Hail and welcome. I started working on an essay addressing the ongoing Israel-Hamas war shortly after fighting broke out in mid-October. I was initially hesitant to tackle the topic but it’s a compelling force in current events and I wanted to understand more about it. These essays serve as focal points and expositions of such research. The essay quickly became quite extensive and as I came to realize that I would have to delve into the history of the conflict to really do it justice, it became clear that I’d have to split the essay into two parts. This essay is the first part and will cover the modern history of Israel and Palestine. It’s a touchy, complex, controversial topic, and I’ve done my best to get everything right, to do justice to the facts, and to present a neutral viewpoint before getting into the analysis. Don’t take that as my taking any sort of centrist position on the conflict; in this essay, I’m just trying to let the facts speak for themselves. I’m also attempting to cover a very complex history about which numerous books have been written in the span of about five thousand words, so there are unavoidably omissions and I suggest that anyone really interested in the full history use this as a launch point for your own research. The goal here is to present a sufficient overview for the purposes of my analysis in the next essay.
Some time during the Iron Age, likely around the 11th century BCE, the Israelites, a Semitic-language-speaking people living in the Levant along the Mediterranean Sea, founded the Kingdom of Israel. The nature and dating of this kingdom, and whether it was actually a proper kingdom, are matters of controversy. According to the Bible, the Kingdom was ruled by the kings Saul, David, and Solomon in succession before splitting into the Kingdom of Judah and the Samarian Kingdom of Israel, also called the Kingdom of Samaria. The latter was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire around 720 BCE; its people were deported and assimilated, and foreign peoples were settled in the former kingdom’s lands. A substantial number of Israelites remained and came to be known as Samaritans. The Kingdom of Judah continued as a vassal state until the Assyrians fell to the Neo-Babylonian empire, at which point the Babylonians conquered Judah and deported its citizens, a period known as the Babylonian captivity. This ended in 539 BCE when the Babylonians were overthrown by a rebel coalition of Persians led by Cyrus the Great, who allowed the captive Judeans to return to Judah, ruled as a province (called Yehud) of the Persian Achaemenid Empire until its conquest by Alexander the Great in 330 BCE. From the end of the Babylonian captivity up through the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, Jewish people living in the Levant were ruled by various foreign powers: the Persian Empire; the Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great and the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Empires of his generals; the Roman Empire; the Byzantine Empire; the Rashidun, Umayyad, and Abbasid Caliphates; the Crusader States established by Europeans during the Crusades; the Mamluk Sultanate; the Ottoman Empire, and finally the British Empire. This 2500-year period saw substantial changes in the demographics and culture of the land, but there was a continuous Jewish presence in the Levant throughout. Their status varied continually; they were at times persecuted, as was the case during Byzantine rule under the emperor Justinian, and at other times tolerated. And at the same time, the Jewish diaspora in various regions around the world waxed and waned. Some Jews remained in Babylon after the end of the Captivity. Others migrated out during other periods, and a population might grow somewhere for a while and then shrink after a period of persecution.
Starting in the late 19th century, things get especially bad for the Jewish population in Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire. Anti-Semitic sentiment gives rise to pogroms, racist and genocidal riots, and the Jewish populations flee in what becomes known as the First Aliyah. Aliyah is a Hebrew term meaning “ascent” or “going up,” traditionally used to describe the act of going up to Jerusalem. In modern times, the term has come to refer specifically to the waves of immigration of Jews from the diaspora to the land of Israel. Then in 1894 we get the Dreyfus affair in France: Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, is accused of passing military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. The discourse surrounding the accusation was deeply anti-Semitic and lead to his being sentenced to life in a penal colony. When information came to light suggesting that Dreyfus was innocent, the military suppressed the information. Supporters of Dreyfus, called the Dreyfusards, campaigned for his release. He was found guilty again in 1899 but exonerated and reinstated into the Army in 1906.
