A bit of history and a few maps...

So! as ridiculous as may seem after my previous post's endless ramblings about the inherent flawed nature of narrative... here is a narrative! (and maps too - using maps is just about the deepest sin I could commit after basically committing myself to a fancy-pants holier-than-thou post-structuralist perspective in the previous post... what the hell tho, if you don't know where I'm going, you arn't going to read much more of this blog eh?)

So the 'narrative' is mostly a copy and paste job from one of my essays (there is also a BBC overview here):

Israel and Palestine

The formation of a cohesive Zionist Identity.

In its modern form the Arab-Israeli conflict was rooted in the Zionist movement at the beginning of the 1880s. Anti-Semitism was prevalent across Europe, particularly in East and Russia where Jews faced pogroms along with oppressive social and economic policies. The Zionist discourse led by Theodor Herzl,¹ and Leo Pinkster² argued that the Jewish community would never find acceptance in Europe and therefore the best option for a successful Jewish community would be the formation of a new, separate state. Although various different locations were discussed, reference to the biblical ‘Holy Land’³ provided an extra incentive for Jewish interest. Herzl’s objectives were incorporated into the philosophy of the organisation “Hibbat Tziyyon” (“Lovers of Zion”)⁴who planned and promoted the settlement of Jews in Palestine. Immigration occurred in waves, or ‘aliyahs’,⁵ and by the time of the Balfour Declaration⁶ the number of settled Jews combined with the geo-political significance of Zionism,⁷ led the British to consider the prospect of forming an Israeli state. The rise of Fascism in Europe was cause for an upsurge in Jewish immigration, and despite restrictions levied by the British authority, by 1946 Jews accounted for 31% of the total population of the mandate.⁸ Jews had also begun to dominate the economy in both the professional and agricultural spheres.

2 Extra-regional agents: Balfour to UNSCR 338.

The Balfour Declaration was the British plan for their governance of the Middle East once the Ottoman Empire was defeated in the First World War. The partition plan for Mandate Palestine was extremely ambiguous.⁹ 1922 saw the issue of a British Government White Paper as an attempt to clarify their policy, and placate both sides. Its effect, however, was the opposite of this.¹⁰

The British era of Governance was characterized by poor communications between themselves and the local populace. The only political organization that claimed to represent the concerns of the Arabic population, the Arab Executive, was for the most part ignored by the British. Consequently, at the same time as Jewish settlers were rapidly growing in power on all of fronts of civil society, the Palestinian Arabs were left without a legitimate means of access to the political authority. This disparity provided the backdrop for violent clashes that occurred within the mandate between the two ethnic groups.¹¹

Another British commission under Lord Peel proposed a new plan for partition that was rejected by both parties.¹² When, following the end of the Second World War, Zionist acts of terrorism began to seriously damage the British infrastructure, Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Minister, deferred the issue to the United Nations (UN). The UN plan again proposed a partition, and international administration of Jerusalem (see map¹³). Although the plan was accepted by the Yishuv (Jewish settlers) it was rejected on behalf of the Arabic communities by the governments of neighbouring Arab states, who promised to defend them militarily.

3 Pan-Arabism : from cohesion to disarray.

The British withdrawal from the mandate was finalised on May 14^th 1948. The next day Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian and Iraqi forces mounted an invasion of the former mandate. They were beaten back by the Israeli Haganah (the Zionist paramilitary organisation that was responsible for most of the violence against the British). By mid-June this same year. Armistice and ceasefire agreements were agreed between Israel and each of the aggressor states.¹⁴ The material outcome of the war and the agreements was an increase in the size of Israel’s territory, and the effective irredinta partition of the Gaza Strip to Eqypt, and the West Bank to Transjordan.¹⁵ The war also stimulated an exodus of over 710,000 Palestinians to various Arab states.¹⁶

The recession of the British Empire and the 1948 war transformed Zionism from an activist political force to an actual Jewish state. It also meant that the status of Palestinian Arabs had changed from a majority within the mandate to a divided community, spread across various territories and without a central political authority. The international Arabic community also proved unable to organise themselves into an effective force behind the cause of Palestinian liberation.

In 1967, Israel, again, prevailed in the face of an Arabic military assault. The proposed UN resolution (242) failed to satisfy either side. It implied Israeli withdrawal only from the Syrian and Egyptian territory and did not specify withdrawal from the occupied territories.

