Palestine

Palestine An area between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. It was ruled by the Kings of Judah until the expulsion of the Jewish people after the unsuccessful Bar Kochba rising, 132–5 ad. Since then it has been populated by a majority of Arabs, though it remained a central reference point to the dispersed Jewish people as their homeland, Eretz Israel (Land of Israel). In the light of renewed pogroms in eastern Europe, a first wave of Jewish immigration into Palestine began in 1882, and there was another wave in 1904–14. Though the second wave contained many intellectuals and people of middle-class origins, the 60,000 Jews who had immigrated in total by 1914 were driven less by a vision of a new state than by the hope of making a new living, free from persecution.

In 1918 the area, which had been under the authority of the Ottoman Empire since 1517 came under British rule, formalized as a League of Nations Mandate in 1920. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 had fostered the hope of a Jewish state in Palestine, which was given further impetus by a third wave of Jewish immigration (around 35,000 people), this time with explicitly Zionist aims. At the same time, however, British encouragement of Arab nationalism, partly through T. E. Lawrence, also fostered an increasing sense of identity among Palestinian Arabs. They began to feel threatened, particularly by relatively sophisticated and well-organized Jewish quasi-state institutions, such as the Histadruth or Haganah. Arab attacks on Jewish settlers climaxed in 1929, when over 200 Jews were massacred in Hebron, and in 1936–9, during the Arab uprising. Tensions intensified partly because Jewish immigration continued, as 80,000 people arrived in 1924–31. In 1932–8, 200,000 Jews immigrated, fleeing from the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe (particularly, though not exclusively, in Germany and Austria). The unspeakable suffering of Jews in Nazi concentration camps such as Auschwitz changed world opinion, and made the creation of an Israeli state inevitable.

Palestinian Arabs, supported by Arabs elsewhere, refused to accept this, and in 1948–9 they rose against the new state of Israel, but to no avail. Western Palestine came under Jewish rule, the Gaza Strip under Egyptian sovereignty, and eastern Palestine became Jordanian territory as the West Bank. The latter territories came under Israeli administration after the Six Day War in 1967; but perhaps the darkest days for Arabs in Palestine (Palestinians) came in 1970, when their leaders and many of their people were violently expelled from Jordan by fellow Arabs. They gradually recovered from this blow, and became increasingly self-confident as their leadership, especially the PLO, grew in international stature. The Palestinians' most concerted effort to have their claim for their own state recognized came in the Intifadah uprising, which finally convinced Israel that it could not defy Palestinian demands forever. In 1988, in response to Jordan's final renunciation of its claims to the West Bank, the PLO declared it the independent state of Palestine, and later that year finally recognized the state of Israel.

Israel refused to accept the legitimacy of the PLO until the Oslo Accord and Gaza–Jericho Agreement (1993). Under these agreements, a Palestinian National Authority (PNA) was established, with Arafat being elected its first President in 1996. This controlled most of the Gaza strip, as well as a number of disparate Palestinian communities in the West Bank. Following the election of Netanyahu in 1996, it became increasingly clear that the Oslo Accord, with its promise of an eventual independent Palestinian state, had collapsed. Given this apparent failure of his policies, which was compounded by the dire economic situation of the population in the areas under PNA control, Arafat lost more and more popular support. Meanwhile, a growing number of Palestinian youths became radicalized and lent their support to the Intifadah. In a desperate bid to quell the growing violence emanating from the Palestinian territories, Israel reoccupied the whole of the West Bank territories in March 2002. Meanwhile, throughout the 1990s Israel increased its stake in the Palestinian territories through its construction of Jewish settlements in areas under Israeli control. Between 1993 and 2002 the number of Jewish settlements there doubled, with an estimated 200,000 settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, and a further 120,000 in East Jerusalem. To protect Israel from the further incursion of suicide attacks, in 2002 Israel began to construct a security wall between the border of Israel and the Palestine. This was criticized by pro-Palestinian observers because the wall included some Palestinian territory on the Israeli side. Paradoxically, it was also criticized by right-wing Israelis, as a de facto recognition of Palestinian separateness. Arafat yielded to pressure by sharing power with a Prime Minister, but his continued control of the paramilitary police forces kept his control of the PNA intact.