The first true empire in world history emerged in the 24th century BCE, when a dynasty of Semitic rulers conquered all of Upper Mesopotamia, including Asia Minor and southeastern Arabia, dubbing itself the Akkadian Empire. Substantial urban development led to the construction of several famed Biblical towns, and the predominantly Canaanite population spoke a language from which Biblical Hebrew evolved. Unsurprisingly, such a volume of early religious activity would set the stage for conflict across the ages.
An important trade route between Egypt and Mesopotamia spanned the territory that makes up modern-day Israel and was periodically conquered by both civilizations, as well as by the chariot-racing Hyksos and Hittite forerunners of the Iron Age. This area’s recorded history begins in the same book as Christianity’s, with the story of Abraham, the first of the Patriarchs. The Semitic-speaking people linked with him may have been the ancestors of the Hebrews , those who would eventually lay claim to the kingdom of Israel and Judah and rebrand themselves the Israelites.
Some scholarship suggests that the Hebrews are related in some way to the semi-nomadic Apiru people. Whether or not the Apiru became the Israelites remains a mystery, however. Some theorize that the Israelites were these highlanders who united, Braveheart-style, in opposition to the urban, valley-dwelling Canaanite traders. Others believe that the Israelites were forced from the coast by invading “sea peoples” (later known as the Philistines, perhaps a jab at all the arts scholarship they missed while at sea).
The next two centuries are known as the Period of the Judges. Local leaders, Gideon and Samuel among them, united the Israelite tribes under a new god, Yahweh, to fight off the encroaching Egyptians, Canaanites, and Philistines. Despite their efforts, the Philistines triumphed in 1200 BCE, likely as a result of a monopoly on iron technology. The Philistines left behind two lasting contributions: expertise in iron work and an infiltration of Semitic language that led to a new name for the country—Palestine, derived from the root word Philistia. Possibly inspired by the arrival of Semitic brethren from Egypt (the Exodus), the Israelites founded their own kingdom under Saul at the end of the 11th century BCE, around the same time as his successor, David, asymmetrically felled Goliath.
The Israelite kingdom reached its peak during the reign of Saul’s successor David, and that of David’s son, Solomon. The construction of the Temple of Jerusalem is considered Solomon’s most formidable feat (only more so considering it is the “footstool” of God’s presence in the world). After Solomon’s death in 922 BCE, social and political unrest split the empire into the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south.
The Assyrians conquered Israel in the late eighth century BCE. The ten tribes of northern Israel were taken into captivity and never returned, hence their moniker: the Ten Lost Tribes. Judah became a vassal state of the Assyrian empire until the Assyrians themselves were crushed by the Babylonians. The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II conquered Judah, razed the Temple, burned Jerusalem, and deported many Jews to Mesopotamia (the Babylonian Captivity or Exile) in 587 BCE. When the Persians defeated Nebuchadnezzar II’s successor some 50 years later, King Cyrus the Great permitted the Jews to return to Jerusalem and build the Second Temple (completed in 515 BCE). Though small, this new Jewish community was revived by the Jewish governor Nehemiah and by the Babylonian Jew Ezra.
The Israelites prospered intellectually and economically under the Persians, until Alexander the Great conquered the region in 332 BCE. The Syrian-based Seleucids displaced his heirs in 198 BCE and attempted to Hellenize the Jews. Judah Maccabee led a revolt of the Jewish lower classes, now commemorated by Hanukkah. Victorious, the Maccabees re-sanctified the Temple in 164 BCE and founded the Hasmonean Dynasty, emboldening a lasting spirit of Jewish nationalism.
The Nabateans, originally a nomadic Arab tribe, moved into the area south of the Dead Sea around the second century BCE. They emerged as an independent kingdom by about 169 BCE. They took control of at least a part of the Red Sea trade route, which became an important source of income. With Petra (in modern Jordan) as its capital, the Nabatean kingdom continued to flourish. In 106 CE, the Roman emperor Trajan was finally able to conquer Petra. He abolished the kingdom and reorganized its territories into a Roman province named Arabia.
