</noinclude> The Arab–Israeli conflict began in the 20th century, evolving from earlier Intercommunal violence in Mandatory Palestine. The conflict became a major international issue with the birth of Israel in 1948. The Arab–Israeli conflict has resulted in at least five major wars and a number of minor conflicts. It has also been the source of two major Palestinian uprisings (intifadas).
Background
Ottoman era Tensions between the Zionist movements and the Arab residents of Palestine started to emerge after the 1880s, when immigration of European Jews to Palestine increased. This immigration increased the Jewish communities in Ottoman Palestine by the acquisition of land from Ottoman and individual Arab landholders, known as effendis, and establishment of Jewish agricultural settlements (kibbutzim). At the time, Arabs lived in an almost feudal existence on the effendis' land.The Jewish National Fund: Land Purchase Methods and Priorities, 1924 – 1939 by Kenneth W. Stein. Middle Eastern Studies. April 1984. Volume 20 Number 2, pp. 190–205 Demographer Justin McCarthy estimated from Ottoman census data that the population of Palestine in 1882–3 was about 468,000, consisting of 408,000 Muslims, 44,000 Christians and 15,000 Jews. By the eve of World War I, these numbers had increased to 602,000 Muslims, 81,000 Christians and 39,000 Jews, plus a similar but uncertain number of Jews who were not Ottoman citizens. The first Statistician General of Israel, Roberto Bachi, give similar numbers except for a lower count (525,000) of Muslims in 1914.
British Mandate (1920–1948)
During the time of the Mandatory Palestine, the Balfour Declaration signed in 1917, stated that the government of Great Britain supported the establishment of a "Jewish national home" in Palestine. This exacerbated tensions between the Arabs living in Mandate Palestine and the Jews who emigrated there during the Ottoman period. Signed in January 1919, the Faisal–Weizmann Agreement promoted Arab-Jewish cooperation on the development of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine and an Arab nation in a large part of the Middle East, though this event had little to no effect on the conflict.Sela, Avraham. "Arab-Israeli Conflict." The Continuum Political Encyclopedia of the Middle East. Ed. Avraham Sela. New York: Continuum, 2002. pp. 58–121.
In 1920, the San Remo conference largely endorsed the 1916 Anglo-French Sykes–Picot Agreement, allocating to Britain the area of present-day Jordan, the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and Iraq, while France received Syria and Lebanon. In 1922, the League of Nations formally established the British Mandate for Palestine and Transjordan, at least partially fulfilling Britain's commitments from the 1915–16 McMahon–Hussein Correspondence by assigning all of the land east of the Jordan River to the Emirate of Jordan, ruled by Hashemite king Abdullah but closely dependent on Britain, leaving the remainder west of the Jordan as the League of Nations Mandatory Palestine. While the British had made promises to give both Arabs and Jews land, the British claimed they had never promised to give either side all of the land. Rising tensions had given way to violence, such as the 1920 Nebi Musa riots, and Jaffa riots of 1921. To assuage the Arabs, and due to British inability to control Arab violence in the Mandatory Palestine any other way, the semi-autonomous Arab Emirate of Transjordan was created in all Palestinian territory east of the Jordan river (roughly 77% of the mandate).
The conflicting forces of Arab nationalism and the Zionist movement created a situation which the British could neither resolve nor extricate themselves from. Pogroms in Russia and Ukraine as well as Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany created a new urgency in the Zionist movement to create a Jewish state, and the evident intentions of the Zionists provoked increasingly fierce Arab attacks against the Jewish population (most notably in the preceding 1929 Hebron massacre, the activities of the Black Hand, and during the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine). The British-appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, led opposition to the idea of turning part of Palestine into a Jewish state."Though attracted to the economic benefits generated by Zionist settlement—an estimated 300,000 Arabs would eventually enter the country from neighboring Arab states—thousands of Palestinian fellaheen ... were displaced by Jewish land purchases while urban workers were marginalized by more technologically skilled Jewish laborers." Oren, Michael B. Power, Faith, and Fantasy: American in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. p. 421
In seeking support against British rule in Palestine, the Grand Mufti sought alliance with the Axis powers; Britain responded by banishing the Mufti (who spent much of World War II in Germany and helped form a Muslim SS division in the Balkans), curbing Jewish immigration, and reinforce its police force. The Jewish leadership (Yishuv) adopted a policy of restraint and defensive action while criticizing Britain for its conciliation of Arab violence and revising its commitments under the Balfour Declaration.Sela, 63. Dissatisfaction with this approach led some members to split from the Haganah and form the Irgun, a more militant underground group later led by Menachem Begin.
