Don G. Dinsdale Loc: El Cajon, CA (San Diego County)

(Part 2)

The United Nations Partition Plan


Following World War II, hostilities escalated between Arabs and Jews over the fate of Palestine and between the Z*****t m*****as and the British army. Britain decided to relinquish its mandate over Palestine and requested that the recently established United Nations determine the future of the country. But the British government’s hope was that the UN would be unable to arrive at a workable solution, and would turn Palestine back to them as a UN trusteeship.


A UN-appointed committee of representatives from various countries went to Palestine to investigate the situation. Although members of this committee disagreed on the form that a political resolution should take, the majority concluded that the country should be divided (partitioned) in order to satisfy the needs and demands of both Jews and Palestinian Arabs. At the end of 1946, 1,269,000 Arabs and 608,000 Jews resided within the borders of Mandate Palestine. Jews had acquired by purchase about 7 percent of the total land area of Palestine, amounting to about 20 percent of the arable land.


Haganah fighters expel Palestinians from Haifa. May 12, 1948. (AFP/Getty Images)


On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly v**ed to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab. The UN partition plan divided the country so that each state would have a majority of its own population, although a few Jewish settlements would fall within the proposed Arab state while hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs would become part of the proposed Jewish state. The territory designated for the Jewish state would be slightly larger than the Arab state (56 percent and 43 percent of Palestine, respectively, excluding Jerusalem), on the assumption that increasing numbers of Jews would immigrate there. According to the UN partition plan, the area of Jerusalem and Bethlehem was to become an international zone.


Publicly, the Z*****t leadership accepted the UN partition plan, although they hoped somehow to expand the borders assigned to the Jewish state. The Palestinian Arabs and the surrounding Arab states rejected the UN plan and regarded the General Assembly v**e as an international betrayal. Some argued that the UN plan allotted too much territory to the Jews. Most Arabs regarded the proposed Jewish state as a settler colony and argued that it was only because the British had permitted extensive Z*****t settlement in Palestine against the wishes of the Arab majority that the question of Jewish statehood was on the international agenda at all.


Fighting began between the Arab and Jewish residents of Palestine days after the adoption of the UN partition plan. The Arab military forces were poorly organized, trained and armed. In contrast, Z*****t military forces, although numerically smaller, were well organized, trained and armed. By early April 1948, the Z*****t forces had secured control over most of the territory allotted to the Jewish state in the UN plan and begun to go on the offensive, conquering territory beyond the partition borders, in several sectors.


On May 15, 1948, the British evacuated Palestine, and Z*****t leaders proclaimed the State of Israel. Neighboring Arab states (Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq) then invaded Israel, claiming that they sought to “save” Palestine from the Z*****ts. Lebanon declared war but did not invade. In fact, the Arab rulers had territorial designs on Palestine and were no more anxious than the Z*****ts to see a Palestinian state emerge. During May and June 1948, when the fighting was most intense, the outcome of this first Arab-Israeli war was in doubt. But after arms shipments from Czechoslovakia reached Israel, its armed forces established superiority and conquered additional territories beyond the borders the UN partition plan had drawn up for the Jewish state.


In 1949, the war between Israel and the Arab states ended with the signing of armistice agreements. The country once known as Palestine was now divided into three parts, each under a different political regime. The boundaries between them were the 1949 armistice lines (the “Green Line”). The State of Israel encompassed over 77 percent of the territory. Jordan occupied East Jerusalem and the hill country of central Palestine (the West Bank). Egypt took control of the coastal plain around the city of Gaza (the Gaza Strip). The Palestinian Arab state envisioned by the UN partition plan was never established.


The Palestinian Refugees


As a consequence of the fighting in Palestine/Israel between 1947 and 1949, over 700,000 Palestinians became refugees. The precise number of refugees is sharply disputed, as is the question of responsibility for their exodus. Many Palestinians have claimed that most were expelled in accordance with a Z*****t plan to rid the country of its non-Jewish inhabitants. The official Israeli position holds that the refugees fled on orders from Arab political and military leaders. One Israeli military intelligence document indicates that through June 1948 at least 75 percent of the refugees fled due to military actions by Z*****t m*****as, psychological campaigns aimed at frightening Arabs into leaving, and dozens of direct expulsions.


The proportion of expulsions is likely higher since the largest single expulsion of the war—50,000 from Lydda and Ramle—occurred in mid-July. Only about 5 percent left on orders from Arab authorities. There are several well-documented cases of massacres that led to large-scale Arab flight. The most infamous atrocity occurred at Dayr Yasin, a village near Jerusalem, where the number of Arab residents k**led in cold blood by right-wing Z*****t m*****as was about 125.


