This excerpt from Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer is posted here with permission of Phyllis Bennis and Interlink Publishing. This is from the 2012 edition. A new edition of the book is in process.
Who are the Palestinians? Where did they come from?
Palestinian Arabs are descendants of the indigenous people of Palestine, who lived under the vast Arab/Islamic empire that from the seventh century dominated Palestine, during the rise of the Arabic language and Arab/IsIamic culture. While the majority of Palestinians were peasants, Palestinian cities, especially Jerusalem, were hubs of Arab civilization, where scholars, poets, and scientists congregated and where, enriched by a constant influx of traders, they forged the city’s identity as an important national center. Islam’s religious and moral teachings remained the dominant social forces, but small indigenous Jewish communities remained as integral parts of the Palestinian community. They were the remnants of Palestine’s ancient Jewish kingdom, which was conquered by Rome in 70 CE, its people largely scattered. Along with groups of Christians, those Palestinian Jews maintained their faith and separate communal identities within broader Palestinian society throughout the rise of Islam.
Throughout the years of the Arab and then Ottoman empires in what is now the Arab world, there were no nation-states; instead the political demography was shaped by cities and regions. As in most parts of the Arab world, modern national consciousness for Palestinians grew in the context of demographic changes and shifts in colonial control. During the 400 years of Ottoman Turkish control, Palestine was a distinct and identifiable region within the larger empire, but linked closely with the region then known as Greater Syria. With World War I and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, Palestine became part of the British Empire. But even before that, beginning in the 1880s, the increasing influx of European Jewish settlers brought about a new national identity — a distinctly Palestinian consciousness — among the Muslims and Christians who were the overwhelming majority of Palestinian society. The indigenous Palestinians — Muslims and Christians — fought the colonial ambitions of European Jewish settlers, British colonial rule during the interwar period, and the Israeli occupation since 1948 and 1967.
Who are the Israelis? Where did they come from?
Israel defines itself as a state of and for the Jewish people, and about 80 percent of the population are Jews. It is, however, a country of immigrants, and unlike the indigenous Palestinian Israelis, the vast majority of Jewish Israelis (or their ancestors) have come to Israel from all over the world in the last 120 years, but mostly since 1948. The tiny indigenous and intensely orthodox Jewish communities in places like Safed and Jerusalem have largely remained separate from the mainstream or even the “regular” ultra-orthodox Israeli Jewish population.
The Israeli Jewish community is roughly divided into Ashkenazi, or European, Jews — of whom about one-fifth are Russians who arrived in the 1990s — and Mizrachi Jews. The Mizrachim constitute a wide-ranging category, usually including Jews from Africa and Asia as well as Spain and Latin America. But the majority of the Mizrachim are Arab — they or their forebears emigrated to Israel from Morocco, Yemen, Syria, Egypt, or other Arab countries or Turkish, Persian, Kurdish, or from elsewhere in the Middle East. Historically there has been significant tension within Israel between Jews of European descent and those whose ancestors come from the Arab world, since Israeli society is heavily racialized and has tended to privilege the Europeans. About nineteen percent of Israeli citizens are Muslim or Christian Palestinian Arabs.
It was European and Russian Jews, back in the 1880s, who first began significant Jewish immigration to what was then Ottoman Turkish- and later British-ruled Palestine.They came fleeing persecution and violent pogroms, or communal attacks, in czarist Russia and eastern Europe, and they came in answer to mobilizations organized by a movement known as Zionism, which called for all Jews to leave their countries of origin to live in a Jewish state they wanted to create in Palestine. The use of Hebrew, recreated as a modern language in the late 1800s, an orientation toward and identification with Europe and the U.S. rather than the neighboring Middle Eastern countries, and nearly universal military service (excepting only Arabs and ultra-orthodox Jews) became the central anchors around which national consciousness was built.
Israel defines itself as a state of the entire Jewish people, wherever they live, not simply a state for its own citizens. It encourages Jewish immigration through what is known as the Law of Return, under which any Jew born anywhere in the world, with or without pre-existing ties to Israel, has the official right to claim immediate Citizenship upon arrival in Israel, and the right to all the privileges of being Jewish in a Jewish state including state-financed language classes, housing, job placement, medical and welfare benefits, etc. Only Jews automatically have the right to immigrate to Israel; the indigenous Palestinians and their descendants, including those expelled from their homeland in 1947–1948 and 1967, are denied that right, despite the guarantees of UN Resolution 194 (institutionalizing the Palestinian right of return) and those of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.
What is Hamas?
