R1.9 Conflict and instability in the Middle East (1896–2020)

The Arab–Israeli conflict is the dispute between the Zionist movement and the State of Israel on one side and the Palestinian Arabs and, at times, the Arab states on the other, over control of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. It has caused several wars, two large refugee movements and repeated international crises, and it has shaped the politics of the whole Middle East since 1948.

The overview timeline divides the conflict into four phases. Terminology itself is contested, and each term is used in its most widely accepted neutral sense: "West Bank", "Gaza Strip" and "East Jerusalem" for the territories taken by Israel in 1967, "occupied territories" as the United Nations uses it, the "1948 war" for the war that Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinians call the Nakba ("catastrophe"), and the "October War" for the war of 1973, called the Yom Kippur War in Israel and the Ramadan or October War in the Arab world.

Background: Palestine and the Jewish people before 1896

Palestine was not a single province of the Ottoman Empire. Around 1900 it was divided between the district of Jerusalem, governed directly from Istanbul, and parts of the provinces of Beirut and Damascus. Its population of roughly 600,000 was overwhelmingly Arab: mostly Sunni Muslim peasants, with large Christian communities in the towns. Jews made up somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent, most of them religious Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias. Population figures for the late Ottoman period are estimates built from incomplete Ottoman registers, so historians give ranges.

Most of the world’s roughly ten million Jews lived in the diaspora (communities outside the Land of Israel, the biblical homeland to which Jewish prayer and tradition had looked for centuries), above all in the Russian Empire. In the 1880s two developments pushed some of them towards nationalism. Waves of pogroms (violent attacks on Jewish communities, often tolerated by the authorities) followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, and new laws restricted where Russian Jews could live and work. In Western Europe, where Jews had gained legal equality, a new racial antisemitism grew, shown most clearly in France by the Dreyfus Affair (1894), in which a Jewish army officer was falsely convicted of treason.

Small groups such as Hovevei Zion ("Lovers of Zion") sent the first organised settlers to Palestine in 1882, in what Zionists call the First Aliyah (1882–1903). Many of their farming colonies survived only with money from the French banker Baron Edmond de Rothschild.

Zionism and Arab nationalism, 1896–1914

Herzl and political Zionism

Zionism is the movement for the national revival of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. Its political form was created by Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist who had reported on the Dreyfus Affair. In Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, February 1896) he argued that antisemitism could not be cured by assimilation and that the Jews needed a state of their own, obtained by agreement with the great powers.

Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves.

Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, pamphlet, 1896 (translation of 1946). Herzl wrote for Jewish and non-Jewish European readers, and the extract shows his diplomatic method: sovereignty was to be granted by the powers, not seized. Palestine is not named here; at this stage Herzl was open to other territories, a point that matters for the Uganda dispute of 1903–1905.

Herzl called the First Zionist Congress at Basel in Switzerland in August 1897. Its Basel Programme declared that Zionism sought a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law, and it founded the World Zionist Organization. The Jewish National Fund (1901) bought land in Palestine that was to remain the inalienable property of the Jewish people. When Britain offered land in East Africa in 1903 (the "Uganda Scheme"), the movement split and in 1905 rejected any territory but Palestine.

Varieties of Zionism and the Second Aliyah

Zionism was never one movement. Political Zionism (Herzl) put diplomacy and a charter first. Cultural Zionism, associated with the essayist Ahad Ha’am, wanted a spiritual and cultural centre for Jewish life, and warned as early as 1891 that the Arabs of Palestine were not a passive population. Labour Zionism, carried by the young socialists of the Second Aliyah (1904–1914), held that the Jewish people would be renewed only by working the land themselves.

The Second Aliyah brought about 35,000–40,000 immigrants, many of whom later left again. Its members founded the first kibbutz at Degania (1909–1910), a collective farm with shared property; revived Hebrew as a spoken language; and founded Tel Aviv (1909) outside Jaffa. They included David Ben-Gurion, later Israel’s first prime minister. Their insistence on "Hebrew labour" (employing Jewish rather than Arab workers) laid the foundations of a separate Jewish economy.

Arab nationalism and early Palestinian opposition

Arab nationalism grew out of the Nahda ("awakening"), a literary and cultural revival of the Arabic language and Arab identity in Beirut, Damascus and Cairo in the late nineteenth century. After the Young Turk revolution of 1908 the Ottoman government tried to centralise the empire and promote Turkish as the language of administration. Arab notables answered with societies that demanded first autonomy and later independence: the secret society al-Fatat (founded by Arab students in Paris, 1909–1911), the officers’ society al-’Ahd (1913), and the Arab Congress held in Paris in June 1913.

In Palestine opposition to Zionism came before any wider Arab state was in prospect. Peasants evicted from land sold by absentee landlords clashed with Jewish settlers; Arab deputies in the Ottoman parliament protested against land sales; and newspapers such as al-Karmil (Haifa, 1908) and Filastin (Jaffa, 1911) warned their readers against Zionist colonisation. Historians such as Rashid Khalidi date a distinct Palestinian identity, layered with Ottoman, Arab and religious loyalties, to these years.

The First World War and Britain’s promises, 1915–1917

The Ottoman Empire entered the First World War on the side of Germany in November 1914. Britain wanted to protect the Suez Canal and the route to India, to win allies against the Ottomans and, as the war went on, to secure a post-war position in the Middle East. In three sets of negotiations it made commitments to three different partners.

The McMahon–Hussein correspondence, 1915–1916

Between July 1915 and March 1916 Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, exchanged ten letters with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, the guardian of Islam’s holy cities. Hussein offered to lead an Arab revolt against the Ottomans in return for British support for an independent Arab state across the Arabian peninsula and the Fertile Crescent. In his letter of 24 October 1915 McMahon accepted these limits with exclusions.

The two districts of Mersina and Alexandretta and portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo cannot be said to be purely Arab, and should be excluded from the limits demanded. With the above modification, and without prejudice to our existing treaties with Arab chiefs, we accept those limits.

Sir Henry McMahon, letter to Sharif Hussein of Mecca, 24 October 1915 (published by the British government in 1939, Cmd. 5957). McMahon was writing a wartime offer under pressure to secure an ally, and the wording was deliberately imprecise. Palestine lies south, not west, of the four named towns, so Arab leaders argued it was included in the area of independence; British officials later claimed that "districts" meant the Ottoman provinces and that Palestine had been excluded. The extract shows why a document can be used to support opposite claims.

The Arab Revolt of 1916–1918 began on 10 June 1916. Led by Hussein’s son Faisal and supported by British officers including T. E. Lawrence, Arab forces took the port of Aqaba in July 1917 and entered Damascus on 1 October 1918.

The Sykes–Picot Agreement, May 1916

At the same time Britain negotiated with France, its main ally. In the Sykes–Picot Agreement, concluded in May 1916 by the diplomats Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, the two powers divided the Arab provinces into zones of direct control and of influence. France was to have the Syrian coast and Lebanon, Britain southern Mesopotamia, and most of Palestine was to be placed under an international administration because Russia and France had their own interests in the holy places.

The agreement was secret. After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia they published it in November 1917, which embarrassed Britain in its dealings with Hussein. Arab nationalists have treated Sykes–Picot ever since as the symbol of European betrayal and of borders drawn by outsiders, though the final borders of 1920–1922 differed from its map.

The Balfour Declaration, November 1917

The third commitment was made to the Zionist movement. Chaim Weizmann, a Russian-born chemist in Manchester and the leading Zionist in Britain, had built close contacts with British politicians. On 2 November 1917 the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, sent a letter to Lord Rothschild, a leader of British Jewry, for the Zionist Federation.

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.

Arthur Balfour, letter to Lord Rothschild (the Balfour Declaration), 2 November 1917. The wording was drafted and redrafted in the War Cabinet over several months. "National home" was chosen instead of "state" to avoid a commitment to sovereignty, and the Arab majority, about 90 per cent of the population, appear only as "existing non-Jewish communities" with civil and religious, but not political or national, rights. The declaration was a statement of policy by a power that did not yet control Palestine.

Historians explain the declaration through several British motives: to win the support of Jews in the United States and Russia for the war effort (based on an exaggerated belief in Jewish influence), to give Britain a claim to Palestine against France and so protect the Suez Canal, and the genuine sympathy of Christian Zionists such as Lloyd George and Balfour for the "restoration" of the Jews. British forces under General Allenby took Jerusalem the following month, on 9 December 1917.

From military occupation to mandate, 1918–1923

At the end of the war Palestine was under British military administration. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 created the mandate system: former Ottoman and German territories would be governed by an advanced nation, under League of Nations supervision, until they could "stand alone". In practice the mandates divided the Arab provinces between Britain and France much as Sykes–Picot had planned.

Competing claims at the peace conference

On 3 January 1919 Faisal and Weizmann signed the Faisal–Weizmann Agreement, in which Faisal accepted Jewish immigration into Palestine on condition that the Arabs obtained their independence; he added in his own hand that the agreement would lapse if that condition was not met. It was never put into effect. The American King–Crane Commission (1919) reported that most people in Syria and Palestine opposed both French rule and the Zionist programme, but its report was ignored and not published until 1922.

