Relationships Going Back Through the Ages to the Holy Land
Both Jews and Arabs had ancestors who settled in the region that is now Israel and Palestine, and their families have been there for centuries or even millennia. Each group claims this land as their ancestral home. Around 1200 BCE, the first biblical texts document the Jews’ existence in the country of Canaan. These texts also identify Jerusalem as the spiritual capital of the Jews and the location of Solomon’s Temple. According to Islamic belief, the Prophet Muhammad made a miraculous journey during the night from Mecca to Palestine in the year 620 CE. This journey ended in Palestine.
Over the course of the next centuries, the Holy Land fell under the control of a succession of different foreign powers, including the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Crusaders, the Mamluks, and the Ottoman Turks. As a result of their exile and dispersion after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in the year 70 CE, Jews were a minority during this time period. Despite the fact that local populations identified as Palestinian Arabs rather than a nationalist identity, an inflow of Arab immigration occurred when Arab Muslims took control of the region in the seventh century.
Even though they were minority in foreign lands and subject to separate empires, these groups continued to maintain cultural and religious ties to their ancestral homeland through the practice of pilgrimage and visits to sacred locations. This merging of religious tradition and historical presence in the 20th century prepared the ground for contemporary struggle over issues of sovereignty and self-determination.
The Origins of European Zionism and the First Waves of Immigration
In the latter half of the 19th century, as anti-Semitism swept over Europe with increasing ferocity and culminated in the Holocaust, Ashkenazi Jews gave birth to the Zionist movement with the goal of establishing a Jewish national homeland in which Jews might live freely and securely. Theodor Herzl, the intellectual patriarch of the Zionist movement, is credited with popularizing the term “Zionism” in his 1896 book “The Jewish State.”
In the 1880s, a number of Jews fled Russian pogroms and Zionist ideology to begin an initial, small-scale migration to Palestine while it was still governed by the Ottoman Empire. Zionist political activity, on the other hand, ramped up following World War I, and in 1917, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, in which it approved “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Continued Arab-Jewish tensions emerged in the context of Israeli immigration, which picked up speed alongside the advent of Nazism. By the year 1948, approximately one-third of the local population was comprised of Jews.
The Partition Plan of the United Nations, Arab Rebellion, and British Dominance
After the Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War One, the League of Nations granted the United Kingdom the mandate to oversee Palestinian areas in 1923. However, British policy began to become inconsistent, shifting between favoring Jewish immigration to placate Zionists and restricting it in order to appease burgeoning Arab nationalism. This was done in an attempt to appease both groups. This resulted in an Arab uprising against British administration and Jewish settlement that lasted from 1936 until 1939.
As more information about the Holocaust became available to the public, there was an accompanying increase in international support for the establishment of a Jewish state. The newly established United Nations attempted to find a solution to the issue in 1947 by drafting the United Nations Partition Plan. This plan proposed partitioning the British mandate into two separate states: one Arab and one Jewish, with Jerusalem being under the jurisdiction of the international community. Arab leaders were opposed to this idea because they felt it would result in the loss of regions that had a long history of Arab occupation.
Conflict, Declaration of Independence, and the Beginning of the First Arab-Israeli War
Within the limits assigned for the division, Zionist Jews declared their independence and formed the current state of Israel in May of 1948. On the other hand, many Arab armies promptly invaded the newly formed nation with the intention of preventing partition. After a year of fierce conflict, Israel was finally able to defend itself and expand its borders, thereby acquiring additional land that was once slated to become a part of the Arab state under the partition plan. This conflict resulted in the displacement of approximately 700,000 Palestinians and is known as the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic). However, it also led to the establishment of the state of Israel.
Conflicts Caused by Disputed Territories and Repeated Wars
Since then, the lands that were acquired beyond the limits that were established in 1948, such as the West Bank and East Jerusalem, have been at the center of contested claims to statehood. Israel won control of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and Sinai Peninsula as a result of the 1967 Six-Day War. This victory was made possible by Arab countries’ unwillingness to recognize Israel as a legitimate state and their insistence on maintaining territorial claims along the country’s borders. In the midst of cycles of bloodshed and an often intransigent approach from leaders on both sides who are passionately attached to their conflicting narratives, attempts to resolve the conflict through diplomacy have been unsuccessful.
The Development of Palestinian Nationalism and the Beginning of the Intifadas
By the late 1960s, Palestinians had started to create their own autonomous national identity apart from the neighboring Arab nations. The decade of the 1980s was marked by an increase in Palestinian civil unrest as well as protests against Israeli occupation known as Intifadas. These rallies were characterized by stone-throwing teenagers battling sophisticated Israeli military gear. In the meantime, Palestinians pushing for statehood expressed their frustration with ongoing Israeli settlement growth. Multiple efforts to mediate peace, such as the Oslo Accords in 1993, resulted in the continuation of contested territorial lines and unresolved questions regarding the eventual state of the conflict.
Conflict that Recurs Over and Over Again
Due to competing visions of sovereignty, disputed East Jerusalem, ongoing occupation and settlement expansion, failed peace talks, periodic uprisings from militant factions like Hamas that govern Gaza, and a lack of trust between leadership on both sides, the conflict has continued to be dominated by violence and diplomatic stalemates into the 21st century.
Although there is widespread agreement on a two-state solution at the international level, the complicated situation on the ground may require alternate frameworks. This intricately linked and emotionally charged territorial, religious, and nationalist issue has roots that go back hundreds of years into contested histories. For the time being, the cycle continues with no end plainly in sight, and it is emotionally taxing. These underlying forces can only be overcome and a more just and long-lasting peace can be forged through efforts made on both sides with an open mind.