Around the same time, the Austro-Hungarian and Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl came to the conclusion that the millennia-long history of Jewish persecution and the likelihood that that persecution would continue into the future necessitated the establishment of a Jewish state. He published a pamphlet on the subject, Der Judenstaat, the founding document of Zionism, the assertion that there should be a Jewish state for the Jewish people. In 1897 he convenes the First Zionist Congress and is elected president of the World Zionist Organization. Jewish immigration into Palestine continues during and after this period as the persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia persists.
World War One breaks out in 1914. In 1916, France and Britain, anticipating the eventual end of the war, make a secret plan, the Sykes-Picot agreement, to partition the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, the British promise a unified Arab state to the Arab people of the region in exchange for Arab support against the Ottoman Empire in the Arab Revolt. This was a lie, one that the Iraqi people were still quite bitter about when I was there in 2005 and 2006. When the end of the First World War finally arrives, Palestine falls to the British Empire, and they administer it from that point forward as Mandatory Palestine, authorized by a mandate issued by the League of Nations. This is the point at which we begin to see the origins of the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The conflict is often framed as the continuation of hostility between the Jews and Arabs that has been ongoing for centuries; the historical record does not support this. There have been instances of Jewish persecution throughout the history of the region, this is true; there were also periods of Arab persecution, such as occurred during the Crusades and the establishment of the Crusader states. What we do not see is a continuum of bilateral conflict extending from any past period through to the present day. In fact, there were very long periods during which Arab and Jewish communities thrived alongside one another. The Abbasid Caliphate of the 8th through the 13th centuries, for example, was a time of shared prosperity for both peoples.
So Britain promises the Middle East to the Arabs in exchange for the Arab Revolt in 1916 and simultaneously makes an agreement with France to split up the Middle East according to their respective geopolitical interests, a situation which obtains in 1918 at the end of the war. Between these two events, in 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour issues the Balfour Declaration:
His Majesty’s Government 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, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
As this declaration is an endorsement of a Jewish state by the British Empire, and as Zionism proliferates as a political philosophy among the Jewish people, and as persecution ramps up in Europe, further waves of immigrants arrive in Palestine. The Arab population becomes concerned that it will lose its majority status and control over land, and in 1936, they launch a general strike which, in the wake of brutal military reprisals by the British, escalates into the 1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine. The British form a commission to try to figure out what to do about the whole mess, and the commission proposes the two-state solution: split up the region into territories controlled by either the Jews or the Arabs. The solution is rejected by both the Jews and the Arabs, and the revolt continues, threatening British control over the region. Britain responds with the White Paper of 1939, which severely curtails legal Jewish immigration and land purchases. Jews continue to immigrate illegally into the region in a movement known as the Aliyah Bet, and Jewish persecution in Europe continues to ramp up into the full-blown genocide of the Holocaust. Refugee transport ships discovered by the British are turned back and the passengers are imprisoned in internment camps.
At this point, the Arabs and the Jews are not getting along, and both of them hate the British. Jews begin fighting a guerrilla warfare campaign against the British administration, who refer the matter back to the United Nations. The General Assembly makes another recommendation for a two-state solution. The Jewish Agency, representing the Jewish people in Palestine before the United Nations, accepts it; the Arab League—an association of Arab states—and the Arab Higher Committee representing the Arab Palestinians reject it. The situation explodes into a civil war and Britain gives up on the situation entirely, announcing the end of Mandatory Palestine, to take place on 15 May 1948. The day before, David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Jewish Agency, declares Israel an independent state with territory allotted to it by the partition plan, and on 15 May, the first full day of Israeli independence and the last day of British occupation, the civil war in Mandatory Palestine becomes an international war as the surrounding Arab states invade.