Faisal was proclaimed king of an independent Syria in Damascus in March 1920. At the San Remo Conference in April 1920 the Allies gave the mandates for Syria and Lebanon to France and those for Iraq and Palestine to Britain. French forces defeated Faisal’s army at Maysalun on 24 July 1920 and ended his kingdom. For Palestinian Arabs who had looked to Damascus, the hope of belonging to a united Arab state ended there, and their politics turned to Palestine itself.

The terms of the mandate

The first Arab riots against Zionism took place during the Nebi Musa festival in Jerusalem in April 1920 (five Jews and four Arabs were killed), and much more serious violence followed in Jaffa in May 1921, when 47 Jews and 48 Arabs died. Britain’s first High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, a Jewish Liberal politician, took office in July 1920. In 1921 Britain separated the land east of the Jordan River, Transjordan, as an emirate under Faisal’s brother Abdullah, where the Jewish national home provisions did not apply.

The Churchill White Paper of June 1922, issued when Winston Churchill was Colonial Secretary, tried to reassure the Arabs: the national home did not mean that Palestine as a whole would become Jewish, and immigration would not exceed "the economic capacity of the country at the time to absorb new arrivals" (the principle of economic absorptive capacity). It also confirmed that the Jewish community was in Palestine by right, not merely by British tolerance. The League of Nations approved the Mandate for Palestine on 24 July 1922, and it came into force in September 1923.

The mandate is the key to the next twenty-five years. It committed Britain to two obligations that were hard to reconcile: to build a Jewish national home and to protect the rights of the Arab majority. It gave the Zionists an officially recognised representative body but no equivalent to the Arabs, who refused to join a legislative council that would have accepted the mandate’s terms.

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Two societies under British rule, 1920–1939

Arab–Jewish tension under the mandate had political, economic and social causes that reinforced each other. Each community built its own institutions, its own economy and its own national story, and contact between them shrank as the stakes rose.

Immigration

Jewish immigration came in waves that depended as much on conditions in Europe as on British policy. The Third Aliyah (1919–1923), about 35,000 people, was mostly young socialist pioneers from Russia and Poland. The Fourth (1924–1929), about 80,000, was largely middle-class Polish Jews pushed out by economic discrimination and unable to enter the United States after its immigration restrictions of 1924; many settled in Tel Aviv. The Fifth Aliyah (1932–1939) was far larger, about 225,000–250,000 legal immigrants, many fleeing Nazi Germany and the antisemitic laws of central Europe.

The chart of the Jewish share of the population shows the effect: from about 84,000 Jews (11 per cent) in the census of 1922 to about 175,000 (17 per cent) in 1931 and an estimated 554,000 (31 per cent) by 1945. In 1935 alone more than 60,000 Jews arrived legally. Arab leaders saw that at this rate they would become a minority within a generation, which is why immigration became the central issue of mandate politics.

The Nazi regime’s Haavara (Transfer) Agreement of August 1933 with Zionist bodies let German Jews who emigrated to Palestine transfer part of their assets in the form of German exports. About 60,000 German Jews reached Palestine under it, bringing capital that boosted the Jewish economy. Some Jewish groups condemned it for breaking the international boycott of Nazi Germany.

Land and labour

Jewish land purchase was organised by the Jewish National Fund and private companies. Much land was bought from absentee landlords living in Beirut or Damascus, such as the Sursuq family, who sold large areas of the Jezreel Valley in the early 1920s. The Arab tenant farmers who had worked this land for generations had no legal title and were evicted, sometimes with small compensation. By 1947 Jews owned only about 6–7 per cent of the land of Palestine, but it included much of the best farmland on the coastal plain and in the valleys, and land sales by Arab notables became a source of bitterness within Palestinian society.

The labour federation, the Histadrut (founded 1920), was more than a trade union: it owned construction companies, a bank, a health service and agricultural cooperatives. Its policy of Hebrew labour, employing only Jewish workers in Jewish enterprises, was meant to create a Jewish working class and stop the Yishuv becoming a colonial society of Jewish employers and Arab labourers. For Arab workers it meant exclusion from the fastest-growing part of the economy. By the 1930s Palestine had in effect two economies, linked by trade but with separate labour markets, schools and services.

Institutions and leadership

The Yishuv governed itself through an elected assembly and its National Council (Va’ad Leumi), and from 1929 the Jewish Agency represented it to the British. The Haganah (1920), its underground defence force, grew into a trained militia. Under the labour leaders David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Arlosoroff, and later Golda Meir, the Yishuv became a state in all but name.

Palestinian Arab politics was led by notable families. Sir Herbert Samuel appointed Haj Amin al-Husseini Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 and head of the new Supreme Muslim Council, which controlled religious courts, schools and endowments. The rivalry between the Husseini family and the more accommodating Nashashibi family divided the national movement. Because the Arab leadership refused to accept institutions that recognised the mandate’s Zionist provisions, it had no elected body through which to negotiate; this refusal, made on principle, left Palestinians without the political machinery the Yishuv possessed.

Data: British census of Palestine, 1931.

British policy and violence, 1929–1935

In August 1929 a dispute over Jewish prayer at the Western Wall (the Buraq Wall to Muslims), a holy site to both religions, turned into riots across Palestine. Arab mobs killed 133 Jews, including 67 in Hebron, where the old Jewish community was destroyed, and others in Safed; 116 Arabs were killed, most of them by British police. Many Arab families in Hebron also hid Jewish neighbours.

The Shaw Commission (1930) blamed Arab fears of land loss and immigration, and the Hope Simpson report found that there was little spare land for new settlers. The Passfield White Paper of October 1930 proposed to restrict immigration and land sales. After fierce Zionist protest, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald wrote to Weizmann in February 1931 interpreting the White Paper so as to remove the restrictions; Arabs called it the "Black Letter". The episode showed both sides that British policy could be changed by pressure in London.

Palestinian politics radicalised. A new generation formed the Istiqlal (Independence) Party in 1932, which blamed British rule more than Zionism. In northern Palestine the preacher Izz ad-Din al-Qassam organised armed cells among landless migrants in Haifa; his death in a gun battle with British police in November 1935 made him a martyr and a model for the armed revolt that followed.

The Arab Revolt, 1936–1939

The Arab Revolt of 1936–1939 was one of the largest uprisings against British rule in the interwar Middle East. It began after killings of Jews and Arabs near Tulkarm and in Jaffa in April 1936. Local national committees called a general strike, and the leading parties united in an Arab Higher Committee under the Mufti, which demanded an end to Jewish immigration, a ban on land sales and an elected national government.

The causes diagram groups the reasons for the revolt by timescale. The long-term causes were built into the mandate itself; the immigration surge of 1933–1935, the economic depression in the Arab countryside and the death of al-Qassam made 1936 the moment of explosion.

The two phases of the revolt

In the first phase (April–October 1936) the six-month strike closed Arab shops and the port of Jaffa, while armed bands attacked British forces, Jewish settlements and the Iraq–Haifa oil pipeline. The strike hurt the Arab economy more than the Jewish one; the Yishuv built its own port at Tel Aviv. It ended in October 1936 on an appeal from the Arab kings, and Britain sent a Royal Commission under Lord Peel.

The Peel Commission reported in July 1937. It concluded that the mandate could not work and proposed partition: a small Jewish state of about 20 per cent of the territory in Galilee and the coastal plain, a large Arab area joined to Transjordan, and a British zone around Jerusalem and a corridor to the sea. It also proposed the transfer of populations, including about 225,000 Arabs from the Jewish state.

An irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country.

Report of the Palestine Royal Commission (Peel Commission), Cmd. 5479, July 1937. The commission wrote for the British government after months of hearings with both sides, and its value lies in its diagnosis: a British official body accepted that the mandate’s two obligations were incompatible and that the conflict was national, not religious or economic. The Zionist Congress accepted the principle of partition while rejecting the proposed borders; the Arab Higher Committee rejected partition altogether.

The second phase (1937–1939) was a full armed rebellion. After the assassination of the British district commissioner for Galilee in September 1937, Britain banned the Arab Higher Committee and the Mufti fled to Lebanon. By the summer of 1938 rebels controlled much of the hill country and the old city of Jerusalem. Britain sent more than 20,000 troops and used collective punishments, house demolitions, detention without trial and executions. Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads, mixed British and Haganah units, raided rebel villages and gave Jewish fighters valuable training.

Casualty figures for the revolt are estimates. Most historians, following the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi’s calculations from British records, put Arab deaths at about 5,000, including many killed in feuds between rebels and their Palestinian opponents; about 300–500 Jews and about 260 British were killed. Thousands of Palestinians were detained and much of the rebel leadership was exiled.

Consequences of the revolt

• For the Palestinians: military defeat, an exiled and divided leadership, disarmament and an exhausted economy. When the decisive struggle came in 1947–1948, Palestinian society had not recovered.

• For the Yishuv: the Haganah grew and gained experience; the Jewish economy became more self-sufficient; settlements were built in strategic places ("tower and stockade" settlements).

• For Britain: with war in Europe approaching, it needed the goodwill of the Arab and Muslim world, and in 1938 the Woodhead Commission declared partition unworkable.

