an enormous refugee problem for Europe.
“The United States representative to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, Earl Harrison, reported to President Truman that the obvious solution to the Jewish refugee problem was to allow 100,000 immigrants into Palestine immediately. Harrison became the first American acting in an official capacity to link the Holocaust, the refugee problem, and Palestine,” Gelvin writes.
Palestinian leaders were not keen on more Jewish settlement.
Ultimately, the British left the matter to the United Nations, which in 1947 created a Special Committee on Palestine.
“In August 1947 the committee issued both a majority and a minority report. The majority report called for the termination of the mandate and the partition of Palestine between Arab and Jewish communities with the stipulation that the two communities be united in an economic union,” Gelvin writes.
In May of 1948, the British government announced that it was withdrawing its troops from Palestine. So when the United Nations General Assembly voted to accept the majority report (calling for a two-state solution), both the Zionists and the Palestinians knew that no one would be there to enforce it.
They would have to work things out on their own. What followed was war.
The 1948 War: Independence for Israel, Catastrophe for Palestinians
The 1948 war for Palestine is viewed very differently by Israelis and Palestinians. For Israelis, it was the War for Independence, which led to the establishment of the State of Israel. For the Palestinians, the war was Al-nakba, the catastrophe.
“Israeli independence came at a high price for Palestinians,” Gelvin writes. “During the war, close to three quarters of a million Palestinians who had lived within the territory over which Israel claimed sovereignty became refugees, prohibited from returning to their homes in the Jewish state. It was, in the words of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, the ‘shattering and exile of a whole society, accompanied by thousands of deaths and the wholesale destruction of hundreds of villages.’”
“Of an estimated total population of 1.4 million Palestinians, a little over half–about 720,000–became refugees. Anywhere from 65 percent to more than 85 percent of Palestinians living within the boundaries of Israel were forced into permanent exile, while upwards of another 25 percent of those who remained were uprooted and became internal refugees in Israel. Those Palestinians who remained in Israel were subject to martial law until 1966.
Gelvin points out that this war actually consisted of two wars.
The first was a civil war between Israelis and Palestinians, which lasted from December 1947 to May 1948. The second was a war fought between the newly proclaimed State of Israel and neighboring countries, which lasted from 1948 to 1949.
As a result of these wars, more than 500 Palestinian villages disappeared forever, and hundreds of thousands were resettled to refugee camps, many of which still exist today.
The newly-declared state of Israel won the wars.
“The Israeli government took over approximately 94 percent of the property abandoned by the Palestinians who fled and distributed it to Jewish Israelis,” Gelvin writes.
The United Nations mediated armistice agreements, which informally confirmed the boundaries of the State of Israel.
The Gaza strip, however, remained under Egyptian control, and Jordan annexed the West Bank.
Arab-Israeli Conflict
“Although the State of Israel received the recognition of most other states in the world, the surrounding Arab states refused to do so,” Gelvin writes.
In 1950, the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, passed the Law of Return, which stated, “Every Jew has the right to immigrate to the country.”
American aid to Israel began in 1949. Between then and 2020, the United States has given Israel over $142 billion in assistance, most of which (over $108 billion) has gone toward military procurement.
In 1967, a war broke out between Egypt and Israel, which Israel won handily in just six days.
“By war’s end Israel found itself in control of territory belonging to Arab states–the Sinai Peninsula (belonging to Egypt), the Golan Heights (belonging to Syria), and a narrow strip of land on the Jordanian frontier–as well as the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem,” Gelvin writes.
This led to United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which called for “Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.”
The ambiguity of this resolution led to ambiguity about which territories Israel was to withdraw from, so it maintained a presence in the West Bank and Gaza.
“After the 1967 war, Israel integrated the economies of the West Bank and Gaza Strip with its own,” Gelvin writes. “The effect was to create a colonial-style dependent economy in those territories.”
Rise of the Likud Party and the Expansion of Settlements
Meanwhile, Israelis continued to establish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank.
In the first two decades of Israeli statehood, the government was dominated by the Labor Party. However, in 1977 a member of the more militant and right-wing Likud party was elected prime minister–Menachem Begin.
