When and how did the Palestinian issue begin?

The modern state of Israel was established in May 1948 after the Holocaust and World War II, but the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians goes back even further.

Historians and commentators differ on when this chapter of history began.

In his series Al-Nakba (2008) on Al Jazeera, documentary filmmaker Rawan al-Zaman begins his story with Napoleon Bonaparte, who proposed a Jewish homeland in Palestine in 1799 in the context of the Siege of Acre during his war against the Ottoman Empire.

The French commander was ultimately defeated, but his attempt to establish a European stronghold in the Middle East was revived by Britain 41 years later when Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston wrote to his ambassador in Istanbul, asking him to “press on the Sultan”. Urge him to open Palestine to Jewish immigrants to counter the influence of Egyptian governor Muhammad Ali.

Although only three thousand Jews lived in Palestine at the time, wealthy French aristocrats such as Baron Edmond, James de Rothschild began sponsoring others from Europe to join them and establish settlements, most notably ( The city) is Rishon Latzion, founded in 1882.

Austrian writer Nathan Birnbaum coined the term ‘Zionism’ in 1885 when Jews, mainly from Eastern Europe, continued to arrive in Palestine.

Austro-Hungarian journalist Dr. Theodor Herzl’s book ‘The Jewish State’ came out a decade later, envisioning the establishment of such a (country) with the advent of the 20th century.
According to Al Jazeera’s Al Naqba series, Herzl’s friend Max Nordo sent two rabbis to Palestine to investigate the prospects of the prospect, who received the reply that ‘the bride is beautiful but she is married to another man. ‘ However, there is a dispute about the validity of this answer.

Birnbaum, Herzl, and Nordo convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897 to discuss their dream of an independent Jewish state and their plans to lobby the European powers for its realization.

By 1907 Britain was considering the need for a ‘buffer state’ to consolidate its dominance in the Middle East. British Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, a biochemist, went to occupied Jerusalem at the time and bought land near Jaffa to establish a company. Within three years, nearly 10,000 dunams of land, a measure of land equivalent to an acre, had been acquired in the northern Palestinian region of Marj bin Amir, forcing 60,000 local farmers to give way to Jews from Europe and Yemen. .

As the Jewish militia – Hishamar – was established to protect the growing number of settlements, Palestinian pharmacist Najib Nasr launched a newspaper called Al-Carmel, which aimed to warn (Palestinians) against what he considered a colonial force. They understood.

From the start of the First World War, Britain began to distrust the ‘Muslims’, justifying increasing the Allied presence in Palestine to strengthen its grip on the Suez Canal.

In January 1915, Liberal Party politician Herbert Samuel produced his secret memo ‘The Future of Palestine’, which was circulated to the Cabinet, in which he advocated annexation and the gradual creation of an independent Jewish state under the auspices of the British Empire. .

Samuel’s recommendations were discussed privately the following year by diplomats Sir Mark Sykes and François-Georges Picot, who were the architects of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which set the limits of British and French influence in the event of the end of Ottoman rule.

Following the British government’s declaration on November 9, 1917, a letter between David Lloyd George, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, and Jewish community leader Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild formally supported the establishment of a ‘National Home for the Jews’ in Palestine. was announced.

Rothschild, Samuel, Sykes and Weismann had addressed a celebratory gathering in London a month earlier. After which, on December 11, 1917, General Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem.

After the defeat of the Kaiser (Emperor) and the end of World War I, US President Woodrow Wilson issued a report on the non-Turkish territories of the declining Ottoman Empire, with the help of academic Dr. Henry King and intellectual Charles Crane, in which It turned out that about 90 percent of the non-Jewish population of Palestine was “vehemently opposed” to the Zionist plan.

The authors warned of the intensity of feeling and argued that Jewish immigration should be restricted in the wider interests of peace, but were largely ignored by the international community, their conclusions suppressed until 1922.

At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Lt. Col. TE Lawrence (known as Lawrence of Arabia) mediated the signing of an agreement between Weizmann, the leader of the Zionist delegation, and his Arab counterpart, Prince Faisal bin Hussein, in which the principle It was agreed to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine and an independent Arab nation in the Middle East.

In 1922 the League of Nations recognized the British Mandate to govern Palestine under the jurisdiction of Samuel, now High Commissioner.

The League of Nations recognized the British Mandate to govern Palestine under the jurisdiction of Samuel, now High Commissioner, who was instrumental in enacting at least 100 legislative measures to maintain the Jewish presence. These (measures) included recognizing Hebrew as an official language and allowing a separate Jewish education system and a Jewish army. The Hebrew University and a labor union ‘Hastadrut’ existed until 1925.

As the decade wore on, mass protests against Jewish immigration erupted as the Palestinian movement unsuccessfully tried to resist and confront the usurping occupation backed by the military and diplomatic power of imperial Britain.

When Balfour visited occupied Jerusalem in August 1929, Palestinians waved black flags and about 250 Jews and Arabs died and many were injured in a tragedy at Dewar Baraq (the Wailing Wall), known as the Baraq Uprising. known as. Samuel’s successor, Sir John Chancellor, had three Muslim men executed for their part in the riots.

But the protests continued and intensified in 1933, when more and more Jewish immigrants arrived (to Israel) to make homes for themselves, rising from 4,000 in 1931 to 62,000 in 1935.

In the same year, the Muslim revolutionary leader Azuddin al-Qassam was shot dead by British soldiers in the hills above Jenin.

Izzuddin Al-Qassam (Public Domain)

In 1936, the intensity of opposition to the British colonial government led to the imposition of the Balfour Declaration on those who denounced it and the subsequent six-month general strike, an impressive feat of organization that resulted in Palestinian homes were destroyed.