After a failed conference with Arab and Jewish delegations in London (St James’s Palace, February–March 1939), Britain imposed its own policy in the White Paper of 1939, published on 17 May 1939.

His Majesty’s Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State. They would indeed regard it as contrary to their obligations to the Arabs under the Mandate … that the Arab population of Palestine should be made the subjects of a Jewish State against their will.

British government, Palestine: Statement of Policy (the White Paper), Cmd. 6019, May 1939. The White Paper limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 over five years, after which further immigration would need Arab consent; restricted land sales; and promised an independent Palestinian state, with both peoples sharing government, within ten years. Its context was the coming war: Britain needed Arab oil, the Suez Canal and Muslim loyalty in India more than Zionist support. For Jews trying to escape Nazi Europe it closed the main door at the worst possible moment; the Arab Higher Committee also rejected it because it did not promise independence quickly enough.

Jewish and Arab responses, 1923–1945

Zionist responses: from the "iron wall" to the Biltmore Programme

Zionist leaders had long disagreed over how to deal with Arab opposition. The founder of Revisionist Zionism, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, argued in an essay of 1923 that no people would ever voluntarily accept colonisation of its land.

Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.

Ze’ev Jabotinsky, "On the Iron Wall", Russian-language article in Rassvyet, 4 November 1923 (English translation). Jabotinsky was arguing against Zionists who believed that Arabs could be won over by economic benefits. His frankness makes the essay valuable: he recognised Arab nationalism as genuine and concluded that only overwhelming strength would bring an eventual agreement. The historian Avi Shlaim later took the "iron wall" as the key to Israeli strategy after 1948.

Revisionists left the Haganah to form the Irgun (1931, reorganised 1937), which answered Arab attacks with bombings in Arab markets in 1937–1939. After 1939 the Irgun turned against the British, and a more extreme splinter group led by Avraham Stern, Lehi (1940; called the "Stern Gang" by the British), even sought contact with the Axis powers against Britain. The mainstream leadership under Ben-Gurion chose a double policy, often summarised in his phrase of September 1939: to support Britain in the war against Hitler as if there were no White Paper, and to fight the White Paper as if there were no war.

About 30,000 Jews from Palestine volunteered for the British forces, and a Jewish Brigade fought in Italy in 1944–1945. In May 1942 a Zionist conference at the Biltmore Hotel in New York adopted the Biltmore Programme, which for the first time openly demanded that Palestine be "established as a Jewish Commonwealth" and that the Jewish Agency control immigration. The centre of Zionist diplomacy moved from London to Washington. In November 1944 Lehi assassinated Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident in Cairo; the Haganah then cooperated with the British against the Irgun and Lehi for some months (the "Season").

Arab responses: the Mufti, the Arab states and the Arab League

Haj Amin al-Husseini fled from Lebanon to Iraq in 1939, supported the pro-Axis coup of Rashid Ali in Baghdad in 1941, and spent the rest of the war in Germany and Italy. He met Hitler in November 1941, broadcast propaganda to the Arab world and helped recruit Bosnian Muslims into the Waffen-SS. His collaboration is documented; its significance is contested, since some writers have used it to portray the whole Palestinian cause as Nazi-inspired, while most historians stress that he acted from opportunism against Britain and Zionism and that most Palestinians played no part. About 9,000–12,000 Palestinian Arabs served in the British forces during the war.

The war strengthened the Arab states as actors in the Palestine question. In 1939 Britain had invited them to the London conference, and the Alexandria Protocol (October 1944) led to the foundation of the Arab League on 22 March 1945 by Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia; Yemen joined in May 1945. Support for the Palestinian Arabs was one of its founding commitments, but each state also had its own interests, and the Palestinians themselves were represented only by a delegate chosen by the League.

The road to war: Britain, the United States and the UN, 1945–1947

The impact of the Second World War

The Holocaust, the murder of about six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, transformed the Palestine question. It seemed to confirm the Zionist argument that Jews needed a state of their own, it destroyed the Jewish communities of Europe from which earlier immigrants had come, and it left about 250,000 Jewish displaced persons in camps in Germany, Austria and Italy by 1947, most of whom wanted to go to Palestine. Western sympathy for Zionism grew, though the United States and Britain still kept their own doors largely closed to Jewish refugees.

The war also changed the balance of power. Britain emerged bankrupt and overstretched, and from 1947 it was leaving India. The United States became the decisive outside power, and President Harry Truman, moved by the Harrison Report on the Jewish displaced persons and by domestic opinion, called in August 1945 for Britain to admit 100,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine at once. The joint Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry recommended the same in April 1946, but Britain’s Labour Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, refused unless the Jewish underground armies were disarmed.

The Jewish insurgency and British withdrawal

From October 1945 the Haganah, Irgun and Lehi cooperated for a time in a Jewish Resistance Movement, attacking railways, bridges and police stations, while the Haganah organised Aliyah Bet: more than 60 ships carried about 70,000 illegal immigrants between 1945 and 1948, though most were intercepted and their passengers interned in Cyprus. On 22 July 1946 the Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the headquarters of the British administration, killing 91 people: British, Arab and Jewish. In July 1947 the British sent the passengers of the ship Exodus 1947 back to Germany, and the Irgun hanged two British sergeants in retaliation for the execution of its members. Both episodes, and the Irgun’s break-in at Acre prison in May 1947, which freed 27 prisoners, turned British public opinion against staying.

By early 1947 about 100,000 British troops and police were tied down in Palestine at great cost. On 14 February 1947 the British government announced that it would refer the question to the United Nations. The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), made up of eleven smaller states, visited Palestine in the summer of 1947; the Arab Higher Committee boycotted it. A majority recommended partition with economic union.

The UN partition plan

On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 by 33 votes to 13, with 10 abstentions. The United States and the Soviet Union both voted in favour; Britain abstained; the Arab and several Muslim states voted against. The resolution divided Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state and an international zone (corpus separatum) around Jerusalem and Bethlehem, linked by an economic union. The mandate was to end by 1 August 1948; Britain later set the date as 15 May.

The map of the partition plan shows why both sides found it hard to accept. The Jewish state was given about 56 per cent of the land for a community that was about a third of the population and owned under 7 per cent of the land; it would contain about 500,000 Jews and 400,000–500,000 Arabs (estimates depend on how the Bedouin of the Negev were counted). The Arab state was given about 43 per cent and would have a small Jewish minority. Both states consisted of awkwardly connected sections.

The Jewish Agency accepted the plan. Ben-Gurion saw it as the international recognition of a Jewish state, even with borders he regarded as inadequate. The Arab Higher Committee and the Arab League rejected it, arguing that the UN had no right to give away the land of the majority without its consent and that it violated the principle of self-determination.

The first Arab–Israeli war, 1947–1949

The war had two phases. The chronology of 1947–1949 shows how a civil war between communities inside the mandate became a conventional war between states.

The civil war, November 1947 – May 1948

Fighting began the day after the partition vote. Palestinian irregulars and the volunteer Arab Liberation Army of Fawzi al-Qawuqji, sent by the Arab League, attacked Jewish transport, besieged Jewish West Jerusalem and cut its supply road from the coast. By March 1948 the Yishuv was in serious difficulty, and the United States briefly proposed replacing partition with a UN trusteeship.

In March 1948 the Haganah adopted Plan Dalet (Plan D). Its stated aim was to secure the territory of the Jewish state and the roads to Jewish settlements outside it before the Arab states invaded. It authorised commanders to occupy Arab villages and, where they resisted, to destroy them and expel their inhabitants. Whether it was a defensive military plan or a blueprint for expelling the Arab population is one of the central debates about 1948.

In April the Haganah went on the offensive. On 9 April 1948 Irgun and Lehi fighters attacked the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem and killed about 100–110 villagers, many of them civilians; reports of the killings, exaggerated in some Arab broadcasts, spread fear across Palestine. Four days later Arab fighters attacked a Jewish medical convoy to the Hadassah hospital and killed 78 doctors, nurses and others. Haifa fell to the Haganah on 22 April and Jaffa surrendered on 13 May; most of the Arab population of both cities fled or was forced out. The Palestinian commander Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini had been killed at al-Qastal on 8 April.

The declaration of the State of Israel

On 14 May 1948, the day the British left, David Ben-Gurion read a declaration of independence in Tel Aviv on behalf of the People’s Council.

… by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel. … We appeal … to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship.

Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, 14 May 1948. The declaration grounds the state in two kinds of legitimacy, historic right and the UN vote, and promises equal citizenship to Arab inhabitants. It was written for an international audience at a moment when recognition mattered as much as arms, and in the middle of a war in which many of those Arab inhabitants were fleeing or being expelled; the gap between its promises and the reality of 1948 is part of its value as a source. The United States recognised Israel de facto within minutes, and the Soviet Union recognised it de jure on 17 May.

The inter-state war, May 1948 – 1949

On 15 May the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq and a small Lebanese force entered Palestine. The Arab League declared that it was restoring order and protecting the Arab population; Israel saw an invasion aimed at destroying the new state. The Arab states’ aims were divided. King Abdullah of Transjordan, whose British-trained Arab Legion under General John Glubb was the best Arab army, wanted to annex the Arab parts of Palestine for himself and had met Golda Meir of the Jewish Agency secretly in November 1947 and again in May 1948. Egypt sent its army largely to stop Abdullah gaining too much.