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| Menachem Begin, the first Likud prime minister of Israel. |
It was then that the expansion of Israeli settlements into the West Bank and Gaza began in earnest. This movement was also supported by the Gush Emunim, who considered Jewish settlement of “Eretz Israel” a religious mission.
Given the disputed nature of the West Bank and Gaza, the United Nations has condemned Israeli settlement activity countless times.
The Palestine Liberation Organization
The Palestine Liberation Organization was formed in 1964. Its first leader was Ahmad Shuqairy, who oversaw the drafting of the Palestine National Charter, adopted in 1964. It was modified in 1968 and after the signing of the fist Oslo accord, it remains the constitution of the PLO. It states:
Palestine is the homeland of the Palestinian Arab people and an integral part of the great Arab brotherhood, and the people of Palestine is part of the Arab nation.
Palestine with it boundaries that existed at the time of the British mandate is an integral regional unit.
The Palestinian Arab people possesses the legal right to its homeland, and when the liberation of its homeland is completed it will exercise self-determination solely according to its own will and choice.
In 1969 the members of the PLO elected Yasir Arafat chairman–a position he held until his death.
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| Yasir Arafat, PLO leader. |
“The guerilla commanders who eventually formed the leadership of the PLO embraced the doctrine of armed struggle,” Gelvin writes. “Since 1969, representatives of guerilla groups and their later political incarnations have dominated the PLO executive committee, which, in effect, acted as Yasir Arafat’s cabinet.”
The largest of the guerilla groups was called Fatah. These various Palestinian guerilla groups, including the PLO, committed acts of terrorism.
Tragically, according to Gelvin, “Many of the most spectacular terrorist incidents coincided with initiatives to reach some sort of accord, whether between Israelis and Palestinians or between Israelis and their neighbors. For example, in 1974 three fedayeen from the PDFLP slipped over the Israeli border from Lebanon and killed 22 students in a high school in the Israeli town of Ma’alot. It was a horrible crime, committed ostensibly to force the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails."
And again: "Terrorist attacks in 1985 coincided with an agreement reached between King Hussein of Jordan and Yasir Arafat to united their efforts to reach a settlement based on United Nations Resolution 242…Negotiations broke down amidst bloodshed and mutual recriminations.”
The First Intifada
The years 1987 to 1993 mark the first “intifada” (Arabic for “shaking off”)--a period of intense Palestinian resistance.
Gelvin describes the conditions that gave rise to the fist intifada:
“By 1987 there was no aspect of life in the occupied territories, no sector of the Palestinian economy, no part of the Palestinian landscape that had remained untouched by the occupation. Over the course of 20 years, the Israelis had buried the Palestinian population beneath a mound of regulations that not only were irksome but intruded into all aspects pf life in the territories, from land use to employment to travel. The Israelis had expropriated land in the occupied territories for 'military training, public needs, and even nature preserves. They had constructed settlements that dominated the countryside. In the three years preceding the intifada alone, the Israelis built seventeen such settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and increased the settler population to more than 68,000.
Israeli agriculture policies had devastated Palestinian agriculture and Israeli labor policies discriminated against Palestinian workers and barred them from enjoying the social benefits and wages granted Israeli workers."
There was severe overcrowding (an estimated 3,754 Gazans per square mile).
During the intifada, Israeli soldiers killed between 900 and 1,200 Palestinians and injured about 18,000.
“Israeli human rights organizations estimate that about 23,000 Palestinians were subjected to “harsh interrogation” (read: torture),” Gelvin writes. “The Israeli army destroyed about 2,000 Palestinian houses as punishment.”
One organization that emerged during the first intifada was the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known by its acronym, Hamas.
“Hamas differs from the secular PLO in a fundamental way,” Gelvin writes. “Hamas is committed to the reconstruction of Palestinian society according to what its leaders regard as Islamic principles.”
Much more Islamic than the PLO, it was Hamas who introduced suicide bombings.
During the first intifada, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) killed an estimated 1,162–1,204 Palestinians. Among Israelis, 100 civilians and 60 IDF personnel were killed.
The Oslo Accords
In the wake of the violence of the first intifada, there was widespread support for a peace process. In 1992, Israelis elected Labor Party candidate Yitzhak Rabin prime minister, who “had run for office on a platform that included a pledge to find a way toward peace and to freeze settlement activity for one year.
