In the 19th century, the population of the region was growing, for the first time in centuries. At the time, it was under the control of the Turkish Ottoman empire. The population was mostly Muslim, with a smaller population of Christians (mostly Orthodox) and a very small population of Jews.
However, in the mid 19th century, Jews who were facing anti-Semitism throughout Europe and were also becoming more proud of their Jewish identity independent of their religious beliefs started a movement called “Zionism” to support the establishment of a new Jewish community in Ottoman Palestine with the goal of eventually establishing some sort of Jewish homeland. By the late 19th century they were well organized and getting financing and started supporting emigration to Ottoman Palestine.
This wasn’t really a problem. Between 1800 and 1890 the Jewish population of the region had grown from about 7,000 to about 43,000. Even then, they were only about 8% of the population of the region, outnumbered by the native Christian community. Even as the population of Jews continued to grow, there was very little friction between the communities, even as Jews approached 15% of the population in 1914, the outbreak of World War I. They now outnumbered Christians, but were still outnumbered 5–1 by the local Muslim population.
The outbreak of the war put an end to immigration (the Jewish population fell in the next ten years even as the population of the region grew) but problems were on the horizon. In 1917, the British government, in order to get support from British Jews for the war effort, publicly promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Within a few months, the British forces displaced the Ottoman ones in the region and took de facto control of the region.
And the local Christians and Muslims let the British known in no uncertain terms that a Jewish homeland in the region was simply unacceptable. They banded together to form organizations to oppose the idea. The British formally took control of the region in 1919 as former Ottoman holdings in the region were handed over to European powers. They soon realized that any plan to establish a Jewish homeland would meet violent local resistance and pretty much dropped the idea.
However, two other developments would start to come to the fore. First, the First World War pretty much destroyed the regional economy, which was largely dependent on trade within the Ottoman empire. As a result, land values plunged and the local Muslims had no resources as many of them were employed as farm workers. That land was largely bought by Jews with access to foreign capital. A lot of these transactions were questionable as the region didn’t have a really good land registry system, and many Muslims who worked the land were displaced from it. Second, the British kept promising the Jews and the Arabs and independent state, but in typical colonial fashion, made no actual progress towards providing such a state.
The British, however, didn’t oppose further Jewish immigration, but it was still more of a trickle than a flood. From 1922 to 1931 the population of Jews grew by 89,000 (roughly doubling) but the Muslim population grew by nearly 290,000, almost 50%.
But during this period bad feelings started to rise between the two communities. There had been a riot in Neba Musi in 1920, and another in Jaffa in 1921, but these had been very small scale, although there were deaths on both sides. However, in 1929, a Jewish group demonstrated at the Western Wall and made statements such as “The Wall is Ours” - quite an inflammatory statement given that the area was also an Islamic holy site. There were small scale riots in Jerusalem, but in Hebron, with an ancient Jewish community, rumours about the incident at the wall spread quickly which lead to the massacre of nearly seventy Jews. Despite this escalation in violence, things were starting to get far, far worse.
In 1933 the Nazis had come to power in Germany, and the trickle of Jewish immigration into Palestine soon became a flood. Between 1931 and 1947 the Jewish population of the region exploded from 175,000 to 630,000, almost all of them coming in between 1933 and 1939 when Jewish immigration was suspended. In 1936, a shipment of smuggled weapons addressed to a Jewish merchant (who was cleared in the investigation) was intercepted by the British, but they weren’t able to determine who was responsible. This set off widespread fighting between Arab and Jewish populations in the region as the Arabs believed the rise in Jewish population was solely driven by Jewish plans to establish a homeland by force. Despite being the instigators of the violence, the Arabs suffered the most from it with over 5,000 deaths (compared to about 800 British and Jewish deaths) plus 15,000 Arabs being wounded, over 12,000 being detained, and over 100 being executed. Still the British authorities could not control the situation which led to another commission being formed in 1937. Once again, that commission proposed a partition of the land into Jewish and Arab areas, but the Arabs rejected the idea outright. The violence only ended when the British agreed to end Jewish immigration to the region and sales of land to Jews was curtailed. As World War II went into full gear, the two sides entered an uneasy truce.
But after the war, it was the Jews who turned violent. Jewish paramilitaries, which had been formed in 1931, started to fragment into factions which started not to attack the Arabs, but the British, including assassination of British officials. In 1946, Jewish paramilitaries bombed the British administrative headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 and injuring another 46.