After early Arab advances, the Israel Defense Forces (formed from the Haganah on 26 May; the Irgun and Lehi were absorbed or disbanded) used the first UN truce (11 June – 8 July) to import arms from Czechoslovakia and to mobilise. In July Israeli forces took Lydda and Ramle and expelled most of their inhabitants, about 50,000–70,000 people. On 17 September Lehi assassinated the UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, who had proposed giving the Negev to the Arabs. Offensives in October–December 1948 (Operations Yoav in the south and Hiram in Galilee) took much of the Negev and the whole of the Galilee, again with flight and expulsions.

Leaders and organisations: Ben-Gurion and the Arab League

David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency executive and from May 1948 prime minister and defence minister, shaped the Jewish side of the war. He had prepared the Haganah for a war with the Arab states since 1946, pushed the leadership to declare the state on 14 May despite American warnings and a divided vote among his colleagues, and insisted on a single army under civilian control. In June 1948 he ordered the shelling of the Altalena, an Irgun ship bringing arms that the Irgun wanted to keep for its own units; 16 Irgun men were killed, and the episode ended the existence of separate Jewish armies.

The Arab League coordinated the Arab response only loosely. It rejected partition, financed and organised the Arab Liberation Army, and in its meetings of 1946–1948 promised to defend Arab Palestine, but its members did not trust each other. It kept the Mufti, its main Palestinian interlocutor, at a distance from real military command, and Abdullah of Transjordan opposed any role for him. The League’s decision to send regular armies was taken only days before the British left, without a joint plan.

Why did Israel win?

Historians such as Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris have challenged the traditional image of a tiny Jewish David facing an Arab Goliath. The Arab states had more people and resources, and Israel faced real danger in the first weeks; but by the summer of 1948 Israel had more troops in the field and a single command, while the Arab coalition was divided by rival aims.

The outcome: armistice lines and the Palestinian refugees

Israel signed armistice agreements with Egypt (24 February 1949), Lebanon (23 March), Transjordan (3 April) and Syria (20 July); Iraq signed none. The armistice lines, known as the Green Line, left Israel with about 78 per cent of mandatory Palestine, far more than the partition plan had given the Jewish state. Transjordan, which renamed itself the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1949, held the West Bank and East Jerusalem and annexed them in 1950; Egypt administered the Gaza Strip. No Palestinian Arab state was created. About 6,000 Israelis were killed, roughly 1 per cent of the Jewish population; estimates of Arab deaths, military and civilian, vary widely and are less precise.

Between the end of 1947 and 1949 about 700,000–750,000 Palestinian Arabs, more than half the Arab population of Palestine, fled or were expelled from the territory that became Israel. About 400–500 Arab villages were depopulated and most were later destroyed or resettled. Palestinians call this the Nakba (catastrophe) and commemorate it on 15 May. Israel did not allow the refugees to return, arguing that they were a hostile population and that the Arab states had started the war; their land and property were taken over by the state under the Absentees’ Property Law of 1950. About 150,000 Arabs remained inside Israel and became citizens.

On 11 December 1948 the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 194. Its paragraph 11 resolved that "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date", with compensation for those choosing not to return. The resolution became the legal basis of the Palestinian claim to a right of return, which Israel has always rejected as a threat to its Jewish majority. In December 1949 the UN created the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which began work in May 1950 and ran camps, schools and clinics in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza.

The war also changed the Jewish world of the Middle East. Between 1948 and the early 1970s about 850,000 Jews left or were expelled from Arab countries and Iran (estimates vary), most of them for Israel, often after riots, confiscation of property and loss of citizenship, as in Iraq in 1950–1951. Israeli governments have presented this as a parallel population exchange; Palestinian and many other historians reject the comparison because the circumstances and choices of the two groups differed.

From armistice to Suez, 1949–1957

The armistice agreements were meant to lead to peace treaties, but none followed. The Arab states refused to recognise Israel, kept an economic boycott, and Egypt closed the Suez Canal and, at times, the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Israel refused to take back refugees or give up territory. Border infiltration by refugees, at first mostly to recover property or harvest crops and later including armed raids by fedayeen (Arab guerrilla fighters), led to Israeli reprisal raids. At Qibya in the West Bank in October 1953 an Israeli unit under Ariel Sharon blew up houses and killed about 69 villagers, and the Gaza raid of February 1955 killed about 38 Egyptians, almost all of them soldiers.

The Gaza raid pushed Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to seek modern weapons. In September 1955 he announced a large arms deal with Czechoslovakia, acting for the Soviet Union, which brought the Cold War into the conflict. When the United States and Britain withdrew their offer to fund the Aswan High Dam, Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company on 26 July 1956.

Britain, France and Israel then planned war in secret at Sèvres in October 1956. Israel invaded Sinai on 29 October; Britain and France, claiming to separate the combatants, bombed Egypt and landed at Port Said. Each had its own aim: Britain to regain the canal and topple Nasser, France to stop Egyptian support for the Algerian rebels, and Israel to end the fedayeen raids, open the Straits of Tiran and destroy Egypt’s new weapons. Under strong pressure from the United States and Soviet threats, Britain and France withdrew by December 1956 and Israel by March 1957.

The Suez Crisis is often called a military defeat but a political victory for Nasser, who became the hero of Arab nationalism; its effects on Egypt itself are part of the study of Nasser’s regime. For the Arab–Israeli conflict its results were mixed. A UN Emergency Force (UNEF) was stationed on the Egyptian side of the border and at Sharm el-Sheikh, the Straits of Tiran were opened to Israeli shipping, and the Egyptian–Israeli border stayed largely quiet for ten years. Israel had shown its military strength but also its dependence on outside approval, and the conflict became linked to the Cold War and to the decline of British and French power.

The creation of the PLO and the search for support for Palestine

For fifteen years after 1948 the Palestinians had little independent voice: their cause was represented by the Arab states, which used it for their own rivalries. A new generation of refugees, students and professionals rejected this dependence. In the late 1950s Yasser Arafat and other Palestinians working in Kuwait founded Fatah (a reversed Arabic acronym for the Palestinian National Liberation Movement), which argued that Palestinians must liberate Palestine through their own armed struggle, on the model of the Algerian revolution.

To control this rising nationalism, the Arab League summit in Cairo in January 1964 sponsored a Palestinian body. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded at a congress in East Jerusalem in May 1964, chaired by the lawyer Ahmad Shukeiri, with its own army (the Palestine Liberation Army) under Arab state control. Fatah stayed outside and launched its first raid into Israel on 1 January 1965. Its raids, encouraged by Syria, were one of the causes of the 1967 war.

The Six-Day War, June 1967

Causes

Tension rose in 1966–1967 along several fronts. A radical government in Syria backed Fatah raids and shelled Israeli farms below the Golan Heights; Israel raided the Jordanian-held West Bank village of Samu in November 1966 in retaliation for a mine attack, and shot down six Syrian fighter planes in April 1967. Nasser, criticised by Jordan and Saudi Arabia for hiding behind UNEF, was under pressure to act as leader of the Arab world.

The chain of escalation shows how quickly the crisis grew in May 1967. Nasser’s closure of the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s outlet to the Red Sea, had been declared a cause for war by Israel since 1957. Arab radio spoke openly of destroying Israel, and many Israelis feared a second Holocaust. Most historians now think that Nasser did not plan to attack first and hoped to win a political victory, while Israeli generals were confident of victory; but neither side controlled the momentum. When American efforts to open the straits failed, the Israeli cabinet, now including the hawkish Moshe Dayan as defence minister, decided on war.

Course

On the morning of 5 June 1967 Israeli air strikes destroyed most of the Egyptian air force on the ground, and then the Jordanian and Syrian air forces. With control of the air, Israeli forces took the Gaza Strip and the whole of Sinai to the Suez Canal in four days. Jordan entered the war on 5 June; by 7 June Israel had taken East Jerusalem, including the Old City and the Western Wall, and the whole West Bank. On 9–10 June it stormed the Golan Heights. About 780–1,000 Israelis were killed (figures differ on whether later deaths from wounds are counted); Arab deaths were many times higher (estimates for Egypt alone run from 10,000 to 15,000).

Consequences

The war tripled the area under Israeli control and brought about one million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli military rule, in what the UN calls the occupied territories. Between 250,000 and 325,000 Palestinians fled or were displaced, mostly from the West Bank to Jordan; many of them were refugees for the second time. For Israelis the capture of East Jerusalem and the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) produced a wave of religious and national emotion; for Arabs the speed of the defeat, called the Naksa ("setback"), discredited Nasser’s pan-Arabism and the regimes that had promised victory.

At their summit in Khartoum in September 1967 the Arab heads of state set the terms of their response.

The Arab Heads of State have agreed to unite their political efforts at the international and diplomatic level to eliminate the effects of the aggression and to ensure the withdrawal of the aggressive Israeli forces from the Arab lands which have been occupied since the aggression of June 5. This will be done within the framework of the main principles by which the Arab States abide, namely, no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it, and insistence on the rights of the Palestinian people in their own country.