Hamas is a Palestinian Islamist and nationalist organization. It believes in a form of political Islam in which religion forms the basis for social and political strategy. Its origins are in the Muslim Brotherhood, a pan-Arab Islamist organization based in Egypt. Hamas was created in Gaza in December 1987, immediately following the eruption of the first Palestinian intifada. In the first years of its existence, Israel allowed Hamas to gain popularity without any of the repression and obstacles it imposed on the secular PLO. In fact, Israeli strategists viewed Hamas as a potential competitor with the PLO for Palestinian loyalty, and believed the Islamist organization would be less of a serious challenge to Israel than the nationalist PLO. Although the PLO is itself a coalition of organizations, Hamas was never a member of the PLO.
Throughout its years, Hamas’s activities have always been far broader than those of its well-known military wing. Especially in Gaza, always the poorest part of Palestine, Hamas created a widespread network of social welfare agencies, including schools, clinics, hospitals, mosques, and more. During the years of the first intifada (1987–1993), as well as the years of the Oslo process and the Palestinian Authority (from 1993 on), Hamas provided many of the basic services that Israel as the occupying power refused to provide, and that the PA, lacking real power and facing both poverty and problems of corruption, could not. As a result, Hamas’s popularity grew.
Hamas’s first suicide bombing was in 1993, and for many in Israel and internationally, that method of attack came to characterize the organization. Some of the attacks were against Israeli soldiers in the occupied territories — acts of military resistance authorized under international law — but others targeted civilians inside Israel itself, in violation of international law. Hamas declared a unilateral cease-fire in March 2005, which it maintained until June 2006, when it announced its intention to break the cease-fire in response to a continuing and then escalating set of Israeli attacks. Of particular relevance in the Hamas decision was the Israeli attack just days before on a Gaza beach that killed nine Palestinians, seven of them from one family, including five children. The end of the ceasefire led to Hamas’s attack on an Israeli military patrol just over the Gaza border, culminating in the capture of one Israeli soldier.
Israel has targeted many Hamas leaders for assassination, including Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the paralyzed and wheelchair-bound founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, who was killed by an Israeli missile in Gaza in March 2004. His position was taken over by Abdel Aziz Rantisi, who was killed by Israel a month later. Rantisi, a Gaza physician, was among the 400 Hamas activists kidnapped by Israel and expelled to Lebanon in the early 1990s. Returned to Gaza in a prisoner exchange, Rantisi was assassinated by a “targeted” Israeli missile strike in Gaza. In another ostensibly “targeted” assassination, this time of Hamas leader Salah Shihadeh, fourteen other people, nine of them children, were killed by the Israeli military air strike. State Department officials reportedly attempted to warn then Secretary of State Colin Powell about Israel possibly violating the U.S. Arms Export Control Act through its use of U.S.-provided weapons in the assassination. But according to US News and World Report, then Undersecretary of State and later U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton prevented the warning from being passed on to Powell.
International observers, including U.S. government officials and mainstream media, often misrepresented Hamas’s political stance, which changed in response to political developments over the years. For years, Hamas had rejected a two-state solution, holding out for what it called an Islamic state in all of historic Palestine. But the Palestinian majority that elected Hamas in January 2006 included many who did not endorse that program. And in the midst of the summer 2006 Israeli attacks on Gaza, Hamas leader and Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh wrote in the Washington Post that the Gaza crisis was part of a “wider national conflict that can be resolved only by addressing the lull dimensions of Palestinian national rights in an integrated manner. This means statehood for the West Bank and Gaza, a capital in Arab East Jerusalem, and resolving the 1948 Palestinian refugee issue fairly, on the basis of international legitimacy and established law.” That carefully articulated set of Palestinian goals — clearly “moderate” even by U.S. and European standards — matched closely what Haniyeh called Palestinian “priorities.” Those included “recognition of the core dispute over the land of historical Palestine and the rights of all its people; resolution of the refugee issue from 1948; reclaiming all lands occupied in 1967; and stopping Israeli attacks, assassinations and military expansion.” It was significant that the Hamas leader, often accused of calling for “the destruction of Israel,” actually distinguished between the need to “recognize” all the lost lands and rights of pre-1948 historical Palestine and the need for Palestinians to “reclaim” only those lands occupied in 1967.
Why did the Palestinians choose Hamas in the January 2006 elections?
The January 2006 Palestinian elections were an imperfect exercise in democracy, since they were inevitably held under conditions of military occupation. However, it is clear that the results represented a reasonably accurate assessment of public opinion. International observers, including former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, representing the U.S.-based Carter Center, called the election “peaceful, competitive, and genuinely democratic.”
There are strong indications that huge turn-out for Hamas was not really a statement of support for an lslamist social agenda or for their prior military attacks (Hamas had initiated and maintained its own unilateral cease-fire from early 2005). Rather, it was a call for change in the Palestinians’ untenable situation, rejecting the status quo. In his report immediately after the election, Carter recognized that “Fatah, the party of Arafat and Abbas, has become vulnerable because of its political ineffectiveness and alleged corruption.” At the time, many Palestinians said that they could have accepted the existing leadership even with its corruption, if only Fatah had any success in ending the occupation, and could have accepted its political failures if only it were not so corrupt. But the combination of corruption and failure was simply too much, and Hamas reaped the electoral results.