In 1992 and 1993, a delegation of Israelis and Palestinians met in Oslo, Norway for talks hosted by the Norwegian foreign minister and his wife.
There they negotiated a framework for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, which became known as the first Oslo Accord.
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| Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, U.S. President Bill Clinton, and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat in 1993. |
The first Accord consisted of an exchange of letters of mutual recognition between Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasir Arafat.
Arafat’s letter to Rabin “recognize[d] the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security” and accepted United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. Arafat’s letter also renounced the use of terrorism and other acts of violence.
Rabin’s letter didn’t go quite as far. While it recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people, it did not recognize the right of Palestinians to establish a sovereign state of their own.
The second Oslo Accord, signed two years after the first, outlined the powers and duties of the Palestinian Authority (the governing body of Palestine).
The second accord also divided up the West Bank into areas of varying Israeli, PA, and shared control, but they did not establish a two-state solution.
Tragically, a little more than a month after Rabin signed Oslo 2, a Jewish religious extremist assassinated him. The assassin stated at his trial that he had shot Rabin because he “wanted to give our country to the Arabs.”
Shortly thereafter, "Israelis elected a Likud candidate and Oslo opponent, Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister,” Gelvin writes. “As for Israel, the assassination of Rabin brought a government to power that was committed to resisting any further concessions and minimizing the impact of concessions already granted.”
Between 1993 and 2000, Israeli settlers in the occupied territories doubled.
At the same time, Israel began regularly barring Palestinian workers from entering Israel.
The Second Intifada
By the year 2000, Gelvin writes, the Oslo process seemed to have reached an impasse. To move things along, U.S. president Bill Clinton met together with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Yasir Arafat at Camp David to try to hammer out an agreement.
“Staking everything on one last throw of the dice, he [Barak] made Arafat a nonnegotiable, take-it-or-leave it offer that covered everything, from the final disposition of territory to the final status of Jerusalem,” Gelvin writes. “Given the choice of take it or leave it, Arafat left it.”
In 2001, four Palestinian protesters were killed by Israeli police. Thus began the Second Intifada, and a tragically familiar pattern emerged.
Hamas and other militants committed acts of terrorism, including suicide bombings.
In response, the Israeli government ordered extra-judicial assassinations, launched reprisal raids into Palestinian towns, destroyed the homes and orchards of families of accused terrorists, imposed checkpoints outside every population center and refugee camp throughout the territories, and closed off the economic links between the territories and Israel.
“Although three-quarters of the 4,000 who died during this intifada were Palestinian…these numbers were drowned out by the horror roused by the terrorist outrages,” Gelvin writes. “In their effort to ‘root out the terrorist infrastructure,’ Israelis waged gun battles with armed Palestinians, blew up houses, made mass arrests, and deployed helicopter gunships, tanks, and bulldozers to reduce whole city blocks to rubble.”
After 9/11 and the “Global War on Terrorism” Israel had much more latitude to really take the gloves off in its response to Palestinian terrorism.
This was also the context in which, under prime minister Ariel Sharon, Israel began constructing a barrier in the West Bank, which the Israelis call a “security fence” and Palestinians call a “separation wall.”
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| Barrier wall in the West Bank, 2004. |
Palestinians, human rights groups, and most of the international community have condemned the construction of the barrier for a number of reasons.
“The building of the fence requires the uprooting of Palestinians, the confiscation of their lands, and the severing of villages from lands under cultivation,” Gelvin writes.”During the first phase of construction about 150,000 Palestinians found their lives disrupted (farmers separated from their fields, workers and students from job sites and schools, doctors and patients from medical facilities, villagers from wells, etc.)."
Hamas Takes Control of Gaza
In 2004, Ariel Sharon announced plans for the withdrawal of all Israeli settlements from Gaza.
“Some Israelis argued that there was little reason to retain an overcrowded, impoverished, and hostile territory to which 50,000 soldiers had to be deployed to protect 7,500 settlers,” Gelvin writes.
After Israel “disengaged” from Gaza in 2005, “Israel continued to control Gaza’s border, airspace, trade, and electrical grid, as well as the flow of workers and exports to Israel and travel between Gaza and the West Bank.”
And then, in 2006, another round of depressingly familiar conflict began when eight Palestinian militants (including Hamas) killed two Israeli soldiers, wounded three, and kidnapped one.