Israel, in its very first day of existence, was invaded by an alliance of five Arab states: Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. Saudi Arabia and Yemen supplied additional support. While the war was not at all one-sided, in the end, the Arab coalition was trounced. The Israelis had been fighting and smuggling arms for years at that point: they were well-armed, well-trained, well-prepared, and highly motivated to fight after the horrors of the Holocaust; the nations they faced had mostly been fighting each other up to that point. And this brings us to the crux of the matter, the key event in the history of the conflict, the Nakba.
The war ended with Transjordan controlling the West Bank and Egypt controlling the Gaza Strip, but Israel had captured a full 60% of the territory allotted to the Palestinians by the United Nations Partition Plan. In the course of the war, Israeli military forces destroyed over 400 Palestinian towns and villages and expelled over 700,000 Palestinians. The word nakba in Arabic means “catastrophe;” an-Nakba is the Catastrophe, referring to this violent and destructive expulsion. Descriptions of the Nakba as ethnic cleansing are disputed, but I don’t know what else you could call it. They substantially and systematically removed an ethnic group from their territory. For the State of Israel, 15 May is Independence Day, a day of celebration. For the Palestinian people, it is Nakba Day, a day of mourning, and so the day itself signifies a profound symbolic fracture.
The population of Israel continued to increase from this point forward, reaching 2 million by 1958. David Ben-Gurion continued as Prime Minister through 1963, excepting a brief stint by Moshe Sharett. Ben-Gurion’s administration was tasked with building a new economy for a new state which was seeing a rapid population influx, all while fending off very hostile neighbors and the Palestinian fedayeen, insurgent forces with foreign support, described either as freedom fighters or terrorists, depending on whom you ask. Suffice to say there’s ample justification for both labels but that the complexity of the situation isn’t well served by such categories in the first place. For a full decade, from 1949 to 1959, Israel existed in a state of austerity and significant danger. Until 1953, when West Germany paid reparations to Israel for the Holocaust, food was rationed and restricted to a mere 1600 calories per day per person. Ben-Gurion addressed the two problems—economics and defense—by investing heavily in the defense industry (Loewenstein, 2023).
Prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the Jewish Agency, as well as the Histadrut, a national trade union, controlled several industries, including arms manufacturers like Israel Military Industries. This form of public ownership transitioned into state ownership in 1948 with the founding of the Israeli State. Ben-Gurion was a socialist, as were many Zionists, and he organized the burgeoning Israeli economy according to socialist principles, with strong state-run industry and investment in collectives like the kibbutzim and moshavim. As the Cold War began to take shape, the Soviet Union sought to expand its influence. They were the first country to officially recognize Israeli statehood and had facilitated an arms deal between Israel and Czechoslovakia that proved decisive in the Arab-Israeli War. At the same time, the United States was home to an evangelical population who believed Israeli statehood had a role to play in certain eschatological prophecies. And Israel was and remains a key component of the United States’ cultural lineage. Beyond that, the rapid industrialization catalyzed by the world wars created a massive demand for petroleum, and both the United States and the Soviet Union could see that petroleum control would condition economic growth and would be a decisive factor in Cold War outcomes. Israel, strategically located and with formidable military capacity, could be a key ally in the region for either side. For a few years Israel was getting aid from both the Soviet Union and the United States. In this decisive period in its history, Israel took advantage of the global geopolitical situation to boost its defense, its strategic position, and its economy through a few key moves. One is heavy early investment in the defense industry, as mentioned. Another is strong and aggressive military alliances with Europe and the United States.
The situation comes to a head in 1956 with the Suez Crisis. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser decides to nationalize the Suez Canal, a key component of the global oil trade which was at the time controlled by the Suez Canal Company in an arrangement favorable to British and French interests. Hands are forced and alliances chosen. The Soviet Union backs Egypt, and Israel makes a secret plan with Britain and France. Israel invades Egypt, followed by Britain and France, the latter two ostensibly to step in and force a peace between Israel and Egypt, but in fact they had planned to retake control of the canal and overthrow Nasser. It didn’t work out; the United Nations deployed a peacekeeping operation and Britain and France were forced out by international pressure, but it set the stage for future cooperation between the West and Israel, and between the Soviet Union and the Arab states.
