PALESTINE.

In 1516 Palestine, a geographic area that includes both present-day Israel and Jordan, was absorbed into the vast Ottoman Empire that at its pinnacle stretched across Europe and Asia. From this time until the end of the First World War, Palestine did not exist as a unified geopolitical entity. It was divided between the Ottoman province of Beirut in the north and the district of Jerusalem in the south. The Muslim inhabitants of Palestine, the vast majority of the population, were subjects of the Ottoman sultan-caliph, the religious and temporal head of the Islamic world, and local governors were appointed by the Ottoman court in Constantinople. There had been a dwindling Jewish presence in Palestine since biblical times, when this area comprised a Jewish state. By 1914, primarily a result of immigration from eastern Europe, Palestine's Jewish community (commonly known as the Yishuv), numbered seventy to eighty-five thousand, about 12 percent of the total population.

1914–1917: OTTOMAN PALESTINE

Since its formal establishment in the 1890s, the Zionist Organization, the Jewish national movement seeking the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland in Palestine, had attempted to gain Ottoman support for this ambitious goal. Following the Ottoman decision to enter the First World War on the side of Germany in November 1914, the Zionists looked to Great Britain, the leading anti-Ottoman power in the Middle East, for political support.

In November 1917 the British government issued the Balfour Declaration. Named after Lord Balfour (Arthur James Balfour; 1848–1930), Britain's foreign minister, it was issued in the form of a letter to Lord Rothschild (Lionel Walter Rothschild; 1868–1937), the leading figure in British Jewry. The Balfour Declaration called for the "establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" and pledged that Great Britain would "use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."

The following month the British army under the command of General Sir Edmund Allenby captured the holy city of Jerusalem. This constituted a grave setback to Ottoman prestige, heralded the ultimate defeat and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, and marked the beginning of almost three decades of British rule in Palestine.

1920–1948: BRITISH PALESTINE

British rule in Palestine was formalized when the League of Nations approved a British mandate for this former Ottoman possession in July 1922. The key clauses of the Balfour Declaration were incorporated into the mandate. This allowed the Yishuv to develop extensive educational and welfare services and to acquire large parcels of land from Arab landowners, absentee landlords, and peasants. Landmark institutions, such as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, were opened and the Histadrut, the General Federation of Hebrew Workers in Palestine, was established. This body played a central role in rapidly developing the construction, industrial, and agricultural sectors in a period of rising Jewish immigration. A 1922 census estimated the total population of Palestine at 752,048, of which Muslims numbered 589,177 (78 percent of the population) and Jews numbered 83,790 (11 percent of the population). By 1947 the Jews comprised 31 percent of a total population of over 1.7 million.

This rise in the Jewish population was largely a result of an influx of Jews escaping Nazi persecution in Europe. However, Palestine's Arabs viewed Jewish immigration into Palestine as a political rather than a humanitarian issue. In 1921, 1930, and 1936 Palestinian Arab delegations visited London to express opposition to Zionism and continued immigration. There were also riots in 1920 and 1921 and a violent attack on Hebron's Jewish residents in 1929.

Haj Amin (Amin al-Husayni; 1893–1974), a member of a leading Palestinian Arab family, dominated Palestinian Arab politics during this period. Appointed grand mufti (expounder of Muslim law) by the British in 1921, he also headed the Arab higher committee, the de facto Arab leadership in Palestine. He played a key role in the Arab revolt against British rule that began in 1936. He also led Arab opposition to the July 1937 recommendation of the royal commission on Palestine (the Peel Commission) that called for the abrogation of the mandate and the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states with a permanent mandate for Jerusalem.

In November 1938 the Woodhead Commission, set up to examine the feasibility of partition, rejected the Peel proposals as unworkable. In May 1939 the British government introduced the Palestine White Paper. This document severely restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine to a maximum of seventy-five thousand between April 1939 and 1944, after which time "no further Jewish immigration will be permitted unless the Arabs of Palestine are prepared to acquiesce in it."

Following the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the Palestinian Arab community showed little interest in opposing the Nazi menace and the mufti's position as Arab Palestine's most popular political leader was not diminished by his cooperation with Nazi Germany during the war. The Yishuv contributed greatly to the struggle against Nazism, but the war years saw a severe breakdown in relations between the Zionists and the British government over the White Paper policy, which was viewed as a subversion of the Jewish national revival in Palestine and the abandonment of European Jewry to their Nazi persecutor.

As such, in May 1942 the mainstream Zionist leadership for the first time officially endorsed the call for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, as opposed to a Jewish national home. At the same time extremist Jewish groups like the Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang increased their attacks against British targets in Palestine, the most notorious of which was the 1946 bombing of the British military headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that killed ninety-one people.