In 1939, much of the world was once again at war against Adolf Hitler’s ‘Nazi Germany’, Hitler’s Germany was blamed for the massacre and execution of six million Jews in concentration camps.

Shortly after US involvement in the conflict, US-Zionist relations were strengthened by a conference held at the Biltmore Hotel in New York in 1942. The incident comes against the backdrop of years of activity by the Irgun, an armed Zionist paramilitary force that has been attacking local Arab groups in Palestine.

Irgun is notorious for the July 22, 1946, bombing of the King David Hotel in occupied Jerusalem, in which 91 people were killed, and the April 9, 1948, ‘Deir Yassin Massacre’ in collaboration with another organization, the Leahy (or Stern Gang). was carried out, in which 107 people were killed.

That summer, an organization called Leahy assassinates Swedish diplomat Fok Bernadotte, who was sent by the United Nations to mediate the conflict.

After the Allied victories in Europe and the Pacific in 1945, the world powers turned their attention to ending the violence in Palestine.

A two-state solution to the disputed territory came about in 1947, when the United Nations General Assembly voluntarily passed Resolution 181, proposing the creation of a new state from Palestine west of the Jordan River: a Jewish state. And for other Arabs.

The resolution, passed after a vote reportedly under diplomatic pressure from the United States, was rejected by the Palestinians, who argued that the Jewish population currently owns no more than 5.5 percent of the land and should have no international legal status.56 There is no right to receive percentage. Jewish prosperity met with Arab hostility and civil war broke out.

On May 14, 1948, with the end of the British Mandate, the State of Israel was established under the leadership of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, which was immediately recognized by the United States and the Soviet Union.

But the bloody Arab-Israeli war broke out. In which three thousand resistance fighters rose up against the new nation and seven million Palestinian people had to flee from the fighting and seek refuge in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza.

The date of the displacement of the Palestinian people is still celebrated annually as ‘Nakba Day’, which is Arabic for ‘catastrophe’, and is a day on which Palestinians hold speeches, rallies and Waving the keys to the homes they were forced to leave behind and still hoping to return to.

In December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 194, which recognized that the Palestinian people ‘who wish to return to their homes and live in peace with their neighbors should be given the right to do so as soon as possible. ‘

Israel rejected the resolution as a threat to the new state, especially the Jewish population.

A year later, the Chamber establishes the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to further assist the displaced.

Between these two events, Israel signed ceasefire agreements with its neighbors in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt.

Jordan assumed administrative control of the West Bank in 1950 and Egypt occupied Gaza, an arrangement that lasted until the 1967 Six-Day War when Israeli forces conquered the territories.

Prior to this, violence continued intermittently. Notable massacres took place in the villages of Qalqilya, Kafr Qasim and Khan Younis in 1956 and in Al Samo in 1966.

The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in Cairo in 1964, dedicated to fighting for the ‘liberation of Palestine’ through armed revolution rather than focusing on rights issues, a position that the PLO did not abandon until 1993. Which is designated as a terrorist organization by both Israel and the United States. He was recognized by the Arab League as the sole representative of the Palestinian people in 1974.

In 1967, Israel’s military advances on the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Egypt led to fresh bloodshed and the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242 ordering it to withdraw from the occupied territories. This advice was ignored.

After the Yom Kippur War, the Security Council passes another Resolution 338 calling for a cease-fire and for Israel to withdraw from the 1967 invasion. Israel again refuses.

Towns from the Sea of ​​Galilee to the Negev faced riots, attacks and more violent reprisals following the Israeli occupation of the land on March 30, 1976, a date Palestinians observe as ‘Land Day’.

Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser brokering a deal between Yasser Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan at an emergency meeting of the Arab League in September 1970 (Public Domain).

A clear breakthrough for peace in the Middle East came on September 17, 1978, when Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin met with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and signed the Camp David Accords at President Jimmy Carter’s Maryland retreat.

One of the framework agreements promoted harmonious relations between the two countries and won the Nobel Peace Prize for the signatories, but the other, on the future of Palestine on disputed territories, was condemned by the United Nations for reaching consensus without the involvement of a Palestinian delegation. Condemned by

Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, while at the end of that decade, the first uprising in the Palestinian territories (Antaqzah) sparked a protest movement against the occupation.

However, further progress towards peace was made when the PLO accepted UN resolutions 242 and 338 formally recognizing Israel. In 1991 and 1992, negotiations again stalled.

Then, in the summer of 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo I Accords, which established the Palestinian Transitional Self-Government, the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority, and the withdrawal of the Israeli Defense Forces from the territories. were organized which are still considered largely occupied.

A second accord, Oslo II, was reached in 1995, granting autonomy to the Palestinians in parts of the West Bank and Gaza, but again without statehood.

Israel recaptured West Bank cities in 2002 as a result of an uncertain ceasefire that lasted until the second intifada, a destabilizing event that worsened after Arafat’s death in 2004. did, which was a major blow to the Palestinian cause.

Violence has escalated since then, with Israel declaring war on Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 and launching repeated attacks on Hamas in Gaza, including Operation Cast Lead (2008), Operation Pillar of Defense (2012) and Operation Includes Protective Edge (2014). In 2017 and 2018, Nakba Day saw further violence, the latter severe enough to prompt a UN war crimes investigation.

The situation became more tense after Donald Trump was elected US president, the former reality television star (Trump) befriended Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to occupied Jerusalem.

Trump also cut US funding for UNRWA and tasked his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, with developing a plan to bring peace to the Middle East, which the junior property developer believed would After reading at least 25 books on this subject one can achieve this without bias.

Tensions have since flared up again after Hamas sent fighters across the border last week and fired thousands of rockets at Israel. Israel has responded by saying that its country is ‘at war’ and has responded by firing at targets in Gaza.