A rchive Date
[ 07-04-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Israel ]
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[http://canoe.ca/CNEWSFeatures0204/06_mideast-sun.html
Genesis of an unholy war
Looking back to make sense of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis
By ROB GRANATSTEIN-- Toronto Sun
A searing ball of fire followed the enormous explosion. Glass, nails and other debris rocketed through the air, lodging in the bodies of dozens of young people at the Tel Aviv cafe.
The blood begins to flow, into their eyes, down their arms. There's screaming. Then the wail of the Israeli ambulances.
The blast at My Coffee Shop in late March is only one of dozens of suicide bombs that have exploded in Israel in the last month. This one only killed the suicide bomber but injured 32.
Days later and a dozen kilometres away, in the parking lot of the Ramallah hospital, doctors and nurses are emptying out the morgue and are burying the dead bodies of Palestinians, many of them civilians caught in the crossfire as the Israeli military hunts for suicide bombers and those who unleash them.
A short distance away, an Israeli tank bulldozes its way through neighbourhoods, over cars, past rock-throwing teens, destroying whatever is in its path.
A strict curfew is in effect, enforced by the armed soldiers.
In the suburban homes in Tel Aviv and Haifa, families sleep with one eye open. The sleep is often restless, but familiar.
A house can not be a home if you can't be comfortable inside it.
A city can't be a community if you can't go for coffee without fearing for your life.
In Ramallah and Tulkarm, there is no such thing as a sleepy community. Kids look out their windows and see tanks roll by. A 13-year-old girl can't celebrate her birthday with friends because of the curfew. They feel like prisoners.
This is not a new feeling for either side.
Both sides have their own version of history. How this started, who is at fault, what should happen now.
This is the holy land, home to an unholy war.
Could Britain be the scapegoat for all this fighting?
While that would not be entirely fair, a lot of trouble in this area can be traced back to World War I and the British.
The Ottoman Turks, or Turkey, ruled the area known as Palestine before World War I, but the area came under British control after the Turks sided with Germany and lost the war.
Here's where the Brits lit the powder keg with contradictory promises.
During the war, the British wanted the Arabs on their side and promised there would be Arab independence in these former Turkish areas, then 90% Arab Christian and Muslim.
But in 1917, Britain's leaders also wrote the Balfour Declaration, calling for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," in attempt to rally Jewish leaders in the U.S. and the U.K. to their side.
After the war, the League of Nations granted power over Palestine to Britain with the mandate that the British would help the Palestinian Jews build a national homeland.
The people in Palestine objected and hostility grew.
The British knew they had a huge problem on their hands. Jewish immigration soared as violent anti-Semitism grew in Europe and Russia. By the end of World War II, Jews made up one-third of the population of Palestine.
"There were no political problems between Jews and Arabs in Palestine prior to the 20th Century," said University of Toronto history professor James Reilly. "It's not a feud that goes back to biblical times.
"But because of the development of Jewish nationalism and Arab nationalism focused on the same territory, a modern ethnic conflict developed," Reilly said. "It acquired international dimensions when the British pledged to build a Jewish national home in a country that at that point was 90% Arab."
Britain wanted out and in 1947 handed Palestine over to the United Nations. It was someone else's problem now.
INDEPENDENCE
The United Nations decided the best way to solve the tensions in Palestine was to partition the territory into a Jewish and an Arab state.
The Jewish movement accepted the partition.
"The Arab population of Palestine and the Arab states opposed the partition on the grounds that the UN had no authority to partition Palestine over the objections of its indigenous inhabitants," said McGill politics professor Rex Brynen, an expert on the Middle East.
On May 14, 1948 the State of Israel was proclaimed by the United Nations.
On May 15, 1948, the State of Israel was attacked by Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon in an attempt to destroy the one-day-old nation.
The move backfired. By 1949 and the end of the Arab-Israeli war, Israel held three-quarters of Palestine, double what the UN had proposed. Jordan had the West Bank, Egypt had the Gaza Strip. Palestinians had nothing.
REFUGEES
The Palestinians were dispossessed from their homes and land in what had become Israel after the 1948 war. There were now 700,000 Palestinian refugees.
They formed refugee populations in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Syria.
"The Palestinian sense of themselves as a people is tied to this dispossession," Reilly said. "Their dream was to return home to their lands, homes and villages."
Since 1949, it has sometimes seemed as if Israel has been under attack on a daily basis from displaced Palestinians trying to recapture their land.
WAR AND PEACE
In 1967, after UN peacekeeping forces had moved out of the area, Egypt closed off the Suez Canal to Israeli ships for the second time in 12 years.
Fearing the Egyptians would attack, Israel struck first, mounting what became known as the Six-Day War. The Israeli fighting machine destroyed both the Egyptian air force as it sat on the ground, then its ground forces. When the UN ended that war, Israel had redrawn the map again.
Israel was swallowing up land like it was a superpower.
It captured Gaza, parts of the Egyptian Sinai desert, West Bank lands, old Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip put Israel in control of one million hostile Palestinians.