In 1947, in the face of Jewish insurgency and Arab hostility, Britain turned the Palestine problem over to the United Nations. On 29 November 1947 the United Nations approved (by 33 votes to 13 with 10 abstentions) a plan calling for the partition of Palestine into two independent states—one Jewish, the other Arab—linked in an economic union, with Jerusalem placed under an international regime.

1948–1967: THE WEST BANK UNDER JORDANIAN RULE

On 15 May 1948, less than twenty-four hours after the end of the British mandate and the proclamation of the establishment of the State of Israel, the combined armies of Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Transjordan (which in 1949 adopted the name Jordan), and Syria invaded the nascent Jewish state.

Israel was victorious in the ensuing war, and by the summer of 1949 it was in possession of far more territory than had been originally envisaged under the United Nations' partition plan. However, Jordan captured east Jerusalem and the west bank of the Jordan River. Jerusalem was divided into a Jordanian sector and an Israeli sector with a small no-man's-land and a demilitarized zone separating both sides. This meant that King Abdullah (Abd Allah ibn al-Husayn; 1882–1951), the founder of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan now ruled both banks of the Jordan River, as during the 1920s the British had placed the area of Palestine to the east of the river under Hashemite control.

By the time hostilities ceased in 1949, large numbers of Palestinian Arabs from the main urban centers of Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa and from villages along the coastal plane of Palestine had fled their homes. The actual number of Palestinians who became refugees at this time is unknown. Israel estimates the figure at 538,000, the UN estimate is 720,000, and Palestinian sources believe it to be 850,000. An emotive academic debate rages between scholars who argue that Israel expelled the refugees and those who claim that the Palestinian Arabs left of their own volition, intent on returning once Israel had been defeated.

In April 1950 King Abdullah annexed east Jerusalem and the West Bank into his kingdom. Unlike Palestinian refugees in other Arab countries, those under Jordanian jurisdiction gained automatic Jordanian citizenship and were integrated into the nation's economic, social, and political life.

However, Jordanian investment in the West Bank's infrastructure, industry, and social services was minimal, resulting in 200,000 West Bank residents moving to the East Bank and about 300,000 others emigrating abroad between 1949 and 1967. Many of those Palestinians who remained lived in refugee camps and were reluctant to integrate into Jordanian society. King Hussein, who succeeded his father King Talal I (r. 1951–1952) in 1953, faced growing economic and political pressure from this large and disaffected constituency. This situation deteriorated when the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), established in 1964, challenged Jordanian sovereignty over the West Bank and attempted to overthrow the Hashemite monarchy.

1967–2004: THE WEST BANK UNDER ISRAELI RULE

In the early morning of 5 June 1967, and in response to relentless threats from its Arab neighbors, Israel launched a surprise military attack on Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. By the time the UN Security Council–sponsored ceasefire had come into effect on 10 June, Israel had captured east Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan. Jerusalem was reunited under Israeli sovereignty and the West Bank was placed under administration.

In the wake of the war the PLO quickly evolved into the diplomatic and military representative of a Palestinian people who felt betrayed by the Arab world. In 1968 the PLO formulated its national covenant that declared the existence of the state of Israel to be null and void. In 1969 Yasser Arafat became head of the PLO, and his championing of the twin policy of international terror and diplomacy gained widespread support in the international community at a time of growing sympathy for anticolonial causes. In November 1974 Arafat had the distinction of becoming the first non–head of state to address the General Assembly of the United Nations.

The overwhelming majority of ordinary Palestinians in the West Bank opposed the occupation, but they did not participate in the armed struggle. Rather, they used their access to the larger and more developed Israeli economy to improve their standard of living, something their own primarily agricultural economy could not offer.

The number of Palestinians working in Israel rose from zero in 1967 to sixty-six thousand in 1975. During the 1970s the West Bank was the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world. This period also saw a significant fall in infant mortality and illiteracy rates, as well as a dramatic increase in life expectancy and attendance at schools and universities. All this influenced the social, economic, and political development of the West Bank, as the traditional pro-Jordanian elite was eclipsed by a younger generation of educated Palestinian nationalists in both urban and rural areas.

Between 1977 and 1991, the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank grew from 20,000 to over 100,000. This became the major Palestinian grievance against Israel, and in December 1987 the intifada, a mass uprising against the Israeli occupation, began. The intifada highlighted the existence of a local Palestinian leadership capable of challenging the dominance of the PLO, which had been based in far-away Tunis since being driven out of Lebanon by Israel in 1982. The PLO's influence was further weakened by the growing appeal of Islamist groups like Hamas—the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brothers, which came to prominence during the intifada—and by the collapse of its longtime patron the Soviet Union following the end of the Cold War.

