The Arab-Israeli Conflict

Kirsten E. Schulze

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315440781
• Auflage: 3
• Thema: Histoire
• Thema: Histoire du monde

In this concise yet comprehensive survey, Kirsten E. Schulze analyzes the causes, course and consequences of the Arab–Israeli conflict, exploring the particular dynamics of this conflict and the numerous attempts at its resolution. Covering pivotal events ranging from the creation of the State of Israel to the first and second Lebanon Wars and the Arab Spring, the book traces the development of the conflict from its intellectual roots in the nineteenth century to the present day.

This third edition has been revised throughout to bring the text up to date

with recent events, including:

• a completely new chapter on the Gaza Wars from 2006 to 2014

• new material on the Arab Spring and its implications for Israel

• an updated discussion of the ongoing negotiations for peace.

Containing a diverse collection of primary source documents, a chronology of key dates, a glossary, a guide to further reading and a Who's Who summarizing the careers and contributions of the main figures, this book is essential to understanding the background to and worldwide significance of the continuing violence between Israel and Palestine and is valuable reading for all students of the Arab–Israeli conflict.

Part I
Background

1 The origins of the Arab–Israeli conflict

The origins of the Arab–Israeli conflict have been the subject of numerous debates. Biblical enmity between Abraham’s two sons Isaac and Ishmael, the advent of Islam, the prophet Mohammed’s quarrel with the Jews of Medina, the emergence of Zionism in the nineteenth century and British colonial policy in the early twentieth century have all been considered appropriate starting points. While a case for these points of departure can be made, it will be argued here that the Arab–Israeli conflict emerged with the advent of nationalism in the Middle East and that the conflict, in simplistic terms, is one of competing nationalisms.

Zionism and Arab nationalism

Zionism and Arab nationalism embarked upon a course of almost parallel development in the nineteenth century as predominantly secular political ideologies based on emancipation and ultimately self-determination. Both started in intellectual circles as a response to political challenges from Europe during that period (Tessler, 1994), and both evolved around the concepts of identity, nationhood, history, religion and culture.

When looking at Zionism it is imperative to distinguish between classical Zionism and modern political Zionism. Classical Zionism was rooted in the traditional ties Jews in the Diaspora proclaimed to the Land of Israel and the belief that Jewish independence would be restored with the coming of the Messiah. Modern political Zionism saw the Jewish people as constituting one nation and saw a Jewish state as the solution for the Jewish problem in Europe. It rejected assimilation, which it believed was neither desirable nor deemed to be possible. Anti-Semitism could only be overcome by physical separation from Europe and by self-determination. And for the vast majority of Zionists religious and cultural ties to the Land of Israel made Palestine the logical territory for this Jewish state.

As a political ideology modern political Zionism was a fusion of ideas and formative experiences from both Eastern and Western European Jewish thinkers. Thus it combined many of the ideas born out of the European enlightenment and the French Revolution, such as concepts of social contract, secularism, equality and citizenship, but was also a response to centuries of inequality and persecution on the other hand (Laqueur, 1974).

It was the series of pogroms which swept through southern Russia in 1881 that crushed any hopes the Eastern European Jewish intelligentsia had nurtured for reform and assimilation. These pogroms triggered Jewish emigration, mainly to the United States, but also gave birth to the Zionist movement with the first Zionist publication – Auto-Emancipation – written by Leo Pinsker, a Jewish doctor from Odessa, in 1882. Auto-Emancipation saw a territory for Jews as the answer to the burden of life as a Jewish minority among Gentiles and as the means to regain lost dignity and self-respect. Drawing upon Pinsker’s ideas, the first Zionist organization Hibbat Zion (Lovers of Zion) was formed to channel small groups of idealist settlers to Palestine. They were part of what became known as the first Aliyah, which lasted from 1882 to 1903 and founded the first Jewish settlements of Rishon LeZion, Petah Tikva, Rehovot and Rosh Pina.