Israeli leaders immediately responded with claims that they now had “no partner for peace,” stated that they would not negotiate with a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, and called for an international boycott of the new government. But those claims were a red herring — Israel had not been negotiating with the existing (Fatah-led, non-Hamas) Palestinian Authority for more than two years, having chosen instead a strategy of unilateral action to redraw borders and impose an Israeli “solution” to the conflict.
The U.S., having already accepted the unilateral, no-negotiations approach of then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, including Israel’s abandonment of the U.S.-backed “road map,” also promoted the Israeli call for an international boycott and sanctions against the Palestinians. And it was U.S. pressure on Europe, Arab states, and many other U.S. allies to accept the boycott that was largely responsible for the humanitarian crisis that soon hit the occupied territories,
especially Gaza. For example, when some Arab banks announced plans to transmit humanitarian assistance donated to beleaguered Palestinians, the U.S. announced that the U.S. branches of those banks would face serious sanctions. Not surprisingly, the banks withdrew their plans, and the Palestinians did not get the funds.
The result was a dramatic rise in the already dangerous humanitarian crisis. In a rare joint statement in July 2006, UN agencies stated that they were “alarmed by developments on the ground, which have seen innocent civilians, including children, killed, brought increased misery to hundreds of thousands of people, and which will wreak far-reaching harm on Palestinian society. An already alarming situation in Gaza, with poverty rates at nearly eighty percent and unemployment at nearly forty percent, is likely to deteriorate rapidly, unless immediate and urgent action is taken.” The UN’s overall coordinating body, OCHA (Office for Coordinating Humanitarian Assistance), called on Israel to allow UN deliveries of emergency supplies, but recognized that “humanitarian assistance is not enough to prevent suffering. With the [Israeli] bombing of the [Gaza] electric plant, the lives of 1.4 million people, almost half of them children, worsened overnight. The Government of Israel should repair the damage done to the power station. Obligations under international humanitarian law, applying to both parties, include preventing harm to civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure and also refraining from collective measures, intimidation and reprisals. Civilians are disproportionately paying the price of this conflict.”
Doesn’t Israel have the right to defend itself against Hamas in Gaza, as well as against Hezbollah in Lebanon?
Every country has the right to defend itself and its citizens against attack. But no country has the right to violate international law against others in the name of its own self-defense. Israel claims its right of self-defense includes the “right” to attack much of Gaza’s infrastructure — starting with Gaza’s only power-generating plant — and to kill scores of Gaza civilians, because Hamas captured an Israeli soldier. But according to international law, there is no justification for Israel’s assault in Gaza.
The war that Israel launched against Gaza in June 2006 and against Lebanon weeks later began when Israel chose to escalate border skirmishes to full-scale wars against civilian populations. Hamas attacked a military post just over the Gaza border — an act of resistance to occupation considered legal under international law since it was against a military, not civilian target. Similarly, Hezbollah’s July 12 raid across the Israeli border may have violated the 1949 armistice agreement between the newly created state of Israel and Lebanon (there was never a peace treaty between them), but the raid was limited to a military target.
As Human Rights Watch described it, “the targeting and capture of enemy soldiers is allowed under international humanitarian law.” In both cases Israel responded first with cross-border raids of their own to try to get its captured soldiers back, legal under international law. But, it was Israel that then took the step of escalating from a small scale border skirmish into full-scale war — by immediately launching major attacks against civilian targets. Israel destroyed the only power plant in Gaza, plunging 800,000 Gaza residents into months of hot, thirsty darkness at the height of the desert summer. In Lebanon, Israel began by attacking key bridges linking towns in southern Lebanon and destroying the international airport, before escalating further to full-scale assaults on the total infrastructure and civilian population of southern Lebanon, and much of Beirut and the rest of the country.
It must be stated unequivocally that this was a war against civilians — there was nothing “collateral” about the violence. Israel was responsible for this war. During the initial clashes on Israel’s borders with both Gaza and Lebanon, the only Israelis killed or captured were soldiers; no civilians were targeted or harmed until Israel chose to transform those military border skirmishes into wars aimed directly at Gaza’s and Lebanon’s civilian populations. Hezbollah violated international law as well, with its indiscriminate rocket attacks against targets in Israeli cities, but it did not begin those attacks until 36 hours after Israel’s assault against civilians began, and only after announcing publicly its desire to negotiate prisoner exchange. Given the human devastation of the predictable Israeli response, Hezbollah’s initial raid may have been what French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy called an “irresponsible act,” but that was far different from Israel’s brutal response, which was, he said, “a disproportionate act of war.” The Israeli attacks stood in stark violation of numerous Geneva Convention prohibitions: against collective punishment, against targeting civilians, against destruction of civilian infrastructure, and more. The attacks constituted war crimes.
