Two Minute Guide to Middle East Peace

Palestine During World Wars 1 and 2
A hundred years ago, the Ottoman Empire ruled Palestine, which was then a large area including present-day Jordan, Lebanon and Israel. After the Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War 1 by the Allies, Great Britain was given stewardship of Palestine by the League of Nations. Britain gradually gave the region of Palestine south of the river Jordan more and more autonomy, and it became known as Transjordan. Only the area to the north of the river was now called Palestine.

Between World Wars 1 and 2, Jewish immigration to Palestine increased because of persecution in Europe. At the end of World War 2, 30% of Palestinians were Jews, and 10% of Palestinian land had become owned by Jews.

This increase angered the Palestinian Arabs, who during WW2 had successfully pressured the British government to limit Jewish immigration into Palestine, even from Axis countries. The Jews in turn were pressuring the British to allow more immigration, and Jewish terrorists attacked many government and military institutions, including assassinating the British Governor Lord Moyne in 1948. In 1947, Britain decided it could not control the region, and asked the United Nations to decide what should happen.

The Creation Of Israel
In 1947, a United Nations committee of neutral countries decided that Palestine should be split into a Palestinian and a Jewish state, except for Jerusalem which was to be governed by the UN as an open city. The Jewish community and leaders accepted this, but the Arabs did not. Indeed, Arab representatives refused to discuss plans for Palestine with the UN. The Palestinian Arabs couldn't understand why half their country should be taken away from them to solve a problem that Europeans had created for themselves through their persecution of the Jews.

Once the U.N. committee's decision was public and had successfully passed a vote in the UN General Assembly, the Arab countries tried to appeal to the International Court of Human Rights, but they did not get enough votes for their case to be heard.

The proposed borders gave the Jewish state 55% of Palestinian land - a generous allocation as only 30% of the Palestinian population was Jewish. The UN committee deciding the borders was initially tending towards recommending a unified Palestinian state, but was impressed by how well existing Jews were already using their Palestinian land.

As the British handover neared, clashes between Arabs and Jews in Palestine escalated and hundreds of people died on both sides. All of the countries neighboring Palestine publicly declared that they would resist the creation of an Israeli state, and it became clear that Israel should expect to be attacked as soon as the British completed their withdrawal.

To make their new country easier to defend, Israeli military forces and gangs attacked Israel's Palestinians to scare them out of their new state's borders, and most Palestinians living in Israel fled to the surrounding areas and Jordan. Hundreds were killed in artillery attacks on their homes and 700,000 were forced to flee. As soon as the British officially completed their pullout in May of 1948, all Arabic countries surrounding Israel attacked it.

The 1948 War
Israel won the war, holding off Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq. It lost 1% of its 500,000 population as casualties. It grew its UN-determined borders by 20% as a result of the war and also seized Jerusalem. The remainder of Palestine was seized by Egypt (the Gaza Strip) and Jordan (the West Bank).

The Six-Day War and Yom Kippur War
In 1967 and 1973, Israel's Arab neighbors again attacked it in two separate attacks. Israel won both these wars as well. After the Six-Day War it again increased its borders by seizing the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. 

Today
Today the 700,000 Palestinian refugees displaced out of Israel in 1948 have grown to 4 million in number. They still want to return to their land and houses in Israeli territory.

Arab countries have started to recognize the legitimacy of Israel, including Egypt in the 1980s and the PLO in the Oslo accords. Yet this is a controversial act in the Arab world, leading to the assassination of Sadat and dissatisfaction with the PLO.

Current peace efforts are concentrating on the creation of an Arab Palestinian state from the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and some of the Israeli territory. Many Arab Palestinians see this as just the first step towards regaining all the land that they use to own.

Israel too wants a separate Palestinian state, because a merged state would lead to the Arab population growing to outnumber the Jewish population over time. But it does not want to give up much of its land that it either won in war or has built settlements on.

The UN's original 1947 plan for division is not acceptable to either side. Both sides want Jerusalem, as well as much more land than the other side is prepared to give.