Middle East - Anthony Ham [206]
Hopes for a Homeland
Fast forward now, through centuries of wars, exiles, suppressions and homecomings, to the final decades of the 19th century, when Austrian journalist Theodore Herzl surmised in his 1896 book Der Judenstaat that the world’s Jews had to establish their own homeland or risk rising pogroms and anti-Semitism in Europe. The following year he organised the first International Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, which resolved to ‘find a small piece of the Earth’s surface’ where Jews could establish a homeland. Though Uganda was floated as one option, most people preferred the idea of biblical Palestine. When, in the wake of WWI, Palestine fell to governance under British mandate, Zionist Jews began to arrive in earnest, encouraged by the British 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Immigrant numbers swelled during the late 1920s, soon escalating Arab/Jewish/British tensions. Then, in the 1930s, came Hitler and the Third Reich, which set to work systematically exterminating the Jewish race; by the end of WWII, at least six million Jews had been murdered in the death camps of Eastern Europe.
The Struggle for Independence
Following the Holocaust, thousands of survivors moved to British-controlled Palestine, causing Palestine’s Arabs to feel more threatened than ever. In February 1947 the British, unable to quell Palestine’s bubbling tensions, decided to turn the issue over to the UN, which voted to partition the region into Arab and Jewish states, with Jerusalem, in between, becoming an ‘international’ city.
While the Jews accepted the proposal, the Arabs rejected it outright. Britain washed its hands of the whole affair and withdrew from Palestine in 1948. An Arab-Israeli war soon broke out, and though the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria invaded, the fledgling Israel prevailed. Tens of thousands of Palestine’s Arabs fled or were chased out, and though Israel still marks each 14 May as Independence Day, when in 1948 Israel officially came into existence, Palestinian refugees refer to the date as ‘Al-Naqba’, the Catastrophe. An armistice of 1949 delineated the Jewish state, leaving the Gaza Strip under Egyptian mandate and the West Bank under Jordanian control.
But tensions with the neighbours had only just begun. Though most of the next two decades were a time of hope for the burgeoning Israel, trouble came to a head again in 1967 when Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against Syria, Jordan and Egypt, known in Israel as the Six Day War. After six days of fighting, Israel had tripled in size, wresting Sinai and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, Jerusalem and the West Bank from the Jordanians, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Then, in 1973, Israel’s skin-of-the-teeth fending off of a surprise attack by its Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian neighbours (known, in Israel, as the Yom Kippur War) left Israel once again feeling victorious, if vulnerable.
Arafat & Uprising
During the 1970s and ’80s, under the spearhead of charismatic ‘freedom fighter’ Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), an extended Palestinian terrorist campaign began to bring the Palestinian plight to international attention. Initially, much of the world watched in horror; then, in 1987, the first intifada (popular uprising) pitted stone-throwing Arab youths against well-equipped Israeli soldiers, and the resulting media images helped resurrect international sympathy for the Palestinians.
The peace talks that followed appeared unfruitful, until news broke in August 1993 that Israel and the PLO had reached a secret agreement (known as the Oslo Agreement), prompting PLO leader Yasser Arafat and the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin to make their famously premature, but Nobel Prize–winning, handshake on Washington’s White House lawn. As a result, the Gaza Strip and most of the