Guerrilla violence against Israel escalated as the Arab world responded to its capture with a no peace, no negotiation, no recognition policy. The Palestine Liberation Organization also got its start in the '60s and Yasser Arafat became its chairman in 1969.
In 1973, Egypt attacked Sinai, while Syria bombarded the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur War. Despite being attacked on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar and suffering huge losses, Israel prevailed and gained even more land.
The Yom Kippur War seemed to prove that after 25 years, the military solution to the Arab nations' demand for some of the land perhaps wasn't the best alternative.
The first Arab-Israeli peace conference convened in December 1973 in Switzerland. That led eventually to the Camp David Accords of 1978, where Egypt and Israel agreed to end the dispute between the two countries. Israel returned Sinai to Egypt.
Both Israel and Egypt also agreed to negotiate Palestinian autonomy in Gaza and the West Bank. But Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat was assassinated before any progress could be made.
The PLO believed no movement toward a Palestinian state was happening and began missile attacks on Israel in the early 1980s. In 1982, the Israeli army moved in to Lebanon in an attempt to drive the PLO out.
"Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon was an attempt to destroy the PLO," said McGill's Brynen. "The architect was Ariel Sharon and the target was Yasser Arafat. In some ways we're replaying 1982 now, except we're in Ramallah instead of Beirut."
RELIGION
The land now called Israel is holy land for three religions, Muslims,Christians and Jews. Brynen believes as the conflict becomes more intense, religion becomes more important.
"But I think most Palestinians would tell you it's as much a national struggle as it is a religious struggle," Brynen said. "Many Israelis, certainly in more secular cities like Tel Aviv, would tell you it's an Israeli national security issue.
"I think the religious dimension quite dangerously has become more important the worse the violence has got," he said. "That makes compromise more difficult."
Peace was close to reality in July 2000 at Camp David. It was closer still as negotiations carried on in private until January 2001.
"There was a sensible middle ground," Brynen said.
That middle ground didn't sit well with many Israelis, who argued Yasser Arafat, representing the Palestinians, was unprepared to even consider the most generous concessions ever offered. Eventually Ehud Barak's Labour government collapsed and Ariel Sharon, the hard-nosed right-wing Likud politician became prime minister in February.
"They ran out of time, the political context was bad," Brynen said. "But the negotiations were going extraordinarily well. In fact, a great many of the negotiators I know personally on both sides said if they would have had another month they would have had a deal."
Sharon pulled all "land-for-peace" deals from the table and began seeking a military solution.
Brynen said two problems must be overcome before peace can come to the Middle East: Violence and politics.
"The violence, most of the blame can be put at the Palestinian door. The absence of any political light at the end of the tunnel can be put at the Israeli door."
Many believe Sharon is not interested in ending the West Bank occupation, so he's incapable of putting a reasonable compromise on the table.
Others argue Arafat's real agenda is not a Palestinian state living peacefully beside Israel, but the destruction of Israel itself.
"It will probably require a different government in Israel to change the political light and that's not going to happen any time in the coming years," he said.
And Brynen said even if Arafat were trying hard to convince his population they shouldn't shoot at Israelis, the Palestinians won't listen as long as Israelis continue to settle in the captured territory.
"We're kind of caught in a Catch-22 which I think we'll have a great deal of difficulty getting out," Brynen said. "I think we're stuck in years of the same at this point."
ISRAELI, PALESTINIAN TIMELINE
WWI - 2002
- World War I: British fight the Ottoman Empire for control of Palestine.
- 1917: Britain issues the Balfour Declaration, calling for a national homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.
- 917: Britain promises independence to various Arab groups in the Middle East, to gain support against the Ottomans.
- 1920: Palestine becomes a mandated territory of the United Kingdom.
- 1924-1939: Waves of Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in Europe settle in Palestine.
- 1947: United Nations divides Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state.
- May 14, 1948: Israel comes into existence.
- May 15, 1948: Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan attack Israel, starting the first Arab-Israeli war. Israel defeats the Arabs and gains much territory.
- 1949: Palestinians in Israeli territory are driven out of their homes and become refugees.
- 1956: Egypt nationalizes the Suez Canal, provoking the Suez crisis. Israeli troops fight Egypt along with the French and British.
- 1964: The Palestinian Liberation Organization is formed in Jerusalem.
- 1967: Israel defeats Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the Six-Day War. Israel captures the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank and Golan Heights.
- 1969: Yasser Arafat named PLO chairman.
- 1972: Palestinian terrorists kill 11 Israeli athletes at the Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany.
- 1973: The Yom Kippur War. Egypt and Syria attack Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.
- 1974: The UN recognizes the right of Palestinians to statehood.
- 1978: Israel and Egypt sign the Camp David Accords.
- 1982: Israel invades Lebanon in an attempt to destroy the PLO.
- 1987: Palestinian uprising known as the intefadeh begins, lasts six years.
- 1994: Israel withdraws from most of Gaza Strip and West Bank city of Jericho under the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords.
- 1995: Israel and PLO signed another agreement calling for further withdrawal from West Bank.
- 1995: Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated.
- 2000: Israeli military withdraws from southern Lebanon after 22 years of occupation.
- 2000: Peace talks at Camp David collapse.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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