Khartoum Resolution, Arab League summit, 1 September 1967, clause 3. The "three noes" were quoted for decades as proof of Arab rejection of Israel. The context complicates this reading: the same clause commits the states to political and diplomatic efforts, and Nasser and King Hussein used the summit to win approval for a diplomatic route to recovering their land, while Saudi Arabia and Kuwait agreed to subsidise Egypt and Jordan. The wording satisfied hard-liners; the policy left room for indirect diplomacy.

In November 1967 the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242, the basis of almost every later peace plan. It called for the "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict" and for the right of every state in the area "to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force", as well as "a just settlement of the refugee problem". The English text says "territories", not "the territories"; Israel read this as allowing it to keep some land, while the Arab states relied on the French text ("des territoires") and on the preamble’s statement that acquiring territory by war was inadmissible. Egypt and Jordan accepted it; Syria and the PLO, which objected to the Palestinians being mentioned only as refugees, rejected it.

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The rise of the PLO and the War of Attrition, 1967–1972

The defeat of the Arab armies gave the Palestinian guerrilla groups their opportunity. On 21 March 1968 an Israeli raid on the Fatah base at Karameh in Jordan met fierce resistance from Fatah fighters and the Jordanian army, and Israel withdrew after heavy losses. Though militarily costly for Fatah, Karameh ("dignity" in Arabic) was celebrated as the first Arab stand after 1967, and thousands of volunteers joined the guerrilla groups. In 1968–1969 the guerrilla groups took over the PLO, and Arafat became its chairman in February 1969.

The PLO revised its founding charter in July 1968. The Palestinian National Charter declared Palestine within its mandate borders an indivisible unit, rejected the Balfour Declaration and the partition of 1947, and defined the method of liberation.

Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. This it is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase. The Palestinian Arab people assert their absolute determination and firm resolution to continue their armed struggle and to work for an armed popular revolution for the liberation of their country and their return to it.

Palestinian National Charter, Article 9, as amended by the Palestine National Council, July 1968 (English translation). The charter was written by guerrilla organisations in the year after 1967, when Arab armies had failed and armed struggle seemed the only way for Palestinians to act for themselves. It is good evidence of PLO aims and of why Israel refused to treat the PLO as a negotiating partner until 1993; it is weaker evidence of later PLO policy, which moved towards a two-state position from the mid-1970s.

The groups used several methods. Raids across the Jordan and Lebanese borders had little military effect. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist group led by George Habash, began hijacking airliners in 1968 to draw world attention; in September 1970 it blew up three hijacked planes at Dawson’s Field in Jordan. King Hussein, whose authority the armed groups openly challenged, then turned his army on them. In the fighting of Black September (1970), thousands were killed, and by 1971 the PLO had been driven from Jordan to Lebanon. A splinter group named after these events, Black September, killed eleven Israeli athletes and coaches taken hostage at the Munich Olympic Games in September 1972; Israel responded with air strikes and a campaign of assassinations of PLO figures.

Along the Suez Canal, Egypt fought a War of Attrition (1967–1970) of artillery duels, commando raids and air battles, with Soviet air defence crews joining in by 1970. It ended in a ceasefire in August 1970 under the American Rogers initiative, without any change of territory. Nasser died in September 1970 and was succeeded by Anwar Sadat.

The October War of 1973

Sadat offered in 1971 to reopen the Suez Canal in return for a partial Israeli withdrawal, and hinted at a peace agreement in exchange for the return of Sinai, but Israel, confident after 1967, and the United States, absorbed in Vietnam and détente, did not take him seriously. Sadat concluded that only a limited war could break the deadlock, restore Egyptian pride and force the superpowers to act.

On 6 October 1973, Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year and during the month of Ramadan, Egypt and Syria attacked together. Egyptian forces crossed the canal and broke through the fortified Bar-Lev Line; Syrian armour almost reached the edge of the Golan Heights. Israeli intelligence had expected war only if Egypt had air superiority (the "concept"), and the government decided against a pre-emptive strike to avoid being blamed for the war. In the first days Israel suffered heavy losses of tanks and aircraft to Soviet-made missiles.

Israel stopped the Syrians and counter-attacked towards Damascus. The United States began a massive airlift of arms (Operation Nickel Grass) on 14 October, while the Soviet Union resupplied Egypt and Syria. On 15–16 October Israeli forces under Ariel Sharon crossed the canal and encircled the Egyptian Third Army. The UN Security Council called for a ceasefire in Resolution 338 (22 October), which also called for negotiations on the basis of Resolution 242. When fighting continued and the Soviet Union threatened to send troops, the United States raised its forces to DEFCON 3 on 24–25 October, the closest the superpowers came to confrontation in the region. About 2,650 Israelis were killed; Arab deaths are estimated at 8,000–18,000.

The war had a global economic dimension. On 17 October the Arab members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) cut production, and they placed an oil embargo on the United States and the Netherlands for supporting Israel. The embargo lasted until March 1974, and the price of oil roughly quadrupled, from about 3 to nearly 12 dollars a barrel, contributing to recession and inflation in the West.

The table of results shows why many historians see 1973 as a turning point toward peace. Israel learned that it could not rely on territory alone for security, Egypt regained enough honour to negotiate, and the United States became the indispensable mediator.

The PLO turns to diplomacy, 1974–1988

After 1973 the PLO began to gain diplomatic recognition. The Arab summit at Rabat in October 1974 recognised it as the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people", undercutting Jordan’s claim to speak for the West Bank. In June 1974 the Palestine National Council had already adopted a "Ten-Point Programme" accepting a "national authority" on any part of Palestine that was liberated, a first step, criticised by rejectionist groups, towards accepting a state alongside Israel. On 13 November 1974 Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly.

Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.

Yasser Arafat, speech to the UN General Assembly, 13 November 1974 (English translation circulated at the UN). The speech was aimed at the Third World majority in the Assembly and at Western opinion, and its double image presented the PLO as both a liberation movement and a potential partner for peace. Israel saw only the gun: the PLO was still carrying out attacks on civilians. Days later the Assembly gave the PLO observer status. In 1975 it passed Resolution 3379, declaring Zionism "a form of racism and racial discrimination", which Israel and the United States denounced; it was revoked in 1991.

In Lebanon the PLO became a state within a state, which helped draw Lebanon into civil war in 1975 (the war itself is part of the wider regional study of Lebanon). In December 1988, after the outbreak of the First Intifada, Arafat publicly accepted Resolutions 242 and 338, recognised Israel’s right to exist and renounced terrorism, and the United States opened talks with the PLO.

Israeli policies after 1967: occupation, settlements and war against the PLO

Occupation and the first settlements

After 1967 Israel governed the West Bank and Gaza through a military administration. It annexed East Jerusalem and the surrounding area immediately, enlarging the city’s boundaries, but did not annex the rest of the West Bank and Gaza, whose inhabitants did not become citizens. Under the Labour governments (to 1977) settlement followed the Allon Plan: settlements in the Jordan Valley and around Jerusalem for security, avoiding the densely populated Palestinian hill country. Tens of thousands of Palestinians from the territories came to work in Israel, mostly as day labourers in construction and agriculture.

After 1973 a religious-nationalist movement, Gush Emunim ("Bloc of the Faithful", 1974), began to settle in the heart of the West Bank, often without government permission, on the grounds that the whole Land of Israel was a divine gift. In May 1977 the Likud under Menachem Begin, the former commander of the Irgun, won the election, ending nearly thirty years of Labour rule. The new government, with Ariel Sharon in charge of settlement, encouraged building throughout the West Bank. Israel passed the Jerusalem Law (1980), declaring the whole city its capital, and applied Israeli law to the Golan Heights (1981).

The chart of settler numbers shows that the population grew in every period, under governments of the left and right, and even during the Oslo years when the future of the territories was being negotiated. For Palestinians, settlements, with their roads, land confiscations and military protection, were the clearest sign that occupation was becoming permanent; for their supporters in Israel they were security outposts or a fulfilment of religious and historic rights.

The war against the PLO in Lebanon, 1978–1985

From southern Lebanon the PLO shelled northern Israel and launched raids; after a Fatah raid that killed 38 Israeli civilians on the coastal road in March 1978, Israel invaded southern Lebanon (Operation Litani). In June 1982, after the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London by the anti-Arafat Abu Nidal group, Israel launched a much larger invasion, Operation Peace for Galilee. Defence Minister Ariel Sharon aimed to destroy the PLO, install a friendly Christian government in Beirut and break Palestinian nationalism in the West Bank.

Israeli forces besieged West Beirut for ten weeks. Under an American-brokered agreement about 11,000 PLO fighters left for Tunisia and other Arab states in August 1982. On 16–18 September 1982, after the assassination of Lebanon’s president-elect Bashir Gemayel, Christian Phalangist militiamen entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, in an area surrounded by the Israeli army, and killed hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians; estimates range from about 460 to over 3,000. In Israel some 300,000–400,000 people protested, and the official Kahan Commission (1983) found that Sharon bore "personal responsibility" for failing to prevent the massacre; he resigned as defence minister.

