MIDDLE EAST ISRAEL-PALESTINE CRISIS
The Palestine-Israel Conflict: Roadmap to Nowhere
“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tragedy; it is a clash between right and right. And, therefore it’s not black and white. Sometimes, recently it is indeed a clash between wrong and wrong. It is not as simple as fascism was.” — Amos Oz
Palestine and Israel have always been prominent players in the arena of the Middle East political conundrum. Their ancient and modern history has often been marked by frequent political conflict and belligerent land seizures because of its significance to several major world religions. Both Israel and Palestine sits at a valuable geographic crossroads between Africa and Asia where Israel is the world’s only Jewish state, located just east of the Mediterranean Sea and on the other hand Palestine, comprising parts of modern Israel and the Palestinian territories of the Gaza Strip (along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea) and the West Bank (west of the Jordan River). The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become more about a political power struggle to control the same piece of land.
The historical memory of Palestine had been greatly influenced by numerous rulers, including the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Fatimids, Seljuk Turks, Crusaders, Egyptians, and Mamelukes. From about 1517 to 1917, most of the region was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. Britain took control of Palestine from Ottoman Empire after its defeat in World War I in 1918. At that time, the land was majorly occupied by a Jewish minority and Arab majority. Tensions between the two peoples grew when the League of Nations issued a British mandate for Palestine — a document that included provisions for establishing a Jewish national homeland in Palestine — which came into force in 1923.
Between the 1920s and 1940s, Palestine witnessed huge migration of the Jewish people fleeing from persecution in Europe and seeking a homeland after the Holocaust of WWII. The swelling Jewish population in the region fuelled the fresh violence between the Arabs and the Jews. In 1947, the United Nations voted for the division of Palestine into two separate states (Jewish and Arab), with Jerusalem becoming an international city. That plan was accepted by Jewish leaders but many Palestinian Arabs vehemently opposed it. Arab groups largely argued about the fact that they represented the majority of the population in certain regions and the same should be reflected when it comes to the division of territories.
The end of the British mandate over Palestine followed by the Israeli Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948, led to full-scale war (1948 Arab–Israeli War). 1948 conflict opened new memorabilia in the struggle between Jews and Palestinian Arabs, which now became a regional contest involving nation-states entwined between diplomatic, political, and economic interests. The 1948 Arab-Israeli War involved Israel and five Arab nations — Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon. The actual reason behind this whole conflict was to prevent the establishment of the newly formed Israeli state. By the war’s end in July 1949, Israel also gained control over almost the entire region laid out for the Arabs state by the former British mandate. While the remaining territories, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were occupied by Egypt and Jordan.
In Israel, the war became a remembrance of its War of Independence. In the Arab world, it came to be known as the Nakbah (“Catastrophe”) because of the large-scale death of innocent civilians and displacement of refugees from the war.
In 1967, the Six-Day War was triggered during a volatile period of diplomatic friction and confrontation between Israel and its neighbors. In April 1967, the clashes worsened after Israel and Syria fought a ferocious air and artillery engagement where six Syrian fighter jets got shot down by the Israeli Air Force in retaliation. It nevertheless stirred Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to enter the war where they dismissed a United Nations peacekeeping force that had been patrolling the border with Israel for over a decade. In May 1967 Egypt joined hands with Jordan to fight Israel on a united front. Israel answered this apparent Arab rush to war through a pre-emptive aerial attack against Egypt, destroying its air force to the ground. As it came to be called, the Six-Day War resulted in major land gains for Israel as it took control of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, drove out Jordanian forces from the West Bank, and pushed back Syrian forces from the Golan Heights.
Palestinian soil had witnessed series of uprisings time and again. One such popular uprising of Palestinians are two popular Intifadas(in Arabic meaning “shaking off”), one in between 1987–1991(First Intifada) and the other between 2000–2005(Al-Aqsa Intifada) aimed at ending Israel’s occupation and creating an independent Palestinian state against Israeli repression including “beatings, shootings, killings, house demolitions, deportations in the Israeli-occupied territories.
In 1987 after the beginning of the first Palestinian Intifada, Hamas came into existence as a Palestinian militant Islamist group against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. After 2005, Hamas has also started actively participating in the Palestinian political process. It won the legislative elections in 2006, before reinforcing its power in Gaza. Hamas's refusal to recognize Israel as an independent state has made it impossible to have peaceful negotiations with Israel. Hamas is considered by Israel and 12 other countries to be a terrorist organization. Hamas and Israel fought each other in several bloody wars, starting from Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, Operation Pillar of Defence in November 2012, Operation Protective Edge in July 2014, including the current ongoing military retaliation between Israel and Gaza.
The issue already lasting more than half a century. What makes it such a complex topic to even approach is that it is packed under all these layers of historical dust. No matter how hard you try to break it down, you always going to leave some crucial part out of context making it harder to decide who is right and who is wrong depending upon when you start measuring time. On top of it, involvement of religion has never calmed any situation when there is a clash.
At the end of the day, who owns sense of responsibilty to shoulder the burden of forgotten suffering of countless number of children and innocent civilians caught in a vicious cycle of wars over a piece of land.