Pinsker was soon joined by Theodor Herzl, who came to similar conclusions but from a completely different starting point. Herzl was a Western European–assimilated Jew who lived in Vienna. In 1894 he was in France as a journalist and reported on the trial of the French Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus, who had been falsely accused and convicted of treason. Herzl was shocked by the anti-Semitism in a country as cultured as France and the birthplace of the French Revolution. So in 1896 Herzl wrote a book titled Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) [Doc. 1, p. 131]. In it Herzl called for the creation of a Jewish state, as assimilation had not produced the hoped-for end to anti-Semitism. Only a state of their own could provide a rational solution to the Jewish experience of rejection, humiliation and shame. Only a state of their own could provide a permanent solution to the problem of the Jews. Through a state of their own, the Jewish people could finally occupy an equal place among nations.

Herzl’s activism and his ideas resulted in the convening of the First Zionist Congress in 1897 in Basle, Switzerland. It was here that the ideas of a Jewish state were linked to the ideas of returning to the Land of Israel. Interestingly, neither Pinsker nor Herzl had been particularly committed to Palestine as the territory for their Jewish state. Indeed, both were, in principle, prepared to accept land elsewhere such in Argentina or in British East Africa. However, Herzl found himself quickly outnumbered by those who favoured Palestine and thus the World Zionist Organization, which was established at this Congress, called for the ‘creation of a home for the Jewish people in Palestine to be secured by public law’. This aim was to be achieved through the acquisition of land, the immigration of European Jews to Palestine and the settlement of Palestine. This Jewish settlement in Palestine became known as the Yishuv.

Zionism saw two further developments which are of long-term interest for the Arab–Israeli conflict. The first was the introduction of socialist principles and ideas of class struggle. These ideas were fused with Zionism by thinkers such as A.D. Gordon, giving rise to Labour Zionism. These ideas infused the second Aliyah between 1904 and 1913, which included mainly Russian and East European Jews fleeing the renewed persecution following the 1905 aborted Russian revolution. An estimated 2.5 million Jews left Russia at that time, of which 60,000 settled in Palestine (Tessler, 1994). This second Aliyah created the first Zionist institutions in Palestine, including the agricultural cooperative or kibbutz which clearly embodied socialist ideals. This second Aliyah is also conventionally credited with laying the institutional foundations of the Yishuv.

The second development in Zionist ideology was the introduction of right-wing nationalist principles in the 1920s and 1930s, again reflecting broader trends in European nationalism. These recast the rational Enlightenment-based Zionism of Herzl into a romantic-exclusivist, much more ethnic nationalism, which openly acknowledged both its colonial nature and the impossibility of co-existence with the Arabs living in Palestine. The key proponent of this strand of Zionism, which became known as Revisionist Zionism, was Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinski, who in his treatise ‘The Iron Wall’ [Doc. 2, p. 132] emphasized the need for Jewish soldiers and self-defence.

Zionism as a modern nationalist movement came into direct competition with Arab nationalism and later with Palestinian nationalism, as both Jews and Arabs laid claim to the same territory. Arab nationalism is the belief that the Arab people constitute a single political community or nation, which should be either independent and united under a common government (Goldschmidt, 1996) or a set of independent allied Arab states. Modern Arab nationalism emerged within the context of the Arab renaissance or awakening, which began at the end of the eighteenth century. This renaissance was in part a response to the challenge of modernization but also an engagement with European nationalist ideas of freedom, independence, equality, and progress. Arab nationalism embodied both elements, embracing modernization but at the same time stressing that European colonialism was superfluous in its attainment (Tessler, 1994).

Like Zionism, Arab nationalism started to develop in intellectual circles. The first Arab nationalist party, in fact, was a small secret society founded around 1875 by graduates of the American University of Beirut. Other societies and literary clubs soon followed and disseminated Arab nationalist ideas of unity, language and culture.

