The Arab-Israeli conflict in 10 points

[Little Tich]

Last edited Sun Aug 21, 2016, 11:34 PM - Edit history (1)

Source: The Irish Times, by Ben Ehrenreich, Aug 16, 2016

The conflict in Israel and the occupied territories has been going on for almost a century. Here, Ben Ehrenreich picks out 10 key events and themes

1 Not an ancient conflict
In the late 19th century, Palestine’s Jewish population stood at less than 5 per cent. Tensions between the region’s Jews and Arabs did not begin to rise until after 1917, when British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour declared that the British authorities “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” After the first World War and the breakup of the Ottoman empire, the League of Nations granted Britain a “mandate” to rule over Palestine. The first serious outbreak of violence there came in 1929. A parliamentary inquiry later determined that “there had been no recorded attacks of Jews by Arabs” in the previous eight decades and that the aggravating factor had been British support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

2 Colonial roots, colonial realities
Many of the laws and practices that would later become essential to Israel’s governance of its Palestinian population were inherited from the colonial regime. The British Defence Regulations, codified in 1945 and incorporated into Israeli law three years later by the first legislative act of the new Jewish state, allowed for the prosecution of civilians by military courts, indefinite “administrative detention” without trial, home demolitions, official censorship, the criminalisation of “unlawful associations”, the establishment of “closed military zones”, the imposition of curfews and restrictions on travel, and the arbitrary confiscation of land and property. All of these measures would be used against Palestinians in Israel and, after 1967, in Gaza and the West Bank as well.

3 Refugees, infiltrators, émigrés
By 1949, when Zionist forces defeated Palestinian militias and the armies of several neighbouring Arab states, more than 700,000 Palestinians had fled or been expelled from their homes. Some ended up in refugee camps in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which fell under Egyptian and Jordanian control. Others began lengthy exiles outside historic Palestine. In 1949 the Israeli military adopted a “free fire” policy, allowing soldiers to shoot returning refugees on sight. By 1956, 2,700-5,000 such “infiltrators” had been killed. There are now more than seven million Palestinian refugees around the world. By contrast, any individual with one Jewish grandparent, regardless of their place of birth, is entitled to emigrate to Israel and become a citizen of the Jewish state.

4 An illegal occupation
After six days of fighting in June 1967, Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai peninsula. Five months later, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 242, calling for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territories it had occupied. Israel had at that point already established its first civilian settlement in the West Bank, though international law forbids occupying powers from transferring “parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”. In the years since, Israeli governments of both the left and right have consistently encouraged the settlement enterprise with financial, infrastructural and military support. About 500,000 Israeli citizens now live in more than 130 settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and in more than 100 “outposts” not yet formally approved by the state. Forty-two per cent of the land in the West Bank currently falls under settlers’ control.

Read more: http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-arab-israeli-conflict-in-10-points-1.2754159

Edit: Correct link.