The Historical Roots of the Israel-Palestine Conflict

On 7 October 2023, the Hamas quasi-government of Gaza, perpetrated a massacre in Southern Israel.  Hamas militants surged across the border in a coordinated assault, overwhelming local Israeli garrisons. Men, women, and children were indiscriminately butchered. Reporting indicates that Hamas took approximately 240 Israeli hostages, and Hamas has been using negotiations to incrementally release hostages under the framework of a ceasefire–an attempt to control the tempo and timing of Israel’s counter-offensive in Gaza.

The return of the Jews to their ancestral home is often cast as a reparation from a guilty world for the horrors of the Holocaust that came at the expense of Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants. Political support for Zionism (the global return of Jews to their ancestral homeland) began in the well-meaning minds of British Prime Minister Lloyd George’s Cabinet during the Great War (World War I). George’s Cabinet observed that the Jews were frequently treated as an other—an outsider caste—all across Europe. It was difficult to fully integrate the Jews into the mainstream cultures of the continent, because they had their own religion and customs. The proposed solution was to give them a home of their own in the Holy Lands of the withering Ottoman Empire.

In the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the United Kingdom announced its intention to work with Jewish communities for the establishment of a “National home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of the Great War, France and Britain signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement which carved up former Ottoman territories between them. The League of Nations soon recognized this agreement and issued a mandate for French and Anglo administration of the Middle East. The UK would administrate Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq, as well as the port cities of Acre and Haifa. The French would administrate Southern Turkey, Lebanon, Kurdistan (Northern Iraq), and Syria.

While much of the Jewish diaspora emigrated to Palestine with the help of European governments, there were already many Jews still inhabiting Palestine – descendants from the ancient Kingdom of Israel. In fact, the Jews constituted an ethnic majority in the Holy City of Jerusalem.

The region’s Arab Muslims, who eventually became known as Palestinians, were largely Bedouin nomadic tribesmen (the inhabitants of Gaza City and Jerusalem were notable exceptions). They migrated freely between Iraq, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Sinai, and Arabia. It was the influx of European agricultural techniques, and especially the rediscovery of ancient regional water resources by agronomist Aaron Aaronsohn that enabled the Palestinian peoples to settle, urbanize, and grow in numbers.

In 1890, prior to the arrival of any Jewish immigrants or the Zionist Movement, there were only approximately 432,000 Arab Muslims living in all of Palestine. By the end of the British Mandate in 1947, the Arab Muslim population had grown to approximately 1,180,000 (the Ottomans, British, and Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics do not significantly differ in their census statistics). By 2000, the number had grown to 3,891,000. The CIA World Factbook currently estimates that 2.16 million Arabs live in the West Bank, 1.84 million Arabs live in Israel, and 1.79 million Arabs live in the Gaza Strip—totaling 5.79 million (does not include Palestinians living abroad).

Missed Opportunities for Peace

Israel has negotiated in good faith for a two-state solution on several occasions, and on each occasion the Palestinians (often goaded by the Arab states around them) have walked away from the table.

Following the 1936 Arab Revolt, London attempted to broker a deal where the Arab Muslim Palestinians would receive 80% of the disputed land and the Jews 20%. Jerusalem would remain under British administration. The Jews accepted the deal, but the Palestinians did not.