The 1973 war was Egypt and Syria’s attempt to win back the lost territory of 1967 (Cf. map above ¹⁷). As a military exercise it failed, although it brought about UN Resolution 338 and peace negotiations in which Anwar Sadat agreed a separate peace deal between Egypt and Israel in 1979 known as the Camp David agreements.

4.4 Palestinian Liberation Movement: From the Mandate, to Cairo, …eventually to Oslo.

In 1964, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed by the Arab League. For the first time since 1948 Palestinian Arabs were provided with a political mechanism and the means to interact with each other, and allied governments.¹⁸

The 1967 war added 200,000-300,000 refugees¹⁹ to the Palestinian Diaspora,²⁰ but it had a profound effect on the nature of the PLO. With the rise to prominence of Yasser Arafat and al-Fatah,²¹ PLO transformed its central philosophy. Rather than relying on pan-Arabic unity as a means to emancipation, the PLO was to now promulgate Palestinian nationalism. A second transformation for the PLO came after Black September (1970) and their ejection from Jordan. The PLO was forced to operate as an international terrorist organisation, relocating their base from Jordan to Beirut.²²

“Legitimate rights of the Palestinian people”²³ were noted in the agreement. This, however, was interpreted very differently by each side. Israel maintained its claim to the West Bank and Gaza and with the security of a non-aggressor in the south they focused their attention on the destruction of the PLO. Israeli involvement in the Lebanese civil war, and invasions in 1978 and 1982, drove the PLO out and forced them to find a new base in distant Tunis.²⁴

There followed another period of profound change for the PLO. Various organisations operating under the PLO umbrella instigated “al-intifada” (“the opening”)²⁵ lasting from “The intensity of the Palestinian protests and the brutality of Israeli response forced international attention in the nature of Israel’s role as occupiers of these lands and called into question the future of the territories”.²⁶ In 1988 the PLO also accepted UN resolution 242, a pragmatic step that allowed the US government to engage with them as a negotiation partner at the Madrid Conference²⁷ (October 1991). Out of the Madrid conference developed the second track of negotiations that became the secretive Oslo Peace process.

5. Oslo

The Oslo agreement was born out of the Madrid Conference (September 1991), which, for the first time allowed Palestinians, who were included in the Jordanian delegation, to converse with the Israeli government directly. Secret talks convened, by Norwegian academics, were to begin in 1993. There were several factors that contributed to a similar ‘softening’ of the conflict. The ideological Likud had been defeated and replace in Israel’s Government, by the far more pragmatic Labour party. The Intifada had reached stalemate; Israel had not managed to destroy the militant groups, and the PLO leadership, based in Tunis, without direct involvement in the fighting were in danger of becoming irrelevant to the Palestinian cause. Israel was also being put under pressure by the Bush administration to sue for peace as a requirement for continued financial support.²⁸

The Oslo agreements made some apparently fast progress, however, when the joint “Declaration of Principles” (Oslo I) was announced in 1993 it was in the form of a phased plan not a peace treaty. Many of the issues of major contention were not resolved²⁹ and both sides agreed that the plan would lead to further talks, and eventually, agreement in 1998. Oslo II, declared in Washington D.C. in 1995, was the outcome of the next round of talks. It demonstrates the vast structural inequality that the two sides still faced. In terms of territory alone, of the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority would only be permitted to claim 3%, and share 24%, Israel would claim the rest (see map³⁰)³¹

The discourse was polarized across the ethnic divide, but also within both sides. Secret talks had not been able to overcome the zero-sum dilemma,³² and the 1998 talks collapsed into the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Oslo had failed to provide a rational centre where reciprocal material concession could be matched with emotive empathy.³³ Perhaps if more of the key issues had been tackled in secret then the structural basis for peace would have undermined the material basis each side’s discourse of hostility. However, as it was, the two antagonists began the process so far apart from each other, and the sacrifices required by each of them to get to a structural centre ground would have cost more than was possible, while at the same time maintaining discursive unity across their own parities.

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¹Author of The Jewish State (1896)

²Author of Auto-emancipation (1892)

³. Appendix A

⁴, W., A History of the Modern Middle East (Oxford: Westview Press, 2004), p.241.

⁵, W., op. cit. p.241.