At the core of Arab nationalism, like any other nationalism, was the concept of self-determination. This quest for independence emphasized three elements in Arab nationalism. First, there was a strong anti-Turkish sentiment as a reaction to centuries of Ottoman control, but also to the 1908 Young Turk revolution. Second, the entrance of European colonial powers and foreign control of Arab land led to an anti-colonial and anti-imperial element. Third, the interaction and competition with Zionism also provided it with an anti-Zionist ideology.

Despite these common aims the Arab nationalist movement was by no means unified. There were differing views on the degree of autonomy, the territorial unit and the type of political system. For instance, at the first Arab Congress organized in 1913 in Paris, the stated aims were the establishment of administrative autonomy, Arab participation in the Ottoman central government, making Arabic an official language and generally striving towards unity – but all still within the framework of the Ottoman Empire. Other Arab nationalists, however, demanded full independence. There were also leadership struggles. As a result Arab nationalism saw both the emergence of pan-Arabism and separate localized nationalisms following the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious European powers after the First World War. And like Zionism it also saw a degree of fusion with other ideologies, giving birth to Arab socialist ideas such as those advanced by Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, or the ‘romantic’ Arab nationalist ideas of Sati al-Husri.

That leaves the question of Palestinian nationalism and at what point a distinctly Palestinian nationalism started to emerge and to what extent this was in reaction to the Jewish immigration to Palestine and Zionist institution building between 1882 and 1913 or the British mandate after the First World War. A look at Arabs in Palestine at the turn of the century reveals that indeed the majority of them did not define themselves in national terms, but rather by family, tribe, village or religion. However, it is equally evident that a process of nationalist self-definition had begun among intellectuals, and this can be traced back to the Ottoman reforms of 1872, which established the independent sanjak of Jerusalem and gave rise to the local urban notables. This predated the first Aliyah by a decade. Yet, at the same time, a more cohesive Palestinian discourse did not emerge until the 1936–39 Arab Revolt, which was a reaction to the Zionist state project and British colonialism.

The impact of the First World War

The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 ushered in important changes for the achievement of both Arab nationalist and Zionist aspirations, mainly as a result of Britain’s policy of alliances. The Ottoman Empire had entered the war on the side of Germany. This meant that in the Middle East Britain was effectively fighting the Ottomans. In order to prevent the latter from taking the Suez Canal, Britain started to cultivate local Arab allies who would aid its war effort (Goldschmidt, 1996). In 1915 the British High Commissioner in Cairo, Sir Henry McMahon, negotiated the support of the Hashemite leader and the Amir of Mecca, Sharif Hussein, in return for the promise of future Arab independence. Embodied in a set of letters known as the Hussein–McMahon Correspondence [Doc. 3, p. 133] is the promise that the Arab territory of the Ottoman Empire be returned to Arab sovereignty, with the exception of the districts of Mersina and Alexandretta, as well as the districts west of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo, which were not purely Arab. The excluded territory, according to Arab interpretation, referred to present-day Lebanon and parts of Syria only. It did not include Palestine, despite Britain’s later claim that it did.

The promise of Arab independence and statehood was not the only British pledge made in the context of First World War alliance policy. By the summer of 1917 the British government had also started to consider the Zionist movement as a potential ally (Fraser, 1995). The key player on the Zionist side was the Russian-born chemist Chaim Weizmann who was teaching at Manchester University. Before the war he had already had contact with a number of liberal and conservative politicians, including former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour. Weizmann furthered Zionist aspirations in two important ways: first, he was an excellent diplomat and eloquent spokesperson for the movement; second, he was involved in the synthesizing of acetone, hitherto imported from Germany, and essential for making explosives and consequently for Britain’s war effort. Both enabled him to convince British decision makers that the Zionists were important for Britain’s war effort. The Zionists could help sustain the Russian front, which was collapsing from internal Russian revolutionary turmoil, and they could help galvanize the desperately needed American war effort. The result of Weizmann’s diplomacy and powers of persuasion was a declaration issued by Foreign Secretary Balfour on 2 November 1917, stating that ‘His Majesty’s Government viewed with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’ [Doc. 4, p. 133].