Explanations in the media and elsewhere disagree about which party is responsible for the conflict because analysts choose to begin their chronologies at different points. In the U.S. media, most mainstream outlets and commentators claimed the summer 2006 war began when Hamas captured an Israeli soldier. But that act cannot be arbitrarily separated from the immediate spark of Israel’s attack on a Gaza beach a week earlier, which led to Hamas calling off its sixteen-month-long unilateral cease-fire. It could not be separated from the reality of a decades-old illegal Israeli occupation of Gaza that began in 1967 — let alone from the economic isolation, closures, and military attacks that had escalated through that spring. As Gideon Levy wrote in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Israelis and most Americans always start with the assumption that the Palestinians started it. “‘They started’ will be the routine response to anyone who tries to argue, for example, that a few hours before the first Qassam [rocket] fell on the school in Ashkelon [a city inside Israel], causing no damage, Israel sowed destruction at the Islamic University in Gaza. Israel is causing electricity blackouts, laying sieges, bombing and shelling, assassinating and imprisoning, killing and wounding civilians, including children and babies, in horrifying numbers, but ‘they started.”
And the crisis built on the existing humanitarian crisis underway in Gaza, a result of U.S. and Israeli-orchestrated international sanctions against the Palestinians that began with the January election of the Hamas-led parliament. That collective punishment represented a clear violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which deals with the protection of occupied populations. Article 33 states, “No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.” In Article 36 the “taking of hostages is prohibited.” That meant the Israeli arrests of about one-third of the elected Palestinian Legislative Assembly and about one-half of the Palestinian Authority’s cabinet ministers, whom Israel kidnapped largely to serve as bargaining chips, were illegal.
What is Zionism? Do all Jews support Zionism?
Zionism is a political movement that calls for the creation of a specifically Jewish state. When the movement began in the late 1880s, anti-Semitism was a powerful and growing force in Russia and Europe. Most Jews at that time believed that the best way to stop anti-Semitism was either through some kind of assimilation, or through alliances with other political movements. But a small number of Jews believed that anti-Semitism was a permanent feature of national and world politics, and that the only way for Jews to be safe would be for them to leave their home countries and establish a Jewish state elsewhere.
Early Zionist leaders believed that a Jewish state could be established anywhere (Uganda, Argentina, and Turkey were all considered at different times); it was a thoroughly secular movement. But the founder of the modern Zionist movement,Theodore Herzl, recognized that linking Zionism to Palestine would gain wider support for the movement among Jews, including more religious elements in the Jewish community who had not been early supporters. Herzl also believed that a Jewish state could only be created with the support of a colonial sponsor, and he traveled the imperial capitals of the world seeking a patron.
Many Jews opposed Zionism. The ultra-orthodox Jews in Palestine believed that only God could deliver a state to the Jewish people, and that a human-based effort was against God’s will. Many Jews facing anti-Semitic attacks rejected Zionism’s call for them to leave their homelands, seeing that position as reflecting the same demand to “get out of our country” of the anti-Semites themselves.
The Zionist movement won strong support from the British when London took control of Palestine with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. In I917, the Balfour Declaration stated that “His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” In the stroke of a pen the vast majority of the population of Palestine was reduced to the “non-Jewish community.”
Zionism gradually gained more adherents, though slowly. It was only in the 1930s and ’40s, as German, Polish, and other European Jews frantically sought to escape Hitler and their first-choice countries of refuge, the U.S. and Britain, denied them entry, that Zionism and the call to create a Jewish state in Palestine became a more popular view among Jews. After World War ll, with desperate Holocaust survivors filling displaced persons camps across Europe, Zionism became the majority position.
The Zionist slogan was that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Certainly the second part was true — the European Jews who had escaped or survived the Holocaust had lost everything — their homes, their families, their countries, their land. Turned away from the U.S. because of anti-Semitism, and encouraged to go to Palestine instead, it was not surprising that thousands flocked to join Jewish communities there. But the first part of the slogan hid the reality — for Palestine was not a land without a people. Its indigenous people had been there all along.
With the creation of the State of Israel, the organizations of the Zionist movement such as the Jewish Agency became adjuncts of the state apparatus, focusing on recruiting and settling Jews from all over the world in Israel.
Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. She writes and speaks widely on U.S. wars and foreign policy and is the author of numerous books including, Understanding ISIS and The New Global War on Terror and Before & After: U.S. Foreign Policy and the War on Terror. She plays a leading role in U.S. and global movements against wars and occupation.
Watch Bennis’s numerous interviews on Democracy Now! here.
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