Making the problem worse was the fact that there were about 250,000 Holocaust survivors who had been displaced from their homes, most of which had been sold during the war and were in use by others. Many countries, including the United States, took in a large number of them, but most of them were being crowded into camps.
The British had had enough and the United Nations took up the matter. They struck a committee which came up with another partition plan for the region, which would also leave Jerusalem as neutral territory under UN control. The partition plan passed overwhelmingly in the General Assembly, although there were several strong dissents, including one from the newly partitioned India.
But fighting between the Jewish and Arab militias only intensified after the announcement of the partition plan. The Arabs were completely opposed to it as over a third of Arabs would be living in the Jewish state and the Arab state would be split up into four parts with narrow Jewish corridors in-between. As the conflict entered 1948, Arab states covertly allowed military units into the region to assist the Arab militias. The fighting was not large scale, but it was clear the Jews were outnumbered and suffering higher casualties.
With Jerusalem under siege by the Arabs and the British having no hope, they announced they would be leaving on May 15, 1948. Although the British abstained on the UN vote, they privately realized the partition plan was unfair to the Arab population and refused to implement it. However, it was clear that their departure would leave a power vacuum in the area.
As such, by early May the Jewish administration, which was remarkably unified, was wondering what action to take in response to a demand from the United States for a cease fire in the ongoing civil war. The Jews believed they could hold on until their forces could be improved, but realized that the only advantage they had over the Arabs was unity. Unfortunately, pretty much anyone who would be an acceptable leader of the Arab movement had been executed or assassinated (often by other Arabs) but it was clear that other Arab nations would intervene. In early May the Jewish administration started to draft a declaration of independence and on May 13, after an hours long meeting, the 10 members of the provisional government who were able to meet had a vote on whether to declare independence or to accept the American cease fire offer. Independence won 6–4. On May 14, after preparing a final draft and keeping the meeting secret to avoid British interference, David Ben Gurion held a press conference at the Tel Aviv Museum to read out the declaration.
The United States recognized Israel’s independence the following day, and the Soviet Union followed a few days later, but the declaration was problematic as it didn’t claim any specific territory, instead using the UN partition plan as a starting point. With the British out of the way, several Arab nations sent in military units right after the British departure, once again putting the pressure on the new Nation of Israel an isolating them in their primary population center in the middle of the region’s Mediterranean coast.
However, poor coordination of Arab forces meant that the Israelis were able to form a beachhead on the coast around their new weapons manufacturing facilities. The number of Israeli fighting personnel started to grow both with local and imported troops. With the British out of the way, the Israelis were able to import massive amounts of weapons, mostly from Czechoslovakia, including aircraft and ships. Before long, they greatly outnumbered the Arab forces and were pushing them back into Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Jordan.
By January, it was clear that the Arab forces were outnumbered and in disarray. The Israelis controlled most of Palestine except for the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which remained in Arab hands and contained about 800,000 displaced Arabs in addition to their usual populations. Faced with the crisis and fearing further retreat, the Arabs agreed to a cease fire, although peace negotiations never occurred. To this day, Iraq and Lebanon are technically still at war with Israel (Jordan and Egypt eventually agreed to terms)
Since then, relations between Israel, it’s neighbours, and the displaced Arab population (and their descendants) have been tense. Jordan represented the interests of Palestinian Arabs until 1964, when the Arab League formed the Palestinian Liberation Organization. After the Six Day War in 1967, when Arab states once again tried to seize the territory, Israel wound up occupying the West Bank and Gaza, which to that point had been administered by Jordan and Egypt respectively. The situation was not changed by the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Since then, Arab and Islamic support for Palestinians has been more covert, including support of terrorist activity. However, it’s unlikely any Arab state would try to attack Israel at this point. Still, there has been constant tension and violence between Israelis and Palestinians that has ranged from widespread revolt in occupied territories to paramilitary attacks such as the one in October 2023.
There was hope in 1993 when covert Israeli diplomats who had tacit government support but were technically committing treason met with PLO representatives in Oslo. At that time, it looked like the two sides could work out their differences and move towards two separate states. However, a later change of government in Israel largely derailed that process and subsequent talks have largely been unproductive. This allowed the PLO supported Fatah to largely be replaced by Hamas. As part of Oslo, the PLO agreed to recognize Israel’s right to exist, but Hamas definitely goes the other way and due largely to Fatah’s failures to promote Palestinian causes, plus a heavy dose of corruption, is popular with the Palestinian people despite an anti-democracy streak.
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