The war removed the PLO from Israel’s borders but did not destroy it. Israel kept a "security zone" in southern Lebanon until May 2000, where it fought a new Shi’a Islamist movement, Hezbollah, whose rise belongs to the wider study of Lebanon. Israel also targeted PLO leaders abroad, bombing the PLO headquarters in Tunis in 1985 and killing Arafat’s deputy Abu Jihad there in April 1988.

The First Intifada and the rise of Hamas, 1987–1993

Causes and course of the First Intifada

By 1987 a generation of Palestinians had grown up under occupation. Land confiscation and settlement, military orders, arrests, curfews and economic dependence on Israel combined with frustration at the Arab states, which had ignored the Palestinian issue at their Amman summit in November 1987, and at a PLO leadership far away in Tunis. On 8 December 1987 an Israeli truck collided with vehicles carrying Palestinian workers at the Erez checkpoint in Gaza, killing four; rumours that it was deliberate set off protests in the Jabalia refugee camp the next day that spread across the territories.

The intifada ("shaking off" in Arabic) was a mass popular uprising more than an armed one. A Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, linked to the PLO factions, issued numbered leaflets calling for strikes, boycotts of Israeli goods, refusal to pay taxes (as in the town of Beit Sahour), resignation from the Israeli-run administration and the building of local committees. Young people threw stones and petrol bombs at soldiers. Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered a policy of beatings, mass arrests and curfews, often summarised as "break their bones", and the images of soldiers beating stone-throwers damaged Israel’s international standing.

According to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, about 1,100 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces and civilians and about 160 Israelis (about 100 civilians and 60 members of the security forces) were killed by Palestinians between December 1987 and September 1993. Several hundred more Palestinians, perhaps as many as 1,000, were killed by other Palestinians as alleged collaborators. In July 1988 King Hussein cut Jordan’s legal and administrative ties with the West Bank, leaving the PLO as its only claimant. On 15 November 1988 the Palestine National Council in Algiers proclaimed a State of Palestine, implicitly accepting partition by referring to Resolution 181.

Hamas

The intifada also produced a new rival to the PLO. Hamas (an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement) was founded in December 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and other leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, which had concentrated on preaching and social welfare and which Israel had tolerated as a counterweight to the PLO. Hamas joined the uprising and set out its aims in a covenant in August 1988.

There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.

Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), Article 13, 18 August 1988 (English translation). The covenant was written in the first months of the intifada by Hamas founders who saw Palestine as an Islamic trust (waqf) that no one could give up, and it competed with the PLO, which was then moving towards recognising Israel. It also contains antisemitic passages drawn from European conspiracy literature. Hamas’s 2017 "Document of General Principles" accepted a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines as a "formula of national consensus" without recognising Israel, though the covenant was not formally withdrawn.

The intifada changed the conflict in three ways. It shifted the centre of Palestinian politics from the diaspora to the occupied territories; it convinced many Israelis, including Rabin, that occupation could not be maintained at an acceptable cost; and it pushed the PLO towards the diplomatic concessions of December 1988. It also created the Islamist alternative that would oppose every later compromise.

The Second Intifada, Gaza and the conflict to 2020

The Second (al-Aqsa) Intifada, 2000–2005

The failure of the Camp David summit of July 2000 left both sides convinced that the other did not want peace. On 28 September 2000 Ariel Sharon, then leader of the opposition Likud, visited the Temple Mount / Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem, the site of the al-Aqsa mosque and the holiest place in Judaism, with a large police escort. The next day Israeli police shot dead several Palestinian protesters at the site, and violence spread through the territories and, in October, to Arab towns inside Israel. Whether the uprising was a spontaneous popular response or was encouraged by Arafat is disputed; the international Mitchell Report (2001) found no evidence that either the visit or a deliberate plan alone caused it.

The Second Intifada was far more violent than the first. Palestinian armed groups, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, carried out shootings and suicide bombings against civilians inside Israel, such as the bombing of a Passover meal at the Park Hotel in Netanya on 27 March 2002, which killed 30 people. Israel, now led by Sharon as prime minister (from 2001), responded with targeted killings, closures and, in Operation Defensive Shield (March–April 2002), the reoccupation of the West Bank cities, including heavy fighting in the Jenin refugee camp. Arafat was confined to his compound in Ramallah.

From June 2002 Israel built a separation barrier (Israelis call it the security fence; Palestinians call it the apartheid or separation wall), much of it on West Bank land east of the Green Line. Israel credited it with the sharp fall in suicide bombings; in an advisory opinion of 9 July 2004 the International Court of Justice found the parts built in occupied territory contrary to international law. Figures compiled by B’Tselem and others put the dead between September 2000 and early 2005 at about 3,000–3,300 Palestinians and about 1,000 Israelis, a large share of them civilians on both sides.

Arafat died on 11 November 2004. His successor, Mahmoud Abbas, elected president of the Palestinian Authority in January 2005, opposed armed struggle, and the Sharm el-Sheikh summit of February 2005 is often taken as the end of the Second Intifada. In August–September 2005, under Sharon’s disengagement plan, Israel removed all 21 settlements and about 8,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip, and four small settlements in the northern West Bank, while keeping control of Gaza’s borders, airspace and coast. Sharon presented it as a unilateral step to strengthen Israel’s hold on the main West Bank settlement blocs; Palestinians and critics saw it as a way to avoid negotiations.

Hamas in Gaza and the Gaza wars, 2006–2020

In January 2006 Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections, taking 74 of 132 seats, helped by anger at Fatah corruption and the failure of negotiations. Israel, the United States and the European Union refused to deal with a Hamas government unless it recognised Israel, renounced violence and accepted earlier agreements, and they cut aid. In June 2006 militants from Gaza captured an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit (released in 2011 in exchange for 1,027 prisoners). Weeks later Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese border led to a 34-day war in Lebanon (part of the wider regional study of Lebanon). After a short-lived unity government, fighting between Fatah and Hamas ended in June 2007 with Hamas in control of Gaza and Fatah of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

Israel and Egypt then imposed a blockade on Gaza, restricting the movement of people and goods; Israel justified it as necessary to stop weapons reaching Hamas, while UN agencies and human rights organisations described it as collective punishment of about two million people. Rocket fire from Gaza and Israeli military operations led to three wars in which the great majority of the dead were Palestinians:

Data: UN OCHA and B’Tselem; figures for Palestinian deaths and the share of civilians among them are disputed by the Israeli army, which gives lower civilian proportions. In 2018–2019 weekly protests at the Gaza border fence, the "Great March of Return", were met with Israeli fire that killed more than 200 Palestinians. By 2020 the conflict had become three separate situations: Israeli rule and expanding settlement in the West Bank, a besieged Gaza under Hamas, and a divided Palestinian leadership.

Attempts to reach a peaceful settlement

Before 1977 every peace effort failed. The American Rogers Plan (1969) proposed Israeli withdrawal to almost all the 1967 lines in return for peace and was rejected by Israel and, in effect, by the Arab states; the Geneva Conference of December 1973, chaired by the United States and the Soviet Union, met only once. The breakthroughs came from direct, bilateral diplomacy with American mediation.

The Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty, 1979

Sadat wanted Sinai back, American economic and military aid instead of Soviet support, and an end to the cost of war for Egypt’s struggling economy. Begin wanted peace with the strongest Arab state, which would make another general Arab war impossible, without giving up the West Bank. In November 1977 Sadat surprised the world by travelling to Jerusalem. On 20 November he addressed the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

We used to reject you. We had our reasons and our claims, yes. … Yet, today I tell you, and declare it to the whole world, that we accept to live with you in permanent peace based on justice.

Anwar Sadat, address to the Knesset, Jerusalem, 20 November 1977 (official English translation). The speech was addressed to Israelis, to the Arab world watching on television and to the United States. Its acceptance of Israel was historic, but the same speech warned that Sadat had not come for a separate agreement and demanded Israeli withdrawal from all occupied land, including Arab Jerusalem, and a Palestinian state: its audience shaped a message of peace that also had to defend Sadat against the charge of betraying the Palestinians.

Negotiations stalled until President Jimmy Carter brought Sadat and Begin to the presidential retreat at Camp David for thirteen days in September 1978. The Camp David Accords (17 September 1978) contained two frameworks. The first, for an Egypt–Israel treaty, led to the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty, signed in Washington on 26 March 1979: Israel withdrew from Sinai in stages, completed in April 1982, removed its settlements there, and the two states exchanged ambassadors and opened their borders. The second framework promised Palestinian "full autonomy" in the West Bank and Gaza over a five-year transition, but the autonomy talks soon failed, because the PLO and Jordan refused to take part and Begin’s government interpreted autonomy narrowly while expanding settlements.

The treaty has lasted. It worked because both leaders gained what mattered most to them, because it involved a clear exchange of territory for peace between two states, and because the United States guaranteed it with large annual aid to both. It was a "cold peace": trade and tourism stayed limited and Egyptian public opinion remained hostile. The costs for Sadat were high: Egypt was suspended from the Arab League from 1979 to 1989, and Sadat was assassinated by Islamist army officers on 6 October 1981. Sadat and Begin shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978.

