Hamas' unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7 prompted massive retaliation from Tel Aviv, plunging the Middle East into a new spiral of violence and instability, showing that the conflict in this "hot spot" remains the most complex, persistent, and difficult-to-resolve problem in the world.
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| Parties signing the Oslo Accords at the White House (USA) in 1993. (Source: History.com) |
Against the flow of history
From the 11th century BC, the ancient Jewish state was born in the land of Palestine. By the 8th century BC, the Jewish states were destroyed, Palestine was successively under the rule of the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire, and the Roman Empire for many centuries after that, before the Arab Muslims conquered this area.
Palestine became part of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-16th century. With the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, Jewish immigration to Palestine began in the early 1880s. Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Palestine became a British Mandate in 1918. In the early 1920s in Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, leader of the Arab nationalist movement in Palestine, launched anti-Semitic riots that forced Jews to flee the Gaza Strip.
At the outbreak of World War II, Jews and Arabs temporarily cooperated with the Allies. However, some radical Arab nationalists such as al-Husseini tended to cooperate with the Nazis and continued the anti-Semitism movement in the Arab world. At the end of World War II, a new wave of immigration to Palestine by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Europe caused the conflict between the two sides to flare up again. By 1947, Jews made up 33% of the population but owned only 6% of the Palestinian territory.
On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly (UN) passed Resolution 181, which partitioned the land of Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state, while the holy city of Jerusalem was placed under international administration. The Jews happily accepted the plan, but the Arabs strongly opposed it because 56% of the land of Palestine would be given to the Jewish state, including most of the fertile coastal area, while the Arabs owned 94% of Palestine and 67% of its population.
On May 14, 1948, the Jews officially declared the establishment of the state of Israel and it was recognized by both superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, in less than an hour. Not accepting this reality, Arab countries attacked Israel, leading to the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948. By 1949, a ceasefire agreement was signed, but most of the territories in Palestine that were allocated to the Arabs under Resolution 181 had been annexed by Israel, while Jordan annexed the West Bank and Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip. Israel also annexed West Jerusalem, while East Jerusalem was temporarily placed under Jordanian control. Having lost all its territory, a huge wave of Arab migration from Palestine to neighboring countries erupted.
In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded by Yasser Arafat, and the Fatah political party was founded the following year. In 1967, Arab countries began planning a second attack on Israel. In response, Israel launched a preemptive attack on three Arab countries: Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, leading to the outbreak of the Six-Day War. Israel again won, conquering the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula.
After the Six-Day War, the PLO fled to Jordan, where it received support from King Hussein. In 1970, the PLO unexpectedly turned against the King of Jordan in the “Black September” incident, then moved to South Lebanon, where it established a base to continue its attacks on Israel. In October 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel again in the October War, during the Jewish holy holiday of Yom Kippur. However, Israel was victorious once again. Israel later returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt under the 1978 Camp David Peace Accords.
However, hopes for peace in the region were dashed by a series of attacks by the PLO and Palestinian militant groups. In 1982, Israel responded by launching a full-scale attack on Lebanon. Palestinian militant groups were defeated within weeks. The PLO headquarters were evacuated to Tunisia in June 1982 by order of PLO leader Yasser Arafat.
Massive Holy War
The Palestinian Intifada (simultaneous holy war) began in 1987, leading to the establishment of Hamas, a force that advocated armed struggle, unlike the PLO and Fatah, which were more diplomatic and political. In 1988, the Arab League recognized the PLO as the sole representative of Palestine, creating conflicts between Palestinian forces.
In the early 1990s, international efforts to resolve the conflict intensified. On September 13, 1993, the Oslo I Accords were signed by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat, witnessed by US President Bill Clinton, allowing the PLO to leave Tunisia and establish a Palestinian national government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. However, this peace process faced significant opposition from Palestinian Islamist groups, notably Hamas and Fatah.
In September 1995, a new interim agreement (the Oslo II Accords) was signed in Washington on expanding autonomy in the West Bank. However, on November 4, 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist. In 2004, President Arafat died, causing the seemingly rekindled Middle East peace process to fall into a deadlock.
After years of unsuccessful negotiations, the Second Intifada broke out in September 2000, sparked by Israeli Likud opposition leader Ariel Sharon's "provocative" visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque with thousands of security forces deployed in and around the Old City of Jerusalem. The violence escalated into an open conflict between the Palestinian National Security Forces and the Israel Defense Forces, which lasted throughout 2004-2005. During this time, Israel continued to retake areas administered by the Palestinian Authority and began building a wall separating the Gaza Strip from Israeli territory and building settlements in the West Bank. By June 2007, Israel began imposing a land, air, and sea blockade on the Gaza Strip. In February 2009, a ceasefire was signed with the participation of the international community, although sporadic fighting between the two sides continues.
| The land of Palestine, with its Holy City of Jerusalem, is of special importance to all three religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Jerusalem is Judaism's holiest city, the former site of the Jewish Temple and the capital of the ancient kingdom of Israel. For Christians, Jerusalem is the site of Jesus' execution and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. For Muslims, Jerusalem is the site where the Prophet Mohammad made his "night journey to paradise" and where the al-Aqsa Mosque was founded. |
History repeats itself
On November 29, 2012, UN General Assembly Resolution 67/19 was adopted, upgrading Palestine to the status of “non-member observer state” at the UN. The change in status was described as de facto recognition of Palestinian statehood. However, the conflict between Palestine and Israel has continued to flare up. In the summer of 2014, Hamas fired nearly 3,000 rockets at Israel, and Tel Aviv retaliated with a major offensive in Gaza. The fighting ended in late August 2014 with an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire.
Following a wave of violence between Israelis and Palestinians in 2015, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared that Palestinians would no longer be bound by the territorial division of the Oslo Accords. In May 2018, fighting broke out again between Hamas and Israel. Hamas fired 100 rockets from Gaza into Israel. Israel responded by attacking more than 50 targets in Gaza over the course of 24 hours.
In 2018, President Donald J. Trump moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, reversing longstanding US policy on the Palestinian issue. The Trump administration’s decision further fractured the Middle East despite the applause of Israel and some of its allies. In August and September 2020, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and then Bahrain agreed to normalize relations with Israel, and Saudi Arabia is considering normalizing relations with Tel Aviv. Egypt and Jordan had previously normalized relations with Israel in 1979 and 1994, respectively.
The trend of normalization between Muslim countries and Israel is supported by the US and many Western countries, but Palestinian forces and some countries have rejected these agreements. On October 7, Hamas launched thousands of rockets into Israeli territory, causing hundreds of casualties. Israel announced fierce retaliation, causing a new conflict between Palestine and Israel to break out and spread. The painful and unstable history in the "fire pit" of the Middle East is repeating itself.
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