Some observations should be made at this point. The Balfour Declaration did not state that Palestine should be turned into a Jewish state. In fact, the word ‘state’ had initially appeared in the earlier drafts of the statement but was changed due to pressure from British Jews who feared that this would prejudice their rights and citizenship within the United Kingdom. Further, neither the Balfour Declaration nor the Hussein–McMahon Correspondence was specific about the actual borders of the territory promised to both Jews and Arabs. The result was that both Zionists and Arab nationalists believed Palestine had been promised to them; the seeds for conflict had been sown.

British policy and the Palestine mandate

British troops entered Palestine in 1918 and set up a provisional military government in Jerusalem. Britain had thus physically laid claim to a territory not only promised to the Arabs and Zionists, but also to one designated as an international zone in the secret 1916 British–French Sykes–Picot Agreement [Doc. 5, p. 134]. Anticipating the future dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France had carved the Middle East into spheres of influence to prevent a power vacuum and Russian entry into the region. British military presence from 1918 onwards assured Britain that it was granted the mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations in 1922, fulfilling its strategic aims of ‘assuring access to the Suez Canal and the East, preventing French ambitions in Lebanon and Syria from drifting South, and creating a land bridge from the Mediterranean Sea to the oil fields of Iraq’ (Tessler, 1994: 7). The mandate provided Britain with the responsibility for placing the country under

such political, administrative, and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home … and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.

British policy was caught between conflicting promises and different views within its own establishment right from the beginning. Popular perception of this period is that Britain was a more than inadequate mandate power which managed to stir up Arab resentment and at the same time was hostile to the Zionist state-building project. A policy acceptable to both Arabs and Zionists was never achieved, and British policy on the ground was further complicated by often contradictory positions in world politics. For instance, in the international arena Britain tended to support Zionism, while in Palestine, British officials favoured the Arabs, often influenced by concern for Muslim opinion in neighbouring countries and India (Goldschmidt, 1996). Arab and Jewish suspicions of each other and of British intentions flourished in such an environment. Many Arabs believed that Britain was planning to hold on to Palestine until a Jewish majority had been achieved. Many Jews believed that Britain was secretly aiding and arming the Arabs, as well as restricting Jewish immigration and land purchases in order to prevent the creation of a Jewish state. While British Palestine policy stumbled from one crisis to another, inter-communal violence rose, starting with the first Arab disturbances in 1920 and 1921.

The inter-war period

The period between the two world wars was characterized by institution building in Palestine. Britain’s first civilian governor, Sir Herbert Samuel, encouraged both Jews and Arabs to form their own institutions. The Zionist Commission, which had been established after the Balfour Declaration, evolved into the Palestine Zionist Executive in 1920 and became the Jewish Agency in 1928–29. Foundations laid earlier by the Zionist Organization were expanded and built upon. The majority of institutions, which later served as the framework for the new Israeli state, were established during this time, including political parties, the general labour federation or Histadrut, the underground defence organization or Haganah and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. These institutions constituted a proto-state which made the transition to full statehood in 1948 easier.

Arab or, indeed, Palestinian institution building did not take place at the same rate. Despite the fact that the British military and civil administration encouraged Palestinian Arabs to mobilize, resulting in the formation of the Arab Executive in 1920, the Arabs remained divided by religious, family and regional loyalties. Consequently the local Arab Executive was a feeble vehicle for their aspirations, beset by feuds between followers of the two leading notable Jerusalem families, the Husseinis and Nashashibis, who, amongst other issues, were split over the degree of Arab cooperation with the British authorities. In the 1930s the feud was clearly won by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, w...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• List of maps
• Chronology
• Who’s who
• Maps
• Part I Background
• Part II Wars and peace
• Part III The Middle East peace process
• Part IV Assessment
• Part V Documents
• Glossary
• Further reading
• References
• Index