The Israelis demanded the release the hostage and launched furious air strikes on both Gaza and Lebanon, followed by ground assaults.
“By the time the smoke had cleared, large swaths of Gaza and Lebanon lay in ruins,” Gelvin writes. “The war resulted in the deaths of about 300 Palestinian civilians, along with 1,200 Lebanese and 44 Israelis.”
Kidnappings and rocket attacks by Palestinian militants, and disproportionate reprisals by the Israel Defense Forces is the awful pattern that continues today.
In 2007, after Hamas candidates were elected to parliament in Gaza, Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip, severing the territory from the West Bank.
“Now there were two governments claiming to represent Palestinians–the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and a Hamas-controlled government in Gaza,” Gelvin writes.
Also in 2004, long time PLO leader Yasir Arafat died, and was succeeded by Mahmoud Abbas, as head of the Palestinian Authority.
According to Gelvin, “Hamas government is autocratic, engaging in arbitrary arrests and detentions, censorship, and torture. There has been no election in Gaza since 2006.”
The Great March of Return
In 2013, the Palestinian Authority officially declared itself the State of Palestine, with Mahmoud Abbas as its first president.
Following another outbreak of violence in 2014, many younger Gazans sought a different tactic.
“Beginning in March 2018 tens of thousands of mostly young, unaffiliated Gazans peacefully marched to the separation barrier demanding their right of return and an end to the blockade of Gaza,” Gelvin writes. “Dubbed the ‘Great March of Return,’ protests continued every Friday through 2018 in spite of being met with lethal Israeli firepower that killed 189.”
In response, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas took the Palestinian case for statehood to the United Nations General Assembly: “By a vote of 138 to 9 (with 41 abstentions) the United Nations accorded Palestine the status of non-member observer state, a status held by the Vatican city-state.”
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| Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. |
This gave Palestine membership in the United Nations Economic, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court (ICC). Being a member of the ICC has allowed Palestine to lodge complaints against individuals it accuses of crimes, which it has done against Benjamin Netanyahu and others.
The Trump Plan
Under the presidency of Donald Trump, the United States made bold moves that strengthened the relationship between Israel and the US, and further alienated Palestinian leadership.
“Israel’s anti-Oslo prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had a close personal relationship with the father of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son and point-man for the Middle East peace portfolio,” Gelvin writes.
Under Trump the American embassy was moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem (a historically contested city) and recognized that city as Israel’s capital. He also recognized Israel’s 1981 annexation of the Golan Heights, another contested area.
Mike Pompeo, secretary of state under Trump, announced that the US no longer considered Israeli settlements to be inconsistent with international law, a startling break from numerous United Nations conclusions.
Trump also cut all US funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), of which there are currently around 1.7 million, thus cutting off $200 billion in aid to Palestinians for a variety of programs, including health and education.
Then Trump announced his “Peace to Prosperity” plan for Israel and Palestine.
“Trump’s plan includes a laundry list of giveaways to Israel. Among other stipulations, the plan calls for Israel to annex (establish permanent Israeli sovereignty over) West Bank territory containing 97 percent of Israeli settlers, along with the Jordan Valley (with the exception of Jericho and its surrounding area). It calls for Jerusalem to be recognized as Israel’s indivisible and sovereign capital. It calls for Israel to retain full security control over all territory west of the Jordan river. It denies Palestinians any right of return to Israel and, once a peace treaty is signed, it terminates Palestinian refugee status as well as UNRWA,” Gelvin writes. “In return, the Palestinians are to be granted sovereignty over a demilitarized state with no control over its borders or airspace."
Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas responded to Trump’s plan by declaring “a thousand no’s” and by renouncing the commitments made by the Palestinians under Oslo.
“Netanyahu concluded rightly that he could count on the support of the Trump White House in his quest to settle all outstanding Palestinian claims in Israel’s favor, crush the Palestinian national movement, and unilaterally fix Israel’s borders,” Gelvin writes. “Israel has a history of underestimating the resilience of Palestinian nationalism and Palestinian resistance. This is a mistake it may be making once again.”
The book I read came out before Biden's presidency, so it doesn't include what he did (or didn't do) on this issue.
Which brings us to the current Israel-Hamas war.