Palestinians


Today this term refers to the Arabs—Christian, Muslim and Druze—whose historical roots can be traced to the territory of Palestine as defined by the British mandate borders. Some 5.6 million Palestinians now live within this area, which is divided between the State of Israel, and the West Bank and Gaza; these latter areas were captured and occupied by Israel in 1967. Today, over 1.4 million Palestinians are citizens of Israel, living inside the country’s 1949 armistice borders and comprising about 20 percent of its population. About 2.6 million live in the West Bank (including 200,000 in East Jerusalem) and about 1.6 million in the Gaza Strip. The remainder of the Palestinian people, perhaps another 5.6 million, lives in diaspora, outside the country they claim as their national homeland.


The largest Palestinian diaspora community, approximately 2.7 million, is in Jordan. Many of them still live in the refugee camps that were established in 1949, although others live in cities and towns. Lebanon and Syria also have large Palestinian populations, many of whom still live in refugee camps. Many Palestinians have moved to Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf countries to work, and some have moved to other parts of the Middle East or other parts of the world.


Jordan is the only Arab state to grant citizenship to the Palestinians who live there. Palestinians in Arab states generally do not enjoy the same rights as the citizens of those states. The situation of the refugees in Lebanon is especially dire; many Lebanese blame Palestinians for the civil war that wracked that country from 1975–1991, and demand that they be resettled elsewhere in order for the Lebanese to maintain peace in their country. Some elements of Lebanon’s Christian population are particularly anxious to rid the country of the mainly Muslim Palestinians because of their fear that the Palestinians threaten the delicate balance among the country’s religious groups. Palestinians in Syria have been caught up in violence since the uprising against the regime there started in 2011.


Although many Palestinians still live in refugee camps and slums, others have become economically successful. Palestinians now have the highest per capita rate of university graduates in the Arab world. Their diaspora experience contributed to a high level of politicization of all sectors of the Palestinian people, though this phenomenon faded in the 2000s as political factionalism increased and the prospects of a Palestinian state receded.


Palestinian Citizens of Israel


In 1948, only about 150,000 Palestinians remained in the area that became the State of Israel. They were granted Israeli citizenship and the right to v**e. But in many respects they were and remain second-class citizens, since Israel defines itself as a Jewish state and the state of the Jewish people, and Palestinians are non-Jews. Until 1966 most of them were subject to a military government that restricted their movement and other rights (to work, speech, association and so on). Arabs were not permitted to become full members of the Israeli trade union federation, the Histadrut, until 1965.


About 40 percent of their lands were confiscated by the state and used for development projects that benefited Jews primarily or exclusively. All of Israel’s governments have discriminated against the Arab population by allocating far fewer resources for education, health care, public works, municipal government and economic development to the Arab sector.


Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel have had a difficult struggle to maintain their cultural and political identity in a state that officially regards expression of Palestinian or Arab national sentiment as subversive. Until 1967, they were entirely isolated from the Arab world and often were regarded by other Arabs as t*****rs for living in Israel. Since 1967, many have become more aware of their identity as Palestinians. One important expression of this identity was the organization of a general strike on March 30, 1976, designated as Land Day, to protest the continuing confiscation of Arab lands. The Israeli security forces k**led six Arab citizens on that day. All Palestinians now commemorate it as a national day.


In recent years it has become illegal in Israel to commemorate the nakba—the expulsion or flight of over half the population of Arab Palestine in 1948. Israel’s Central E******ns Committee has several times used patently political criteria to rule that Arab citizens whose views it found objectionable may not run in parliamentary e******ns. While in all cases the decisions were overturned by the Supreme Court, they contributed to anti-Arab hysteria and anti-democratic sentiment, which increased dramatically among Jewish Israelis after 2000.


The June 1967 War


After 1949, although there was an armistice between Israel and the Arab states, the conflict continued and the region remained imperiled by the prospect of another war. The sense of crisis was fueled by a spiraling arms race as countries built up their military caches and prepared their forces (and their populations) for a future showdown. In 1956, Israel joined with Britain and France to attack Egypt, ostensibly to reverse the Egyptian government’s nationalization of the Suez Canal (then under French and British control) and to neutralize Palestinian commando attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip.


Israeli forces captured Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, but were forced to retreat to the armistice lines as a result of international pressure led by the US and the Soviet Union (in an uncharacteristic show of cooperation to avert further conflict in the Middle East). By the early 1960s, however, the region was becoming a hotspot of Cold War rivalry as the US and the Soviet Union were competing with one another for global power and influence.