At the Madrid Peace Conference of October 1991, and in subsequent bilateral political discussions with Israel, the Palestinians were represented by a joint Palestinian-Jordanian delegation, as Israel refused to negotiate with the PLO. However, secret talks between Israeli and PLO officials in Oslo, Norway, over the same period resulted in a peace agreement. On 13 September 1993, in a historic ceremony in the garden of the White House, Israeli and PLO leaders signed a Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (also known as DOP, or Oslo 1), which set out a framework for Palestinian self-rule in occupied territories prior to a final settlement.

Subsequent agreements in 1994, 1995, 1997, and 1998 extended Palestinian autonomy and provided for a gradual Israeli military redeployment and cooperation on security issues. The international community provided significant support for the economic, political, and social development of the West Bank following the signing of the Oslo Accords. The World Bank has estimated that annual donor assistance averaged one billion U.S. dollars per annum in these years.

Nevertheless, this massive investment did not result in ordinary Palestinians experiencing a noticeable rise in their living standards. This was because of widespread corruption and gross inefficiency within the Palestinian Authority, the governing body of the self-rule areas; as well as Israel's repeated closure of its borders to Palestinian goods and workers in response to a wave of Palestinian terrorism between 1994 and 1996.

By 1999, according to World Bank figures, the West Bank had recovered from the economic decline of previous years. However, the failure of Israel and the Palestinian Authority to reach a permanent settlement resulted in the breakdown of the Oslo process and the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000. Israelis and Palestinians then experienced a period of violence and despair unprecedented even by the appalling standards of this tragic conflict. The death in November 2004 of the longtime Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, a man whom many held responsible for the failure of Oslo, and the decision of the Israeli government to withdraw unilaterally and remove all settlements from the Gaza Strip presented a new opportunity for peace. But by the mid-2000s, creating the circumstances that would result in the establishment of a viable, sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank still posed a significant challenge to Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

See alsoBritish Empire; Israel; Zionism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Cmd. 5479, Report of the Palestine Royal Commission. London, July 1937.

Cmd. 6019, Palestine: A Statement of Policy. London, May 1939.

Secondary Sources

Friedman, Isaiah. The Question of Palestine: British-Jewish-Arab Relations, 1914–1918. New Brunswick, N.J., and London, 1992. A scholarly and intricate analysis of Britain's Palestine policy and its negotiations with Arabs and Jews during the First World War.

Karsh, Efraim. The Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Palestine War 1948. Oxford, U.K., 2002. A succinct and reader-friendly account of the 1948 war that examines the factors that led to the fighting and analyzes the war's impact on Israeli-Arab relations, Palestinian society, and the international community.

Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge, U.K., 2004. A leading scholar argues that Israel was responsible for expelling Palestine's Arab population during the 1948 war.

Rabinovich, Itamar. Waging Peace: Israel and the Arabs, 1948–2003. Princeton, N.J., 2004. A comprehensive and informed history of Israeli-Arab relations by a leading scholar who was also Israel's ambassador to the United States during the 1990s.

Ross, Dennis. The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace. New York, 2004. A hugely detailed narrative account of the Oslo peace process by the senior U.S. negotiator.

Sayigh, Yezid. Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993. Oxford, U.K., 1997. A definitive study of Palestinian society and the PLO's struggle against Israel from the time of the 1948 war until the Oslo peace process.

Shamir, Shimon, and Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, eds. The Camp David Summit—What Went Wrong?: Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians Analyze the Failure of the Boldest Attempt Ever to Resolve the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. Brighton, U.K., and Portland, Ore., 2005. A collection of easily accessible essays on why the Oslo peace process failed, written by academic experts and key Israeli, Palestinian, and American participants in the negotiations.

Sherman, A. J. Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine, 1918–1948. London, 1997. An entertaining account of the British mandate based primarily on the diary entries and correspondence of British residents of Palestine during that period.

Shlaim, Avi. The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. London, 2000. A critical examination of Zionism and Israel's responsibility for the Arab-Israeli conflict over the course of the twentieth century.

Watson, Geoffrey R. The Oslo Accords: International Law and the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Agreements. Oxford, U.K., 2000. A scholarly study from a legal perspective of the obligations imposed on both Israel and the Palestinians under the various Oslo peace agreements.

Vital, David. Zionism: The Crucial Phase. Oxford, U.K., 1987. The definitive scholarly account of both the Zionist movement and the Yishuv's evolution from the beginning of the First World War until the outbreak of the Second World War.

Rory Miller