A British Royal Commission of Inquiry that came to be known as the Peel Commission was established in 1936. In its 1937 report, it proposed a two-state solution that gave the Arabs control over all of the Negev, much of the present-day West Bank, and Gaza and gave the Jews control over Tel Aviv, Haifa, present-day northern Israel, and surrounding areas. The British were to maintain control over Jaffa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and surrounding areas. The two main Jewish leaders, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion had convinced the Zionist Congress to approve equivocally the Peel recommendations as a basis for more negotiation.William Roger Louis, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez, and Decolonization, 2006, p. 391Benny Morris, One state, two states:resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict, 2009, p. 66Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, p. 48; p. 11 "while the Zionist movement, after much agonising, accepted the principle of partition and the proposals as a basis for negotiation"; p. 49 "In the end, after bitter debate, the Congress equivocally approved –by a vote of 299 to 160 – the Peel recommendations as a basis for further negotiation."Eran, Oded. "Arab-Israel Peacemaking." The Continuum Political Encyclopedia of the Middle East. Ed. Avraham Sela. New York: Continuum, 2002. The Arabs, however, rejected it while demanding cessation of immigration and land sales to Jewish people. The Arabs' demands prompted the British to stop Jewish immigration, thus preventing refugees from escaping the Holocaust.Oren, Michael B. "Israel’s 1967 Victory Is Something to Celebrate." The New York Times. 4 June 2017. 5 June 2017.
Jewish violence against the Mandatory Palestine continued to mount throughout the later half of the 1940s, with attacks by the Irgun, assassination of British authorities officials by the Lehi, and the 1946 King David Hotel bombing.
In 1947, the population was reported as 1,845,000, consisting of 608,000 Jews and 1,237,000 Arabs and others.
War of 1948
The 1948 Arab–Israeli War (1948–49), known as the "War of Independence" by Israelis and al-Nakba ("the Catastrophe") by Palestinians, began after the UN Partition Plan and the subsequent 1947–48 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine in November 1947. The plan proposed the establishment of Arab and Jewish states in Palestine. The Arabs had rejected the plan while the Jews had accepted it. For four months, under continuous Arab provocation and attack, the Yishuv was usually on the defensive while occasionally retaliating.Benny Morris, 1948. A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, Yale University Press, 2008, p. 79. By March 1948 however, the United States was actively seeking a temporary UN approved trusteeship rather than immediate partition, known as the Truman trusteeship proposal.The Avalon Project : United States Proposal for Temporary United Nations Trusteeship for Palestine – Statement by President Truman, March 25, 1948 The Jewish leadership rejected this. By now, both Jewish and ArabCollins, Larry and Dominique LaPierre. O Jerusalem!. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972. p. 88. militias had begun campaigns to control territory inside and outside the designated borders, and an open war between the two populations emerged.
Jordanian, Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese,"Milestones: 1945–1952." Office of the Historian. 13 June 2013."War of Independence (1948)." Ynetnews. 19 October 2008. 13 June 2013. Iraqi and Saudi troops invaded Palestine subsequent to the British withdrawal and the declaration of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. The Arab invasion was denounced by the United States, the Soviet Union, and UN secretary-general Trygve Lie, although it found support from Taiwan and other UN member states. The Arab states proclaimed their aim of a "United State of Palestine"Cablegram from the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States to the Secretary-General of the United Nations May 15, 1948, at Wikisource. Retrieved 22 March 2006. in place of Israel and an Arab state. The Arab Higher Committee said, that in the future Palestine, the Jews will be no more than 1/7 of the population. i.e. only Jews that lived in Palestine before the British mandate. They did not specify what will happen to the other Jews.["1948 A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, 2008, Benny Morris, p. 66] They considered the UN Plan to be invalid because it was opposed by Palestine's Arab majority, and claimed that the British withdrawal led to an absence of legal authority, making it necessary for them to protect Arab lives and property.The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem, PART II, 1947–1977 , United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine (UNISPAL), June 20, 1990, ST/SG/SER.F/1 About two thirds of Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from the territories which came under Jewish control; the rest became Arab citizens of Israel. All of the much smaller number of Jews in the territories captured by the Arabs, for example the Old City of Jerusalem, also fled or were expelled. The official United Nations estimate was that 711,000 Arabs became refugees during the fighting.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 , published by the United Nations Conciliation Commission, October 23, 1950. (U.N. General Assembly Official Records, 5th Session, Supplement No. 18, Document A/1367/Rev. 1). The Committee believed the estimate to be "as accurate as circumstances permit", and attributed the higher number on relief to, among other things, "duplication of ration cards, addition of persons who have been displaced from area other than Israel-held areas and of persons who, although not displaced, are destitute."
The fighting ended with signing of the several Armistice Agreements in 1949 between Israel and its warring neighbors (Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria), which formalized Israeli control of the area allotted to the Jewish state plus just over half of the area allotted to the Arab state. The Gaza Strip was occupied by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan until June 1967 when they were occupied by Israel during the Six-Day War.
Aftermath of the 1948 war