The Oslo peace process, 1991–2000

The end of the Cold War and the Gulf War of 1991 created new conditions. The Soviet Union could no longer back Arab states against Israel; the PLO was weakened and short of money after Arafat sided with Iraq; the United States had new influence after the war; and the First Intifada had shown Israelis the cost of occupation. The Madrid Conference (30 October 1991), sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union, brought Israel, Syria, Lebanon and a joint Jordanian–Palestinian delegation, with Hanan Ashrawi as its spokesperson, to direct talks for the first time.

The Madrid talks made little progress, but Yitzhak Rabin, elected prime minister for Labour in 1992, allowed secret talks with PLO officials in Norway. They produced letters of mutual recognition, in which the PLO recognised Israel’s right to exist in peace and security and renounced terrorism, and Israel recognised the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. On 13 September 1993 Rabin and Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn as the Declaration of Principles was signed.

The aim of the Israeli Palestinian negotiations within the current Middle East peace process is, among other things, to establish a Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority, the elected Council (the "Council"), for the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, for a transitional period not exceeding five years, leading to a permanent settlement based on Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.

Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (Oslo Accords), Article I, 13 September 1993. The wording shows the method of Oslo: a gradual process of interim self-government, with the hardest questions left for later. The document does not mention a Palestinian state, an end to settlement building or the right of return; Article V lists Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security arrangements and borders as subjects for permanent-status talks, to begin no later than the start of the third year of the interim period. This deliberate ambiguity made agreement possible in 1993 but left each side free to expect a different outcome.

The Gaza–Jericho Agreement (May 1994) created the Palestinian Authority (PA), and Arafat returned to Gaza in July 1994. The Interim Agreement (Oslo II, September 1995) divided the West Bank into three zones: Areas A, B and C. In Area A (the main cities) the PA had civil and security control; in Area B (most villages) civil control with Israeli security control; and in Area C, about 60 per cent of the West Bank, including the settlements, the Jordan Valley and most open land, Israel kept full control. Peace with Jordan followed in the Israel–Jordan Treaty of Peace of 26 October 1994.

Why did the Oslo process fail?

The Camp David summit, July 2000

Israel’s Labour prime minister Ehud Barak, elected in 1999, wanted to move straight to a final settlement. President Bill Clinton hosted Barak and Arafat at Camp David from 11 to 25 July 2000. The details of the proposals were never written down, which is why accounts differ. Barak was reported to offer a Palestinian state in Gaza and most of the West Bank (figures of 88–92 per cent are commonly given) with some Palestinian sovereignty in parts of East Jerusalem, but with Israeli annexation of the main settlement blocs, Israeli control of the Jordan Valley for some years and no right of return. Arafat refused, above all over sovereignty on the Haram al-Sharif / Temple Mount and the refugees, and made no detailed counter-offer.

Clinton publicly blamed Arafat, and the dominant Israeli and American narrative became that "there was no partner for peace". Others, including Robert Malley, a member of the American team, argued that the offer fell short of a viable state, that Arafat had been pushed into a summit he did not want, and that both sides and the United States made mistakes. Talks continued after the outbreak of the Second Intifada: the Clinton Parameters of December 2000 proposed a state on about 94–96 per cent of the West Bank with land swaps, Arab neighbourhoods of Jerusalem under Palestinian sovereignty and a limited return of refugees, and negotiators came close to agreement at Taba in January 2001, but time ran out when Sharon won the Israeli election in February 2001.

The Arab Peace Initiative, 2002

At the height of the Second Intifada the Arab League, meeting in Beirut on 28 March 2002, adopted a plan proposed by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. It was the first collective Arab offer of recognition, and a reversal of the "three noes" of Khartoum.

Full Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied since 1967, including the Syrian Golan Heights to the lines of June 4, 1967 … Achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 … The acceptance of the establishment of a Sovereign Independent Palestinian State on the Palestinian territories occupied since the 4th of June 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza strip, with east Jerusalem as its capital.

The Arab Peace Initiative, Arab League summit, Beirut, 28 March 2002 (official English translation). In return the Arab states would consider the conflict ended and establish "normal relations" with Israel. Its value as evidence lies in what it shows about the Arab states’ shift to land for peace on a regional scale, and its phrasing on refugees ("to be agreed upon") left room for compromise. Israel did not accept it, objecting to the full return to the 1967 lines and the reference to Resolution 194; the Hamas suicide bombing at the Park Hotel took place on the evening of the summit’s opening day. The initiative was re-endorsed by the Arab League in 2007 and 2017.

From the Roadmap to the Abraham Accords, 2003–2020

• The Roadmap (April 2003), from the "Quartet" of the United States, the EU, Russia and the UN, set out phased steps to a Palestinian state; neither side carried out its first-phase commitments (an end to violence and a settlement freeze).

• The Geneva Initiative (December 2003), an unofficial model agreement negotiated by the former Israeli minister Yossi Beilin and the former Palestinian minister Yasser Abed Rabbo, showed in detail how the final-status issues could be settled (a border close to the 1967 lines with land swaps, a shared Jerusalem, a limited return of refugees), but neither government adopted it.

• Annapolis (November 2007): negotiations in which the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert in 2008 offered a state on about 94 per cent of the West Bank with land swaps; Abbas did not accept before Olmert left office.

• The Kerry talks (2013–2014) under US Secretary of State John Kerry collapsed over settlements and prisoner releases.

• UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (December 2016) declared settlements a "flagrant violation" of international law; the United States abstained.

• The Trump administration recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the US embassy there (14 May 2018), cut funding to UNRWA, and in January 2020 published "Peace to Prosperity", which allowed Israel to annex about 30 per cent of the West Bank. The Palestinian leadership rejected it outright.

The Abraham Accords, signed at the White House on 15 September 2020, normalised relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain; Sudan and Morocco announced similar agreements in October and December 2020. As part of the UAE agreement Israel suspended its plan to annex parts of the West Bank. The accords reversed the order of the Arab Peace Initiative, which had made normal relations conditional on a Palestinian state. Their supporters saw a new regional alignment against Iran and the benefits of trade and security cooperation; Palestinian leaders called them a betrayal, and critics argued that sidelining the Palestinian question would not make it disappear.

The impact of the Arab–Israeli conflict, 1948–2020

The consequences diagram groups the main effects of the conflict. They fell very unevenly: on states and peoples, on men and women, and on majorities and minorities within each society.

Political impact

Israel

War shaped the Israeli state from its first day. The army, built on universal conscription and long reserve service, became the central institution of society, and many generals (Rabin, Barak, Sharon) became political leaders. The Labour movement that had built the Yishuv governed until 1977; the Likud’s victory that year reflected the shock of 1973 and the votes of Mizrahi Jews (Jews from Middle Eastern and North African countries) who felt excluded by the Labour establishment. The question of the territories taken in 1967 became the main dividing line of Israeli politics, between a "land for peace" camp and those who wanted to keep the whole Land of Israel. Religious parties and the settler movement gained influence through coalition politics. The assassination of Rabin in 1995 by a religious nationalist and the violence of the Second Intifada weakened the peace camp; Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud was prime minister in 1996–1999 and again from 2009.

The Arab states

Defeat in 1948 discredited the old monarchies and parliamentary elites. Army officers took power in Syria (1949), Egypt (1952, the Free Officers) and Iraq (1958), promising to modernise their countries and defeat Israel. King Abdullah of Jordan was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1951 by a Palestinian who saw him as a traitor. Pan-Arab nationalism under Nasser dominated the 1950s and 1960s, but the defeat of 1967 discredited it and helped the rise of political Islam, which presented religion as the answer to the failure of secular nationalism. The conflict justified states of emergency and large security services across the region, and destabilised Jordan (1970) and Lebanon, where the PLO’s presence was one cause of the civil war of 1975–1990.

The Palestinians

The 1948 war left the Palestinians stateless and scattered among Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, the neighbouring Arab states and the Gulf. From 1964, and above all after 1967, the PLO built a national movement and a national identity across this diaspora. The Oslo Accords created the Palestinian Authority, the first Palestinian self-government, but its powers were limited and its rule became increasingly authoritarian. The split of 2007 left two rival governments, Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, and no Palestinian presidential or legislative elections were held between 2006 and 2020.

Economic impact

Israel spent a very high share of its national income on defence, peaking at about 30 per cent of GDP after the 1973 war. Defence spending, the cost of absorbing immigrants and the oil shock contributed to an inflation that reached about 445 per cent a year in 1984, before a stabilisation plan in 1985 brought it under control. American aid, about 3 billion dollars a year from the 1980s and fixed in a 2016 agreement at 38 billion dollars over 2019–2028, became a pillar of Israeli security. From the 1990s a high-technology economy, helped by military research and Soviet immigrant scientists, made Israel one of the richer countries in the world.

For Egypt the closure of the Suez Canal from 1967 to 1975 cost its main source of foreign currency, and military spending held back development until peace brought large American aid. The oil embargo of 1973–1974 showed the Arab oil producers’ power, and the oil price rise enriched the Gulf states, which then funded the front-line states and the PLO. The Palestinian economy of the occupied territories became dependent on Israel: by the 1980s about a third of the Palestinian labour force worked in Israel, and Israel controlled trade, water and land. The economist Sara Roy described Gaza’s condition as "de-development", a process in which occupation blocked the growth of a self-sustaining economy. After 1993 repeated closures cut Palestinians off from jobs in Israel, and after 2007 the blockade devastated Gaza; a UN report of 2015 warned that Gaza could become uninhabitable by 2020.