Israel had found its niche: the key ally of the West in the Middle East, securing the region and its oil fields for Western business interests against the Soviet Union, with an economy grounded to a large extent in the defense industry. At the same time, they conducted a policy of aggressive reprisals for attacks past and present. They kidnapped Adolf Eichmann from Argentina and brought him to Israel to try him for organizing some of the logistical operations of the Holocaust, and carried out strikes in surrounding nations in response to foreign-backed attacks by the fedayeen. In October 1953, one such reprisal, carried out by troops under the command of Major Ariel Sharon, resulted in the Qibya massacre, the murder of about seventy Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children.
Low- to mid-level conflict with the surrounding Arab states continues through the 1950s and 1960s. In 1967, President Nasser mobilizes Egyptian military forces along the Israeli border and closes the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. On June 5, anticipating a large-scale military confrontation, Israel launches a preemptive strike against Egypt and cripples their air force. The ensuing military conflict—the Six-Day War—ends quickly, with a decisive Israeli victory. Israel retakes the Gaza Strip from Egypt along with the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank from Jordan including East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Sporadic clashes follow. The 1967 Arab League Summit in Khartoum promulgates the Khartoum Resolution, famously known as the “Three No’s”: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. This takes place in the context of the administration of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, who was substantially responsible for the strength of the alliance between Israel and the United States.
One of the themes of the conflict up to this point is the continual failure of the Arab states to adjust to the new strategic situation. They repeatedly underestimated Israel’s military strength and resolve and repeatedly paid for it. After the brutal humiliation of the Six-Day War, Egypt switched to World War I tactics: draw a line in the sand, set up a defensive position, shell everything past the line, and wear down the enemy through attrition. This was at least more successful than prior efforts; while the aptly-named War of Attrition ended in 1970 with no significant territorial gains on either side, it at least wasn’t another humiliating defeat for the Arab states. During the war, Prime Minister Eshkol initiated a settlement policy, settling Israelis in lands under Israeli military control but not formally annexed. This accomplished several objectives at once, expanding Israeli territorial control and establishing a new demographic status quo.
In 1972 we get the Munich massacre: at the Summer Olympic games in Munich, a Palestinian terrorist organization called Black September, affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization, holds hostage eleven Israeli Olympians. A failed attempt by West Germany to rescue the hostages results in the death of all eleven, plus one West German police officer, plus five of the eight Black September members. In response, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir launches Operation Wrath of God, also called Operation Bayonet, directing the Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency) to assassinate those involved in planning and carrying out the massacre. The operation lasted for over twenty years and resulted in an unknown number of deaths, likely somewhere between 10 and 35, including key PLO members but also at least four innocent bystanders, at least one mistaken target, and as few as one person directly related to the Munich attack.
In October of 1973, Egypt and Syria launch a two-pronged surprise attack on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism, coinciding with Ramadan, the Islamic holy month. This is a major antecedent of the current conflict, which opened fifty years later on Yom Kippur with a surprise attack. With the element of surprise in their favor, Egypt and Syria quickly gain ground. Both the United States and the Soviet Union become directly involved, airlifting supplies to their respective sides. Arab nations impose an oil embargo, initiating the 1973 oil crisis. Within a few days of the initial assault, Prime Minister Meir puts plans in place for the use of tactical nuclear weapons. CIA documents declassified in 2016 indicate that the Soviet Union was supplying nuclear weapons to Egypt (Naftali, 2016). American supplies and Israeli reserve mobilization turned the tide; after just two weeks and five days of fighting, Israel prevails and makes significant territorial gains. This was the most expansive war of the conflict up to that point and had major global ramifications, as well as being an inflection point in the Arab-Israeli conflict itself. In the wake of inquiries into the handling of the war, Prime Minister Meir resigns, succeeded by Yitzhak Rabin, an ambassador to the United States with extensive experience in the IDF.