In the spring of 1967, the Soviet Union misinformed the Syrian government that Israeli forces were massing in northern Israel to attack Syria. There was no such Israeli mobilization. But clashes between Israel and Syria had been escalating for about a year, and Israeli leaders had publicly declared that it might be necessary to bring down the Syrian regime if it failed to end Palestinian guerrilla attacks from Syrian territory.


Responding to a Syrian request for assistance, in May 1967 Egyptian troops entered the Sinai Peninsula bordering Israel. A few days later, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser asked the UN observer forces stationed between Israel and Egypt to redeploy from their positions. The Egyptians then occupied Sharm al-Sheikh at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula and proclaimed a blockade of the Israeli port of Eilat on the Gulf of ‘Aqaba, arguing that access to Eilat passed through Egyptian territorial waters. These measures shocked and frightened the Israeli public, which believed it was in danger of annihilation.


As the military and diplomatic crisis continued, on June 5, 1967, Israel preemptively attacked Egypt and Syria, destroying their air forces on the ground within a few hours. Jordan joined in the fighting belatedly, and consequently was attacked by Israel as well. The Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies were decisively defeated, and Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria.


The 1967 war, which lasted only six days, established Israel as the dominant regional military power. The speed and thoroughness of Israel’s victory discredited the Arab regimes. In contrast, the Palestinian national movement emerged as a major actor after 1967 in the form of the political and military groups that made up the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).


UN Security Council Resolution 242


After the 1967 war, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242, which notes the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force,” and calls for Israeli withdrawal from lands seized in the war and the right of all states in the area to peaceful existence within secure and recognized boundaries. The grammatical construction of the French version of Resolution 242 says Israel should withdraw from “the territories,” whereas the English version of the text calls for withdrawal from “territories.” (Both English and French are official languages of the UN.) Israel and the United States use the English version to argue that Israeli withdrawal from some, but not all, the territory occupied in the 1967 war satisfies the requirements of this resolution.


For many years the Palestinians rejected Resolution 242 because it does not acknowledge their right to national self-determination or to return to their homeland. It calls only for a “just settlement” of the refugee problem without specifying what that phrase means. By calling for recognition of every state in the area, Resolution 242 entailed unilateral Palestinian recognition of Israel without reciprocal recognition of Palestinian national rights.


The Occupied Territories


The West Bank and the Gaza Strip became distinct political units as a result of the 1949 armistice that divided the new Jewish state of Israel from other parts of Mandate Palestine. During 1948–1967, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, was ruled by Jordan, which annexed the area in 1950 and extended citizenship to Palestinians living there. In the same period, the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian military administration. In the 1967 war, Israel captured and occupied these areas.


Israel established a military administration to govern the Palestinian residents of the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Under this arrangement, Palestinians were denied many basic political rights and civil liberties, including freedoms of expression, the press and political association. Palestinian nationalism was criminalized as a threat to Israeli security, which meant that even displaying the Palestinian national colors was a punishable act. All aspects of Palestinian life were regulated, and often severely restricted. Even something as innocuous as the gathering of wild thyme (za‘tar), a basic element of Palestinian cuisine, was outlawed by Israeli military orders.


Israeli policies and practices in the West Bank and Gaza have included extensive use of collective punishments such as curfews, house demolitions and closure of roads, schools and community institutions. Hundreds of Palestinian political activists have been deported to Jordan or Lebanon, tens of thousands of acres of Palestinian land have been confiscated, and thousands of trees have been uprooted.


Israel has relied on imprisonment as one of its key strategies to control the West Bank and Gaza and to thwart and punish Palestinian nationalist resistance to the occupation. The number of Palestinians arrested by Israel since 1967 is now approaching 1 million. Hundreds of thousands of the arrestees have been jailed, some without trial (administratively detained), but most after being prosecuted in the Israeli military court system. More than 40 percent of the Palestinian male population has been imprisoned at least once.


Torture of Palestinian prisoners has been a common practice since at least 1971. In 1999 Israel’s High Court of Justice forbade the “routine” use of such techniques. Dozens of people have died in detention from abuse or neglect. Israeli officials have claimed that harsh measures and high rates of incarceration are necessary to thwart terrorism. Israel regards all forms of Palestinian opposition to the occupation as threats to its national security, including non-violent methods like calling for boycotts, divestment and sanctions.


Israel has built 145 official settlements and about 100 unofficial settlement “outposts” and permitted 560,000 Jewish citizens to move to East Jerusalem and the West Bank (as of early 2013). These settlements are a breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention and other international laws governing military occupation of foreign territory. Many settlements are built on expropriated, privately owned Palestinian lands.


