In January 2006, the Islamic militant group Hamas won the Palestinian Parliamentary elections, with 42,2% of the votes. The election in Palestine of a group that remains committed to an armed struggle, the destruction of Israel and retaliatory attacks on Israeli civilians shows that nearly sixty years after the creation of the State of Israel, the co-existence of Palestine and Israel is still problematic in the Middle East. When did this Palestinian problem start to emerge and how did it became a more general conflict between Arabs and Israel? According to Cleveland, in the 1880s, "Zionist claims to the same territory inhabited by Palestinian Arabs lay at the root of the conflict over Palestine? . How did these conflicting claims over a territory cause the emergence of an Arab-Israeli conflict that spaned more than one century of political tensions and open hostilities with "Jordan, Egypt and Syria, whatever their mutual animosities, ... aligned against Israel? ? How did this conflict generate five wars and create over 1 million refugees? How did it produce misunderstanding and bitterness among the various parties involved and repercussions throughout the Middle East and the world at large?
[...] The next day Palestine's Arab neighbour states -Syria, Jordan, Egypt and some elements of the Iraqi and Lebanese army- rejecting the Israeli independance attacked Israel, “launching a regional war that lasted until december 1948 and resulted in the defeat of the Arab forces, the enlargement of Israeli territory, and the collapse of the UN proposal for a Palestinian Arab state”[35]. The Arab defeat was due to a lack of military coordination and to political divisions since they all placed their own interests first. [...]
[...] Many milestones of the conflict could have been evoked in this essay like the first intifada 1987 or the Gulf War in 1991, but we used the date 1979 as the period in which the Palestinian problem and the Arab-Israeli conflict were shaped in similar terms as we know them today. Bibliography Readings - Smith, Charles, Arab-Israeli Conflict' in Fawcett, Louise International Relations of the Middle East (Oxford : Oxford university Press 2005) - Cleveland, William L., A History of the Modern Middle East (Boulder : Westview Press, 3rd edition, 2004) Ch - Goldschmidt, Arthur and Davidson, Lawrence, A Concise History of the Middle East (Boulder : Westview Press, 8th edition, 2006) Ch. [...]
[...] first century but this idea “found its modern, political expression at the end of the nineteenth century”[4] when Jews suffered discrimination in Europe and that the active persecution of the Jewish community intensified, especially in Poland and Russia. In 1896, Theodor Herzl[5] publishes Judenstaat[6] in which he provides the ideological basis for political zionism. For him, Jews constituted a nation but lacked a political state within which they could freely express their national culture”[7]. Largely because of Herzl's effors, the First Zionist congress was held in Basle, Switzerland, in August 1897 and the first interterritorial gathering of Jews on a national and secular basis. [...]
[...] Its charter stated that the Palestinian Arabs had to fight to retain their homeland within what had been the British mandate[59] and that the formation of an Israeli state were illegal[60]. But the PLO stayed under Egyptian control. “However gave the Palestinian movement room for manoeuvre: the regular Arab armies were discredited, while political mobilisation grew in the newly occupied West Bank and in the refugee camps of Jordan and Lebanon. The new leader of PLO, Yasser Arafat[61] . used his own political organisation al-Fatah[62] . [...]
[...] war resulted in Israel's conquest and occupation of the Gaza strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank and the Golan Heights”[49] (three times what it had been six days before) and in almost a million Arabs, most of them Palestinians, under Israeli rule[50]. “Israel was then in a stronger position than ever, and backed by western states and much of western public opinion”[51]. The Arab world, aligned with the USSR was now humiliated and on the defensive. As a result, the UN resolution 242 adopted by the Security Council in November 1967 stressed the “inadmissibility of acquiring territory by and called for a “just and lasting peace”[53] based on the withdrawal of Israel “from territories occupied in the recent conflict”[54] and on the right of every state in the area to “live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats and acts of force”[55]. [...]
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