To understand the anger and fear in Israel and Palestine, you have to go back to Israel’s foundation and the lines drawn in the sand.
A Palestinian protester argues with Israeli security forces to prevent shooting tear gas at Palestinian protesters during a demonstration against Israeli settlements in the village of Qaryout, near the West Bank city of Nablus, 15 September 2023. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed)
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The State of Israel was created in 1948. The key word is created. While countries come into being in many different ways, such as violence, revolutions and treaties, the creation of the state of Israel was unique and has proven highly controversial.
To understand the chaos that is now taking place in Israel and the Palestinian territories, one needs to return to that original creation.
The British government ruled the territory known as Palestine under the League of Nations from 1922 until 1948. Already in 1917, the British government issued what is known as the Balfour Declaration which envisioned a Jewish state in what had been claimed a historic Jewish homeland.
Jewish organisations had argued that the land called Israel has been the religious and spiritual center for Jews for thousands of years. While many countries recognized the new State of Israel in 1948, its creation did not effectively redress the dislocation of those who had been living on the territory that Israelis would inhabit.
Following the end of World War II, European Jews who had been displaced during the Holocaust flocked to Israel. The United Nations divided the land into two states, one Jewish, one Arab, which further divided the Arab territory into three sections — the Golan Heights at the Syrian border, the West Bank at the Jordanian border and the Gaza Strip at the Egyptian border.
The creation of deep divisions
The division gave more than 50% of the land to Israel, leaving the Arabs with 42% even though they made up two-thirds of the population.
This resulted in massive Arab displacement and is why the Jewish Independence Day of May 14 is followed by the marking of Nakba Day by Arabs, translated as “The Catastrophe”.
Since Israel’s founding in 1948, there have been several outbreaks of violence between Israel and its neighbors. Among them were the 1948–49 War of Israeli Independence; 1956 Suez Canal Crisis; 1967 Six-Day War; 1973 Yom Kippur War; 1982 Lebanon War and various large-scale Palestinian uprisings known as Intifadas.
None of these conflicts resulted in reparations for the hundreds of thousands of Arabs displaced by Israel’s creation, many of whom ended up in crowded refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank and neighboring countries.
Further inflaming tensions, Israeli settlers have continued establishing communities in the West Bank, which was conquered by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. The international community considers these colonies illegal, and some of the settlers have been found guilty of violence against the Arabs who live there.
Working towards peace
There have been several attempts to have peace agreements between Israel and its neighbors.
The most important are the Camp David Accords of 1978 which was finally reduced to simple diplomatic relations between Egypt and Israel, and the 1993 Oslo accords which established formal relations between Israel and the Palestinian leadership, giving the latter self-governance over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Recently, there were talks about a larger regional agreement including Saudi Arabia.
Then came 7 October 2023, when Hamas, an Islamist militant group, attacked Israeli settlers killing more than a thousand people, many of them women and children, and taking over 200 Israeli hostages.
Israel’s response to the Hamas attack, which it justified as legitimate self-defense, has seen more than 32,000 Gazans killed with over 70,000 wounded, mostly civilians with many elderly and children. Much of Gaza’s infrastructure has been destroyed, including hospitals and humanitarian aid has been blocked. Fighting has continued for more than six months as Israel seeks to destroy Hamas and at the same time free the hostages.
The emotions behind the conflict are extreme. The Israelis condemn Hamas as a terrorist organisation whom they argue are out to kill all Jews and destroy the State of Israel. Hamas, which was the official ruling organisation in the Gaza Strip, maintains that Palestinians have been reduced to living in an open-air prison since it took control of Gaza in 2005 when Israel disengaged.
Israel and the international community
The fighting in Gaza has raised many questions relevant to international humanitarian law. South Africa brought a case before the International Court of Justice in The Hague accusing Israel of genocide. The Court ruled that there was “plausible” genocide and ordered several provisional measures Israel must follow, among them increasing access to humanitarian aid.
Beyond Israel, Hamas and the International Court of Justice, various resolutions have been proposed before the United Nations Security Council concerning a ceasefire. Although the latest resolution did pass, with the United States abstaining and not using its veto power, no ceasefire has taken place, although increased humanitarian aid is now entering Gaza.
But the situation of the Palestinians remaining in Gaza remains precarious at best.
The Israel/Hamas conflict has spread to other countries in the region, including Iran, which has long been a supporter of Hamas. On 1 April 2024, Israeli warplanes destroyed a building in Damascus, Syria, part of an Iranian Embassy complex, killing several Iranian officers involved in covert actions in the Middle East.
Shortly after, Iran sent hundreds of drones and cruise missiles towards Israel, which were largely intercepted by Israeli and U.S. air defenses. Subsequently, several drones were downed by Iran’s air defense system near Isfahan, but it is not clear whether they came from Israel or other sources.
What is clear is that there has been enormous international pressure to de-escalate the current situation in order to stop the Israel/Hamas conflict from growing into a regional conflict involving Iran and other countries, or even a more global escalation of violence.
Questions to consider:
1. How did the United Nations divide Palestine to create the state of Israel?
2. What happened to the people displaced in 1948 when Isreal was created?
3. What kind of compromises do you think might have to take place for there to be peace between Israelis and Palestinians?
Daniel Warner earned a PhD in Political Science from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, where he was Deputy to the Director for many years as well as founder and director of several programs focusing on international organizations. He has lectured and taught internationally and is a frequent contributor to international media. He has served as an advisor to the UNHCR, ILO and NATO, and has been a consultant to the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense of Switzerland as well as in the private sector.
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