Israel justifies its violation of international law by claiming that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are not technically “occupied” because they were never part of the sovereign territory of any state. According to this interpretation, Israel is but an “administrator” of territory whose status remains to be determined. The international community has rejected this official Israeli position and maintained that international law should apply in the West Bank and Gaza. But little effort has been mounted to enforce international law or hold Israel accountable for violations it has engaged in since 1967.


Some 7,800 Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip were repatriated in 2005 following an Israeli government decision to “evacuate” the territory. Since then, Israel has maintained control of exit and entry of people and goods to the Gaza Strip and control of its air space and coastal waters.


Jerusalem


The UN’s 1947 partition plan advocated that Jerusalem become an international zone. In the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Israel took control of the western part of Jerusalem, while Jordan took the eastern part, including the old walled city containing important Jewish, Muslim and Christian religious sites. The 1949 armistice line cut the city in two.


In June 1967, Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan and almost immediately annexed it. It reaffirmed its annexation in 1981.


Israel regards Jerusalem as its “eternal capital.” Most of the international community considers East Jerusalem part of the occupied West Bank. Palestinians envision East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.


The Palestine Liberation Organization


The Arab League established the PLO in 1964 as an effort to control Palestinian nationalism while appearing to champion the cause. The Arab defeat in the 1967 war enabled younger, more militant Palestinians to take over the PLO and gain some independence from the Arab regimes.


The PLO includes different political and armed groups with varying ideological orientations. Yasser Arafat was PLO chairman from 1968 until his death in 2004. He was also the leader of Fatah, the largest PLO group. The other major groups are the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and, in the Occupied Territories, the Palestine Peoples Party (PPP, formerly the C*******t Party). Despite these factional differences, the majority of Palestinians regarded the PLO as their representative until it began to lose significance after the 1993 Oslo accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994. Hamas, which is an Islamist group and not a component of the PLO, emerged in the late 1980s. The rise of Hamas, especially in the 2000s, further diminished the authority of the PLO.


In the late 1960s, the PLO’s primary base of operations was Jordan. In 1970–1971, fighting with the Jordanian army drove the PLO leadership out of the country, forcing it to relocate to Lebanon. When the Lebanese civil war started in 1975, the PLO became a party to the conflict. After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the PLO leadership was expelled from the country, relocating once more to Tunisia.


Until 1993, Israel did not acknowledge Palestinian national rights or recognize the Palestinians as an independent party to the conflict. Israel refused to negotiate with the PLO, arguing that it was nothing but a terrorist organization, and insisted on dealing only with Jordan or other Arab states. It rejected the establishment of a Palestinian state, demanding that Palestinians be incorporated into the existing Arab states. This int***sigence ended when Israeli representatives entered into secret negotiations with the PLO, which led to the 1993 Oslo Declaration of Principles.


The October 1973 War and the Role of Egypt


In 1971, Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat indicated to UN envoy Gunnar Jarring that he was willing to sign a peace agreement with Israel in exchange for the return of Egyptian territory lost in 1967 (the Sinai Peninsula). When this overture was ignored by Israel and the US, Egypt and Syria decided to act to break the political stalemate. They attacked Israeli forces in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights in October 1973, on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. The surprise attack caught Israel off guard, and the Arabs achieved some early military victories. This turn of events prompted American political intervention, along with sharply increased military aid to Israel.


After the war, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger pursued a diplomatic strategy of limited bilateral agreements to secure partial Israeli withdrawals from the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights while avoiding negotiations on more difficult issues, including the fate of the West Bank and Gaza. This strategy also positioned the United States as the sole mediator and most significant external actor in the conflict, a position it has sought to maintain ever since.


Sadat eventually decided to initiate a separate overture to Israel. He traveled to Jerusalem on November 19, 1977 and gave a speech to the Knesset. It was a powerful symbol of recognition that Israel has been expecting other Arab heads of state to repeat, without due consideration of the particular circumstances that brought Sadat to Jerusalem.


In September 1978, President Jimmy Carter invited Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to the Camp David p**********l retreat in Maryland. They worked out two agreements: a framework for peace between Egypt and Israel, and a general framework for resolution of the Middle East crisis, in other words, the Palestinian question.


The first agreement formed the basis of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty signed in 1979. The second agreement proposed to grant autonomy to the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for a five-year interim period, after which the final status of the territories would be negotiated.


Only the Egyptian-Israeli part of the Camp David accords was implemented. The Palestinians and other Arab states rejected the autonomy concept because it did not guarantee full Israeli withdrawal from areas captured in 1967 or the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. In any case, Israel sabotaged negotiations by continuing to confiscate Palestinian lands and build new settlements in violation of the commitments Begin made to Carter at Camp David.