Social impact and migration

The graph of Israel’s population shows the scale of immigration. Between 1948 and 1951 about 690,000 immigrants arrived, doubling the Jewish population: Holocaust survivors from Europe and Jews from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco and other Arab countries. Many Mizrahi immigrants were housed for years in ma’abarot (tent and tin-hut transit camps) and then in remote "development towns", which created lasting ethnic and class inequality. Later waves came from the Soviet Union (about one million from 1989), and from Ethiopia in airlifts such as Operation Moses (1984) and Operation Solomon (1991).

For Palestinians the conflict meant repeated displacement. The refugees of 1948 and their descendants registered with UNRWA grew from about 750,000 to about 5.6 million by 2019, living in Jordan (most of whom received Jordanian citizenship), Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza; about a third lived in 58 recognised camps. Many Palestinians found work in the Gulf states, but after Arafat supported Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait most of Kuwait’s Palestinian community, around 400,000 people, left or were expelled in 1990–1991. The right of return remained central to Palestinian identity, and Nakba Day, Land Day and the keys of lost houses became symbols of memory.

Experiences of women

The conflict both opened and limited opportunities for women. In Israel women have been conscripted under the Defence Service Law of 1949, but for decades most served in support roles, and combat posts opened only after a court ruling of 1995 (the Alice Miller case). The kibbutzim promised equality but in practice women often returned to traditional work in kitchens and children’s houses. Golda Meir, prime minister from 1969 to 1974, was one of the world’s first women heads of government. Women also led protest movements: Women in Black held weekly vigils against the occupation from 1988, and the Four Mothers movement campaigned from 1997 for withdrawal from Lebanon.

Palestinian women were active in national politics from the women’s congress of 1929 onwards. In the 1960s and 1970s a few joined armed groups, such as Leila Khaled of the PFLP, who took part in hijackings in 1969 and 1970. In the First Intifada women’s committees organised education, food production and care for the families of prisoners and the dead, and women took a prominent part in demonstrations; Hanan Ashrawi became the international face of the Palestinian delegation at Madrid in 1991. The Second Intifada brought female suicide bombers, beginning with Wafa Idris in January 2002, which divided Palestinian opinion. Refugee women carried heavy burdens in the camps; Palestinian citizens of Israel and Mizrahi women have described a double marginalisation, by gender and by national or ethnic origin.

Experiences of marginalised groups

• Arab citizens of Israel (about a fifth of the population by 2020) lived under military government until 1966, with restrictions on movement, and lost much land to confiscation. On Land Day (30 March 1976) six Arab citizens were killed protesting against land expropriation in Galilee; in October 2000, thirteen were killed by police during protests at the start of the Second Intifada. The Nation-State Law of 2018 defined Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and downgraded Arabic from an official language to one with "special status".

• The Bedouin of the Negev, many living in villages that the state does not recognise and so lacking water, electricity and planning rights, faced repeated demolitions.

• Mizrahi Jews suffered discrimination in housing, education and jobs; the Israeli Black Panthers (1971), young Moroccan-born Jews from Jerusalem, protested against it. Ethiopian Jews faced racism and protested against police violence in 2015 and 2019.

• The Druze, an Arabic-speaking religious minority, have served in the Israeli army since 1956 but objected that the Nation-State Law treated them as second-class citizens.

• Palestinian Christians, about 10 per cent of Palestine’s Arab population under the mandate, shared the losses of 1948 and the occupation, and their share of the population of the West Bank and Gaza fell to about 1–2 per cent by 2020, through emigration and lower birth rates. Towns such as Bethlehem were hit hard by closures and by the separation barrier in the 2000s.

• LGBT people were affected by the conflict in different ways on each side. Israel decriminalised homosexuality in 1988 and opened military service to gay men and lesbians in 1993, while in Gaza a law of the British mandate period still criminalised sex between men and in both territories social hostility was strong; some Palestinians fled to Israel, where they had no legal status. Palestinian and other critics accused Israel of "pinkwashing", using its LGBT rights record to deflect criticism of the occupation; Israeli officials rejected the charge.

• Palestinian refugees in Lebanon were barred from owning property and from dozens of professions, and suffered in the civil war, including the Sabra and Shatila massacre and the "war of the camps" of 1985–1988.

• Jews of the Arab world: ancient communities in Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Libya almost disappeared after 1948, through emigration, expulsion and pressure.

Perspectives and debates

The history of the conflict is unusually bound up with national identity. Each side has a foundational narrative: for Israelis, the return of a persecuted people to its homeland and a war of survival in 1948; for Palestinians, the dispossession of a people by a settler movement backed by imperial powers. Historians on both sides and beyond have tested these narratives against the archives, and in the main debates evidence has narrowed the gap between the narratives on some questions but not on others.

Origins and British responsibility

The Lebanese-Palestinian writer George Antonius, in The Arab Awakening (1938), argued that Britain betrayed the promise of Arab independence made to Hussein, which in his reading included Palestine. The British historian Elie Kedourie, in In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth (1976), examined the same correspondence and argued that the promises were conditional and ambiguous and that Britain had not promised Palestine to the Arabs. The Israeli journalist-historian Tom Segev, in One Palestine, Complete (2000), argues that the British, partly from an exaggerated belief in Jewish influence, did more than anyone to make the Jewish national home possible. Rashid Khalidi, in The Iron Cage (2006) and The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), frames the conflict as a settler-colonial project supported by Britain and later the United States, while also blaming the divisions and failures of Palestinian leadership. Israeli historians such as Anita Shapira, in Land and Power (1992), explain Zionism as a national movement that came to accept the use of force only gradually, as Arab resistance grew.

1948: the "New Historians" and their critics

From the late 1980s, using newly opened Israeli archives, a group of Israeli scholars later called the New Historians challenged the official Israeli account of 1948 (that the Arabs started the war, that refugees left on their leaders’ orders, and that a weak Israel defeated a united Arab world).

Morris himself later argued (in interviews from 2004) that expulsion had been justified in the circumstances of 1948, which shows that historians can agree on facts and still disagree sharply on judgement. Most scholars now accept that both flight and expulsion occurred; the debate is about intention, proportion and responsibility.

The 1967 war: inevitable or avoidable?

Michael Oren, in Six Days of War (2002), argues that neither side set out to fight: a chain of incidents and miscalculations, Arab rivalries and Egypt’s militant rhetoric produced a war that Israel then fought in self-defence against a real threat. Tom Segev, in 1967 (2005; English translation 2007), stresses the anxiety and political weakness within Israel, under a prime minister, Levi Eshkol, whom many Israelis distrusted, and questions whether war was necessary at all. Both reject the idea of a long-planned war; they differ on how real the danger to Israel was and how much choice Israeli leaders had.

The failure of Oslo and Camp David 2000

Dennis Ross, the chief American negotiator, argues in The Missing Peace (2004) that Arafat was unable or unwilling to make the compromises needed for a final settlement and bears the main responsibility for the failure of 2000. Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, in their article "Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors" (New York Review of Books, August 2001), argue that Israeli, Palestinian and American mistakes all contributed, including Barak’s take-it-or-leave-it approach and Palestinian distrust after years of settlement growth. Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel’s foreign minister at Camp David, wrote in Scars of War, Wounds of Peace (2005) about the mistakes of both sides; in a debate in 2006 he said that had he been a Palestinian he too would have rejected the Camp David offer, while arguing that the Palestinian rejection of the Clinton Parameters later that year was a historic mistake. Avi Shlaim sees the deeper cause in the "iron wall" tradition and continued settlement; the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said opposed Oslo from the start as an unequal agreement that left occupation in place.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Paper 3: the causes of Arab–Jewish tension

Paper 3: the outcome of the 1948 war

Paper 3: turning points in the conflict

Paper 3: the failure of the peace process

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain the origins of Zionism and of Arab and Palestinian nationalism before 1914.

• To do:

  I can explain what the McMahon–Hussein correspondence, the Sykes–Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration promised, and why they were disputed.

• To do:

  I can describe how the Palestine mandate was created and what it committed Britain to.

• To do:

  I can use data to explain the growth of Jewish immigration under the mandate and why it caused tension.

• To do:

  I can explain the social, economic and political causes of Arab–Jewish tension, including land, labour and institutions.

• To do:

  I can explain the causes, course and consequences of the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939 and the significance of the Peel Commission and the 1939 White Paper.

• To do:

  I can describe Jewish and Arab responses to rising tension, from the iron wall and the Biltmore Programme to the Arab League.

• To do:

  I can explain how the Second World War, Britain and the UN led to the 1948 war, and the roles of Ben-Gurion and the Arab League.

• To do:

  I can explain why Israel won the 1948–1949 war and how the Palestinian refugee problem arose.

• To do:

  I can explain the causes and consequences of the Suez Crisis, the Six-Day War and the October War.

• To do:

  I can explain the creation and development of the PLO and its search for support.