ISRAEL, PALESTINE – AN OVERVIEW

By Harold Ramoutar, Retired University Lecturer

THE violent conflict between Palestine and Israel is fraught with controversies.

Understanding the various issues is difficult for most people even in the Middle East and the “experts” in the United Nations.

It includes, but is not limited to, religious polemics, politics, economics, and property.

So I don’t propose to claim any expertise in this issue as I attempt to provide a brief overview of a complex dispute, and only in an overall socio-historical perspective.

Israel traces their claim of land ownership, including the full Gaza strip back to the days when using the Torah with specific boundaries pointed out to Moses by God.

 For Israel, the Torah is not just God’s word but their history and, to localise it a bit, the area became their irrefutable and indisputable legal land deed that both Moses and God signed, sealed and delivered.

In the Torah, God pointed out to Moses (and others before that—Abraham, Isaac Jacob, etc.) that he would give their descendants all the land, including what is now the disputed Gaza.

In the Biblical book of Judges, Israel, through the tribe of Judah, it was specifically pointed out that Israel drove away the people of Gaza and began occupation dating back to approximately 1400 years BC.

However, as the millenniums rolled by, Israel was conquered, subjugated, driven away, killed, and taken captive by various nations, including, but not limited to, the Babylonians, Assyrians, and, in the last major instance, Rome, and was generally scattered throughout the wider world.

That is, until the mid-20^th century. 

When the Ottoman Empire fell, in World War 1, Palestine was, characteristically, especially the geographic region, that area located between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River that is under dispute.

Palestinians, who are Arabs, have been calling this territory home since around the 7^th century AD. 

Israel was nowhere in sight.

For all intents and purposes, Israel ceased to exist.

Fast track to almost 1,300 years later.

Within the last century, Jews, as Israelites are called, began asserting themselves are seeking to reestablish a national homeland in the same area demarcated by God to Moses.

Many left various parts of the world and moved back to their original “homeland,” accepting that it is their Divine right.

But by then, Palestine had been inhabited by Arabs for just about 1,300 years.

When WW 1 ended in 1918, it was the then ubiquitous British who took control of Palestine.

The then League of Nations, the forerunner to the UN, issued a British mandate for Palestine, a document that gave Britain administrative control over the region, and included provisions for establishing a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, which went into effect in 1923.

In 1947, after more than two decades of British rule, the UN proposed a plan to partition Palestine into two sections: an independent Jewish state and an independent Arab state. 

Jewish leaders accepted the plan, but many Palestinians, some of whom had been actively fighting British and Jewish interests in the region since the 1920s, vehemently opposed it.

Arab groups argued that they represented the majority of the population in certain regions and should be granted more territory.

They began to form volunteer armies throughout Palestine.

In May 1948, less than a year after the partition proposal for Palestine was introduced, Britain withdrew from Palestine and Israel declared itself an independent state, implying a willingness to implement the partition plan. 

Almost immediately, neighboring Arab armies moved in to prevent the establishment of an Israeli state.

The 1948 Arab-Israeli War that ensued involved Israel and five Arab nations – Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon.

 By the war’s end in July 1949, Israel controlled more than two-thirds of the former British Mandate, while Jordan took control of the West Bank and Egypt took control of the Gaza Strip.

A new set of conflicts began between Jews and Palestinian Arabs, which now became a regional contest involving nation-states and a tangle of diplomatic, political and economic interests.

Approximately 135 United Nations member countries recognise Palestine as an independent state, but Israel and some other countries, including the United States, ignore this distinction.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a powerful invasive attack against Israel.

The offensive retaliation from Israel is what now taking place.