The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

A People's War

Beverley Milton-Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134129119
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is one of the most enduring and complex in the modern world. But, why did the conflict break out? Who is demanding what, and why is peace so difficult to achieve?

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict tackles the subject and analyses the conflict from its historical roots in the late nineteenth century to the present attempts at conflict resolution in the twenty-first century.

Framing the debate and analysis around issues such as Zionism, Palestinian nationalism, international peace efforts, the refugees, state-building, democracy and religious opposition and highlighted by first hand quotes and sources of the conflict from its major participants, Beverley Milton-Edwards explores the deep impact of the conflict on regional politics in the Middle East and why the enmity between Palestinians and Israelis has become a number one global issue drawing in the world's most important global actors.

An essential insight into the complexities of one of the world's most enduring conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, this textbook is designed to make a complex subject accessible to all. Key features include a chronology of events and annotated further reading at the end of each chapter.

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is an ideal and authoritative introduction into aspects of politics in Israel, among the Palestinians – a vitally important issue for those studying the politics of the Middle East.

1
Roots of conflict

Chapter outline

		• Ottoman idyll? 10
		• Zionism 13
		• The Palestinian nationalist ‘awakening’ 17
		• The First World War and its consequences 21
		• Balfour bombshell 23
		• Parallel points 27
		• Further reading 29

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is one of the most enduring of the modern era and it continues to entangle and engage the international community to the present day. The ongoing battle between the Israelis and Palestinians is rooted in a struggle between the two peoples over land, national identity, political power and the politics of self-determination. The initial context of the conflict lies in the decline of Ottoman Muslim power and the opposition from within this society from a new breed of nationalist. European territorial ambitions and the emergence of new notions of territorial nationalism that would come to bind both the Palestinian and Jewish people to ambitions for independence and statehood in the same territory are also clearly significant factors shaping the period that can be considered as epitomizing the roots of the conflict.

By the late nineteenth century the leaders of the Ottoman Empire, who were based in Constantinople (Istanbul) in Turkey, had ruled over much of the Arab world for centuries. Palestine and its principal city of Jerusalem had been characterized by Ottoman rule for some 500 years. The subject inhabitants of the territories known as Palestine included native Muslims, Christians and Jews. While the Muslims constituted the majority this religiously mixed population had lived in relative harmony for hundreds of years but this situation was soon to change.

This chapter, then, will outline the historical background to the conflict. It will begin with an examination of late-nineteenth-century Palestine – an Ottoman province and largely rural society. It will then outline emerging discourses on Jewish nationalism and the ascendance of Palestinian national identity. It will trace the events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in respect of rising European interest in Palestine and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and its impact in the arena of the Middle East. This is because the region became subject to the competing strategic and other ambitions of European powers, of Britain and France in particular. Moreover, the dominant Ottoman Turkish authorities sided with Germany during the war, leading to a series of battles and revolts in its empire territories of the Middle East between and on behalf of the warring parties.

The writing will draw out parallel points of identity issues and politics between Jews and Arabs and their nascent nationalist ideologies – including Zionism and Palestinian nationalism. The chapter will address growing tensions between the Jews and Arabs associated with Jewish land settlement and growing Palestinian frustration and revolt at British mediation of the incipient conflict. This means that the roots of the conflict are outlined. It will detail Western rivalry in the region during the First World War and its effects on Palestine. This will thus include examination of French–British machinations, including the Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916, in addition to an explanation of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 as well as the earlier Hussein–McMahon Correspondence of 1915. This gives a dimension of much needed political analysis in terms of theories of state, nation and colonial ambition as well as attitudes towards the region.

Ottoman idyll?

The story of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is rooted in the last decades of Ottoman Turkish rule over Palestine. The Ottomans ruled over Palestinian territory for hundreds of years but in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth events conspired to bring change instead of Ottoman continuity. Although ethnic difference may have divided the Ottoman Turkish rulers from their Arab subordinates the common faith of Islam had largely united the Middle East. Jews and Christians, minority subjects, also enjoyed a close relationship with the Ottoman authorities, where the usual strictures about non-Muslim subjects were often overlooked (Levy, 2002).