In 1976, members of the PLFP-EO, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine: External Operations, hijack an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris. The flight is redirected to Uganda, where 94 Israeli passengers and the 12-person crew are held hostage. Prime Minister Rabin authorizes a commando raid to rescue the hostages. The raid is largely successful, with 102 hostages rescued and only one Israeli military fatality: Yonatan Netanyahu, older brother of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Yom Kippur War had shifted the strategic calculus of Israel, which became more aware of its own vulnerability, and the Arab states, which began to accept the presence of Israel in the Levant as an unavoidable reality. Both sides thus became incentivized towards peace. In 1978, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin meet at Camp David in the United States and work out an agreement which becomes, in 1979, a formal peace treaty. Israel withdraws from the Sinai Peninsula and the two nations normalize diplomatic relations and begin trading. Additionally, the United States begins supplying Egypt with military aid, about $1.3 billion annually. This comes as very bad news to the Palestinians, who are now losing their allies in the Arab world, and in 1981, President Sadat is assassinated by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
1980 and 1981 see Israel’s formal annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. In 1982, Israel invades Lebanon in the wake of PLO attacks and an assassination attempt on Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom. Israeli forces surround Beirut, including the neighborhood of Sabra and the adjacent refugee camp of Shatila, and the Lebanese Forces, a Christian militia, take advantage of the situation and massacre hundreds or possibly even thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese Shia Muslims. Occupying IDF forces are made aware of the massacre but do not intervene. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, whom we remember from the Qibya massacre, is held personally responsible and forced to resign.
Conflict continues over the next several years, in particular clashes with the PLO along the northern border with Lebanon. In December of 1987, an IDF truck collides with a civilian vehicle, killing four Palestinians. This is the spark that ignites the First Intifada, intifada being an Arabic word meaning “uprising,” literally translated as “shaking off.” Mass protests at various scales of violence and intensity continue for the next six years. Israeli forces responding to the riots were authorized to use lethal force even in situations that were not life-threateneing to soldiers or bystanders, including situations in which Palestinians were fleeing (Human Rights Watch, 1990). As of 1990, 670 Palestinians, most of whom were unarmed, had been killed in the conflict; only 11 IDF personnel were killed during that same period (ibid.).
The uprising caught the PLO off-guard; Palestinian leadership behind the Intifada emerged organically, threatening the PLO’s ability to claim itself as the true representative of the Palestinian people. This may have been a motivating factor in the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995, in which the PLO recognized Israel as a state and Israel recognized an independent Palestinian Authority as a legitimate government of Palestinian territories within the borders of Israel. Prime Minister Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat shake hands on the arrangement. I remember the news coverage in the 90’s: I was a teenager and not following it closely, certainly not looking more deeply than whatever the media handed me, but it seemed like after decades of conflict, a real peace was actually within reach. In 1994, another Arab nation, Jordan, normalized relations with Israel. But it is clear that there are factions on both sides who do not want peace on these terms. The peace with Jordan is met with suspicion on all sides. Settlements in Palestinian territories continue. Palestinian suicide attacks on Israeli civilians continue. And in 1995, Prime Minister Rabin is assassinated by a far-right Jew.
Regardless, the peace process continues to make positive progress. In 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat meet at Camp David to build on the Oslo Accords and finalize a lasting peace. It does not go well. And in the midst of the negotiations, Ariel Sharon, whom we remember from the Qibya massacre and the Sabra and Shatila massacres, is campaigning for Prime Minister. On 28 September 2000, he makes a public visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex, the Temple Mount, one of the holiest sites in Islam, located in Palestinian-controlled East Jerusalem, also the location where the Jewish Second Temple was believed to have been located and thus one of the holiest sites in Judaism as well. The Palestinians see this as an unforgivable provocation and launch the Second Intifada, which continues until 2005 and claims over 4000 lives. At this point it becomes difficult to discern Palestinian militants from civilians, but almost a full quarter of that number is Palestinian children (Fatalities, n.d.). Ariel Sharon’s gambit succeeds and he is elected Prime Minister.
