The Arab-Israeli Conflict

Almost 60 years ago a story started, a story of creation, filled both with joy and sadness. The state of Israel came into being, and with that a conflict which seems to never end! Rights were taken away from one side, to be given to the other one. While Israelis can be proud today of their success in creating a state for themselves, the Palestinians curse the day when their story turned into tragedy and their lives fell on the hands of Israeli occupying force. Charles Smith does a great job in giving a brief but yet thorough history of this story in his book Palestine and Arab-Israeli Conflict. In his narrative, Smith by understanding the complexity of the issue, goes a step beyond the simple history and aided by original documents shows how and why the attempts to reach a negotiated settlement achieved no positive result. Following that line, in this paper I will explore the reasons for the failure to achieve an agreement, thus, a solution to the conflict, and argue that the lack of incentive and the involved parties' contribution to the idea of the conflict's intractability are the main reasons behind that failure.

With nationalism then moving across Europe, some Zionist Jews believed that religious and racial ties among Jews were necessary to establish a Jewish “nationality” and bequeathed the so-called “Jewish nation state” with national rights including the right to separate existence in a foreign occupied territory and the right to form a Jewish state. “Jewish nationalism” would be the driving force for colonization. The objective of Zionism was described as: “The object of Zionism is to establish for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.” Theodor Herzl, (1860-1904) a visionary behind modern Zionism had written in his diary after the First Zionist Congress in Basel: “If I were to sum up the Basle Congress in one word — which I shall not do openly — it would be this: at Basle I founded the Jewish State. If I were to say this to-day, I would be met by universal laughter. In five years, perhaps, and certainly in fifty, everyone will see it.” Herzl's philosophy found tremendous support from the poverty-stricken Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia.

VIIth International Symposium on Social Sciences of the Turkic World , 2023

After the First World War, with the establishment of the Republic of Turkiye and with the Treaty of Lausanne, Palestine, one of the former Ottoman lands, came under the mandate system within the framework of Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant. With the abolition of the League of Nations and the establishment of the United Nations, Palestine, has been taken under the Chapter XII of the United Nations` Charter within the International Trusteeship System. The United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 on 29 November 1947, decided to establish two separate states, Arab and Jewish, in Palestine, which was under a single mandate. After the authorization by the United Nations General Assembly, the Jews published a declaration of independence one day before the end of the British mandate in Palestine on 14 May 1948, and announced the establishment of the state of Israel to the world. On 15 May 1948, the First Israel-Arab war began. As a result of the war, Israel took control of about 60% of the area proposed for the Arab (Palestine) state, as well as the area proposed by the United Nations for the Jewish state. On 4 March 1949, Israel was accepted as a member of the United Nations with the approval of the Security Council by the Resolution 273 of the General Assembly. After the First Arab-Israeli War, the United Nations Security Council did not demand Israel's withdrawal from the territories that it occupied. The United Nations Security Council demanded that Israel to withdraw from only the territories it occupied during the Second Arab-Israeli War in 1967 with its resolution 242. Today there is a misconception that the boundaries of Israel before the Second Arab -Israel War as legal.

Palestine: Past and Present, 2019

Palestine has had a long and tumultuous history. Recent years have seen a number of anniversaries marking inauspicious events that would have profound impacts on the future of the land long-known as Palestine. Central among these included the centenary of the First World War, which raged from 1914-1918. While most accounts of the Great War tend to focus on Europe, the war had profoundly devasting effects in the Middle East and set in chain a number of processes that continue to shape the region until the present day – and, perhaps, none more so than in the case of Palestine. Throughout the course of the war, a number of momentous events transpired which laid the genesis for the ongoing conflict in Palestine, including, but not limited to, the 1915-16 McMahon-Husayn Correspondence, the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, the 1917 Balfour Declaration, and the November 1917 capture of Jerusalem by British forces followed by the subsequent conquest of the rest of Palestine. After the war, the newly-formed League of Nations bequeathed Britain the Mandate of Palestine – a thinly-veiled façade for European colonialism in the Middle East – which endured until 1947-48. During most of the inter-war period, Zionist immigration exponentially increased under British patronage allowing the Zionist movement a firm foothold in the Holy Land. 15 May 2018 marked the 70th anniversary of al-Nakba (The Catastrophe), the Palestinian day of mourning commemorating the ethnic cleansing of over 700,000 Palestinians from their traditional homeland, a product of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Israelis celebrate the same events as Independence Day, the culmination of the unlikely success of the Zionist movement - a settler colonial movement aimed at creating an independent state for Jews in the lands of British Mandate Palestine in the face of widespread anti-Semitism in Europe. The diametrically opposed interpretations of 1947-48 lay at the heart of the ongoing conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. The introduction examines the history of the Palestine-Israel conflict until 1967 in order to contextualises the chapters that follows.

Belleten, 2019

Israeli history textbooks published since 1948 dwell at length on the Ottoman government’s relations with the Zionists and its policies toward the Palestinian Jews. Explaining the Ottomans’ opposition to Jewish settlement in Palestine, the textbooks acknowledge their concern that a non-Muslim majority could emerge there to demand autonomy or independence, as had happened earlier in the Balkans. However, they sharply criticize the wartime policies of Jamal Pasha against the Jewish community in Palestine. Although they concede that the majority of the community remained loyal to the Ottoman government, they mainly attribute this to their fears of a harsh retaliation from the part of the government. In contrast, they consider the pro-British activities of Nili and the Hebrew Battalions as the right kind of investment for the future of the community.

Revista Estudos do Século XX, 2008

Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 2007

This article analyzes Jewish and Arab national formations by exploring dynamics surrounding their border-zone community of Arabized-Jews during the first half of the 20th century. As the internal composition of the Arab and Zionist-Jewish collectivities was not pre-ordained, their sociopolitical demarcations fluctuated as a consequence of domestic, regional and international developments. The Jewish and Arab national movements sometimes included Arabized-Jews in-and at other times excluded them from-their ranks. From the late 1930s, actions by Zionist and Arab forces vis-à-vis Arabized-Jews converged, producing their dispersal. The events surrounding Arabized-Jews impacted considerably the post-1948 direction that the phenomenon of nationalism in the Middle East has followed and the imbalance of power between Israel and the Arab states.

Middle East Policy, 2019

Discussions around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict tend to rely upon a binary distinction of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine and the Zionist movement to establish a “national home of the Jewish people” there. This oversimplifies and erases the position of those whose identities are both Jewish and Arab, and the existence of Jewish communities in Palestine long before the ‘national home’ was proposed. The Zionist movement created new tensions between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewry who had previously co-existed in relative harmony under Ottoman rule, as the Ashkenazi population began to dominate the Palestinian Jewish community and Zionism defined itself in terms starkly incompatible with Arab identity. From the Old Yishuv of the Ottoman Era to the establishment of the Israeli state (and beyond) Zionist rhetoric has been characterised by a deeply contradictory relationship to non-European Jewry, treating them as a burden whilst relying on them to make the Zionist project workable. Additionally, contrary to the promise of safety associated with the 'Jewish National Home,' the Zionist movement has profited from the persecution of Jews in the Arab world, relying on displacement of Jewry from populations such as Egypt and Iraq due to anti-Semitism to legitimise and strengthen the National Home.