This common unity of Muslim faith between Turk and Arab was, however, challenged by growing foreign infiltration and involvement in Palestine, leading to a variety of European rivalries and contests, which often cost the local population dearly. In this respect matters in Palestine were a mirror of events elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire as its grip on power declined in the face of growing European penetration. Economic as well as political and religious imperatives largely explain the changes that would beset the area. Such changes would impact on a local population that was mostly rural, Muslim, and had largely contented itself with a way of life that they had enjoyed as a result of centuries of relatively stable Ottoman rule.

The population of Palestine, as previously noted, was mostly Muslim, but did include other religious minorities, such as Christians and Jews, in major cities and towns such as Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Jaffa and Hebron. By the 1870s this minor cosmopolitan mix was described as a patchwork quilt of different cultures, religions and ways of life:

spawned by the endless waves of invasion [which] had produced a network of anarchic bonhomie where Maghribi mystics, Armenian craftsmen, Talmudic scholars, British mercenaries, Turkish gendarmerie and Greek orthodox traders lived side by side with the merchants, landowners and religious elite who made up the upper echelon of Sunni Muslim society.

(Smith, 1984:8)

By the 1870s–80s Ottoman-ruled Palestine also included a highly stratified societal structure presided over by the rulers from Istanbul and their local agents, sometimes referred to as the Effendi class. They oversaw a series of reforms called the tanzimaat (1839–76) that were meant to modernize education, the status of minorities, the bureaucracy of state, political and religious institutions and law and order (Abu Manneh, 1990). The initial intent behind such reforms was also to reassert the hegemony of Ottoman power in its Palestinian province at a time when rebellion, banditry, lawlessness and general insecurity were said to characterize the area.

European travellers at the time often described at length the extent to which lawlessness prevailed in the Holy Land. In the 1880s William Thomson remarks in his lengthy account of travels in ‘The Land and the Book’ that journeys in and around the environs of Jerusalem had improved considerably as a result of Ottoman reforms after ‘Ibrahim Pasha had broken up the nest of robbers’. For before such changes, ‘no-one could reside outside the walls of Jerusalem for fear of those lawless robbers, nor were the city gates kept open after sunset’ (Thomson, 1883:61). Thomson was just one of a succession of Europeans who by the 1880s were having an impact on Palestinian society and the way it was represented back in Europe. The establishment of myriad competing European missions and religious societies, pilgrims, tourists, artists, writers, poets, foreign trade, and the settlement of new communities in Palestine increasingly led to contact and impact on the local landed and notable families. Inevitably the politics and the economy of Palestine began to alter. New class alliances and interests emerged to challenge and ultimately diminish the influence of traditional elements such as the tribal chiefs and heads of clans. Urbanization and modernization gave rise to new elements within society – Muslim, Christian, Jewish – who prospered through trade and commerce and educated their children in modern and/or European style schools, missions and other institutions.

Meanwhile the vast majority of the population – the peasants (fellahin) from the many hundreds of villages and hamlets that typified the area – were part of a social and economic system of clan and tribe and loyalty to local lords (Muslih, 1988:47). Local networks of power and patronage were further challenged by the impact of Ottoman reforms, which created new structures of power and challenged the hegemony of village sheikhs or mukhtars. There is some disagreement on the extent to which the Ottomans were successful in altering power relations within the village but there can be no doubting the impacts on village life in general that the last decades of the Ottoman Empire had (Gerber, 1986:30).

By 1900 immigration to Palestine by Jews also led to the establishment of about 20 new exclusive communities or colonies where some 5,000 Jewish immigrants lived (Smith 1984:15). In the wake of the anti-Jewish Russian pogroms of 1881–84 and 1903–06 thousands of Jews chose to escape to Palestine. These waves of immigration were known in Hebrew as aliyah (ascent). This concept of aliyah, of an ‘ascent’ to the Holy Land by Jews through immigration, became one of the fundamental tenets of modern Zionism and was later enshrined in the ‘Law of Return’ by the state of Israel. The first waves of immigration to Palestine during this period were made for ideological, pragmatic and spiritual reasons. The first aliyah dates from the period of 1882–1903. Jews came to Palestine to settle the land. During this time the majority of these Zionist immigrants came from Eastern Europe or Russia and they established new communities (moshav) mostly in the countryside. They did, however, also found new towns such as Rishon LeZion and Zikhron Ya’akov.