⁶“The Balfour Declaration”, Cited in W. Laqueur and B.Rubin (eds.) The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, (6^th ed.), (New York: Penguin, 2001), p.16.

⁷Cleveland, W., op cit. 243 “Until the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, the British cabinet was worried that Germany might make a declaration in support of Zionist aims and thus attract a sympathetic response from US Jewry. A similar consideration arose with regard to Russia, which was on the verge of a military collapse and a social revolution.”

⁸. Cleveland, W., op. cit. p. 255.: Table 13.1 “Population of Palestine by Ethnic Group, ”.

⁹“The Balfour Declaration”, op. cit.: It spoke of “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” but lacked a clear plan.

¹⁰ Cleveland, W., op cit., pp 239-248.

¹¹Cleveland W., op. cit., pp. 256 - 257: e.g. Including the Wailing wall 1929 incident.

¹² Ibid.: pp. 258-261.

¹³From the University of Dartmouth (Available online: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~gov46/unscop-maj-prop-1947.gif): The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was actually divided on what the best plan for the future of Palestine would be. The minority proposition was a federated state.

¹⁴It is significant that there was no formal peace treaty as this made it possible for the Arab governments to avoid recognising Israel’s right to exist.

¹⁵ Cf. Appendix B

¹⁶“General Progress Report and Supplementary Report of the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, Covering the Period from 11 December 1949 to 23 October 1950”, From the United Nations Conciliation Commission, October 23, 1950, (U.N. General Assembly Official Records, 5th Session, Supplement No. 18, Document A/1367/Rev. 1).

¹⁷Israel: Map” Microsoft® Encarta® 2007 [DVD]. Microsoft Corporation, 2006.

¹⁸, W., op. cit., p. 258.: it was an attempt “by the Arab States to restrict Palestinian resistance activity and prevent the Palestinian movement from operating independently”.

¹⁹Bill, J. and Springborg, R., op. cit.., at p. 243.

²⁰Cf. Appendix D for the International Diaspora

²¹ Ibid.: 267-8.: “Although dominated by Arafat and Fatah, the PLO since 1969 has in fact been an umbrella organization into and out of which the competitors of Fatah have drifted as the relations have waxed and waned”.: Cleveland, W., op. cit., p. 359.: “al-Fatah founders avoided tying the cause to communism, Baathism, or pan-Arabism”.

²²Smith, C. “The Arab-Israeli Conflict” in Fawcett, L., (ed.) International Relations of the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 217-241, at p. 227.: “PLO actions against Israel engaged Lebanon more directly in the Arab-Israeli conflict and become a major factor in instigating a Lebanese civil war in the mid-1970s [sic].”

²³Qaundt, W., Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1993) p.256 cited in Smith, C., op. cit., p. 230.

²⁴Smith, C., op cit., p. 232.

²⁵Cleveland, W., op. cit., p. 377.

²⁶Smith, C., op. cit., p. 232.

²⁷Cf. Cleveland, W., op. cit., pp. 500-502, and Smith, C., op. cit., pp. 233-234.: The Madrid Conference was convened in the aftermath of the US led war to remove Iraqi forces from their occupation of the Emirate of Kuwait ). The conference’s aim was to find an acceptable resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

²⁸Miall, H., Ramsbotham, O., and Woodhouse, T., Contemporary Conflict Resolution, (Cambrige, UK: Polity Press, 1999).

²⁹Shlaim, A., “The Rise and Fall of the Oslo Peace Process” in Fawcett, L., op. cit., pp.241-263.: No mention of a Palestinian state, 5 year plan for Palestinian autonomy, no resolution to competing claims to Jerusalem, no commitment to withdraw settlers.

³⁰Source of Map: Foundation for Middle East Peace (available online at: http://www.fmep.org/maps/map_data/redeployment/oslo_map_1995.html last accessed 12/01/:48:49)

³¹Cleveland, W., op. cit., at p. 507

³²“Israeli troops, Palestinians clash after Sharon visits Jerusalem sacred site” CNN (available online at: http://archives.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/meast/09/28/jerusalem.violence.02/ last accessed: 12/01/:46:42): as demonstrated by the ability Likud to exploit 1998 agreements and, hostility to the peace process as a whole to their own electoral ends, and of Hamas and various organizations within the umbrella of the PLO, to launch a second intifadia.

³³Horowitz, D., Ethnic Groups in Conflict (California: University of California Press, 1985).