The Second Intifada was considerably more violent than the First and signified a total collapse of the peace process. Hamas, formally the Islamic Resistance Movement, had appeared during the First Intifada, grew in strength over the course of the 1990s, and played a major role in the Second Intifada. Yasser Arafat dies in 2004, replaced by Mahmoud Abbas, and Israel disengages from the Gaza Strip in 2005, leading to an end to the Uprising, but the damage has been done. Hamas prevails in the Palestinian legislative election of 2006 and proceeds to expand and maintain its power through non-democratic means. In 2008, violence breaks out again in the Gaza Strip, with the IDF launching a raid to destroy a tunnel used by Hamas for military operations. Over a thousand Palestinians are killed in the ensuring war, mostly civilians, and 10 IDF soldiers, four of whom were killed by friendly fire. The violence results in the destruction of some 4000 homes in Gaza, which the United Nations Human Rights Council orders Israel to rebuild, an order which Israel largely ignores. In 2014, Hamas militants kidnap and murder three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank; this launched the 2014 Gaza War in which 67 IDF soldiers are killed along with over 2000 Palestinians, again mostly civilians. The large civilian body counts arise in part due to Hamas using civilians as human shields, a method which aligns both with their strategic objective of rallying foreign support around Palestinian suffering and their religious philosophy of martyrdom in violent jihad.
In 2020, the Abraham Accords normalize relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and between Israel and Bahrain. In 2023, Israel and Saudi Arabia begin conducting state visits and talks leading in the direction of normalizing diplomatic relations. Such diplomatic normalizations are a negative outcome not only for the Palestinian people, but for Russian control of the Middle East as well. Russia’s strongest ally in the region at this point is likely Iran, a nation historically at odds with the Arab states due to their distinct ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious background. Iran remains fervently opposed to Israel and the United States and has historically backed Palestinian liberation, preferring militant groups such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad to the more diplomatic approach of the Palestinian Authority.
This is the context in which the October 7th Hamas attacks occur, attacks planned in part by Iran (Said, 2023). Details about the attacks are still coming out and most have been disputed. What we know is that Hamas launched a rocket barrage into Israel and sent about 3000 militants into Israel to attack civilian and population centers. The details of the attack—those that we know for certain—are difficult and painful to read, moreso to describe. Suffice to say it’s the absolute worst of human behavior, which, knowing us, is saying something. The attacks can justly be condemned as evil, but the thing is, no amount of moralizing is going to change what happened or what is going to happen as a consequence. There’s a place for moral assessment but I think we do better for ourselves by looking to the material reality of the situation to understand its dynamics. That’s where I’ll be turning in part two of this series: Reflections on the Eve of Insanity.
Works Cited or Referenced
- Fatalities since the outbreak of the second intifada and until operation “Cast Lead.” (n.d.). B’Tselem. https://web.archive.org/web/20100701064428/http://www.btselem.org/english/statistics/Casualties.asp?sD=29&sM=09&sY=2000&eD=26&eM=12&eY=2008&filterby=event&oferet_stat=before
- Human Rights Watch. (1990). The Israeli Army and the Intifada: Policies that contribute to the killings. https://www.hrw.org/legacy/campaigns/israel/intifada-intro.htm
- Loewenstein, A. (2023). The Palestine laboratory: How Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world. Verso.
- Naftali, T. (2016). CIA reveals its secret briefings to Presidents Nixon and Ford. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/26/opinions/secret-briefings-to-presidents-from-cia-naftali/
- Said, S., Faucon, B., & Kalin, S. (8 October 2023). Iran helped plot attack on Israel over several weeks. In The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iran-israel-hamas-strike-planning-bbe07b25