The second aliyah (1904–14) was much more ideologically motivated by socialist Zionist ideals and it was from this group of immigrants that the first socialist utopian community known as kibbutz (gathering) was founded. These collective communities would come to form a cornerstone of the state of Israel as well as modern Zionism. The kibbutz communities were interpreted as a symbol of redemption Zionism where the modern Jew could fully reach his or her potential free of the shackles of anti-Semitism and oppression that had dogged their experiences as a minority and Diaspora community in Europe and Russia. In this way, as will be explained in Chapter 3, the differences between Labour Zionism with its socialist ideals and epitomized by David Ben Gurion, right-wing revisionist Zionism led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky and the religious Zionist community also became apparent (Segev, 2001:209–10).

The kibbutzim are often described as one of the largest and most successful examples of collective community. This is where the realization of the ideal of socialism and Zionism in Palestine had been successfully achieved. The kibbutz implied a form of communal living, which in the early years of state independence gave rise to a generation of political, military and other leaders. The settler founders of the kibbutz movement also saw the land that they settled as the means to the foundation of a Jewish nation and state based on the principles of freedom and equality. The kibbutzniks, as they became known, were considered to be ‘pioneers’, farming and growing on Palestine’s ‘empty lands’ and ‘making the desert bloom’. With a desire for the establishment of a self-sufficient utopian enterprise centred on the Jew it was little surprise that contacts with the indigenous Arab population would be tenuous at best. And although the number of kibbutniks was relatively small they were considered to be the ‘guardians of Zionist land, and their patterns of settlement would to a great extent determine the country’s borders … the kibbutzim also had a powerful effect on the Zionist self-image’ (Segev, 2001:249). One critic, however, opines that such projections ‘leave out the facts that … Arabs were never admitted as members, that cheap (Arab or Oriental Jew) labor is essential to kibbutz functioning, that “socialist” kibbutzim were and are established on land confiscated from Arabs’ (Said, 1980:21). The same was true of later developments within Labour Zionism such as the formation of the Jewish Labour Federation (the Histadrut) in 1920; ‘its objectives were considered synonymous with those of the Zionist movement’ (Segev, 2001:209). Hence the rights of Arab labour were basically excluded. The fact is that these early waves of settlement, on lands that had been owned or dwelled on by Palestinians for generations, contributed to a nascent tension and hostility between these Zionist settlers and the indigenous Palestinian population. Critics consider this to be a form of colonization by an alien group of settlers seeking economic output from the enterprise. This emphasis on the nationalist, Zionist and religious sentiments behind early Jewish settlement overlooks the pressing need to escape persecution in the European continent.

Zionism

The history of the Jewish people, like Christianity and Islam, is intimately tied to the Holy Land or Palestine. The spiritual and historical chronicles of Judaism are rooted in experiences that took place in and around the lands of Palestine. The ancient kingdoms of the Jewish kings were located in cities such as Jerusalem. For those that are seeking it, Palestine is a repository of Jewish history, spirituality, hopes, dreams and aspirations for the reunification of a people tied to each other through the profession of faith made modern as a form of ethnic and distinct identity. Persecution of the Jewish Diaspora communities of Europe and Russia, typified by the Dreyfus Affair in France in the 1880s and the Russian pogroms of 1881 and 1903, clearly stirred some to think anew about the promise of unification of the Jewish people. These events served to underscore the pervasive anti-Semitic prejudices at large in many European societies and the belief that integration or assimilation would never truly materialize. The Jews would always be considered the ‘other’ or the ‘outsider’ or a threat to notions of overarching loyalty in the newly em...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Roots of conflict
• 2 Between the wars
• 3 Palestine after the Holocaust
• 4 Israel reborn
• 5 The dispossessed
• 6 The occupation generation
• 7 The war of the stones and guns
• 8 A global concern
• 9 Moving from zero
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Index