In 63 BCE, the Roman general Pompey swept in and secured much of modern-day Israel for Rome; it was ruled via the Herodian Dynasty, including, infamously, Herod the Great (not all that great, actually—he murdered his own family and a number of rabbis). In 70 CE, however, the Roman general Titus burned Herod’s Temple with the rest of Jerusalem. The destruction led to dramatic upheaval among the Jewish people. Three years later, the Romans captured the last Jewish stronghold at Masada, ending the First Jewish-Roman War. The Romans exiled the majority of Jerusalem’s population, dispersing the exiles throughout the empire.
Jewish hopes for liberation from Roman rule were raised again when an uprising, headed by Simon Bar Kokhba, broke out in 123 CE. Although the Jews made some headway, Roman troops pushed them back to their fortress in Judea, which fell in 135 CE. In the wake of the revolt, many towns and villages in Judea were razed. Perhaps to obliterate the land’s connection with the Jews, Emperor Hadrian bestowed on the territory the name Syria/Palestine, after the name passed down by the Philistines.
With the division of the empire into Latin West and Byzantine East in 395 CE, Palestine came under the supervision of Constantinople. Although little changed administratively, the earlier adoption of Christianity by Emperor Constantine in 325 CE generated new interest in what to many was the “Holy Land.” Led by pilgrim St. Eleni (Constantine’s mother), worshippers built churches and endowed monasteries and schools as opposed to razing temples as their predecessors had done.
After the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 CE (see Islam), Bedouin armies, inspired by Islam and the prospect of substantial booty, ventured outside their traditional strongholds in central Arabia. By 642, they had conquered Mesopotamia, Palestine, Syria, Persia, and Egypt.
Muhammad’s death gave rise to political confusion, as he had designated no successor. Amid vigorous debate as to whether the successor had to be a blood relative, Abu Bakr was chosen as the first successor ( khalifa, or caliph). The choice of his descendant Ali as the third successor incited a civil war and produced a lasting schism in Islam between the Sunni (the “orthodox,” who believed that the caliph should be chosen by the community of believers), and the Shi’a (who supported Ali’s claim and believed that the caliph should be a direct descendant of the prophet).
The advent of the Umayyad Dynasty, founded in 661, installed a Sunni hereditary caliphate (unrelated to the Prophet). Eighty years later, the Islamic world stretched from Narbonne to Samarkand. By 750, when the ‘Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads, the majority of the peasantry had converted to Islam. A mammoth bureaucracy, composed of everything from tax officials to scribes to Islamic jurists (ulama) , helped run the empire.
The Shi’a Fatimids, attacking eastward from their domain in Tunisia, expelled the ‘Abbasids from Egypt in 969. By 977, the Fatimids had captured most of Palestine and controlled Jerusalem. It was the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim who broke the long-established trend of Muslim toleration of other faiths and destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Europe’s internal violence and rumors of Seljuk Muslim policies regarding the treatment of Christian pilgrims prompted western Europeans to launch a series of Crusades to recapture the Holy Land, an attempt to glorify God not only by reclaiming Israel but also by sending many of their compatriots to meet him. Impelled by desires for land, power, and heavenly reward, the Crusaders wreaked havoc on Israel. Massacring the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem in 1099, the Crusaders established a feudal kingdom under Godfrey I and then Baldwin I.
The success of the first Crusaders was short-lived, however. The members of the second and third Crusades were staved off by the leadership of Salah al-Din (a Kurd), founder of the short-lived Ayyubid Dynasty (1171-1250). Salah al-Din dethroned the Fatimids in 1192 with an army of Turkish slaves (Mamluks). One by one, the Crusader States eventually fell.
Salah al-Din’s slave armies became a problem for his successors. While their arms were under his authority, the Mamluks were technically the property of the sultan. In 1250, Izz al-Din, a Mamluk of the Bahri clan, resolved to rule the sultanate directly. By 1291, Mamluks controlled all of the former Crusader outposts. Slave had indeed become master.
When the Ottoman Empire, a formidable Turkish empire founded in 1299, gained formal sovereignty over Palestine and Egypt in the early part of the 16th century, the Mamluks still retained most of their political power as a vassal state. Through appointments, bribery, and assassination, however, the Ottoman sultans garnered real control. With military innovations, including Jannisary and Sipahi corps who were armed with gunpowder weapons, the Ottoman Empire thrived and expanded.
When the gates of Vienna stood firm against Ottoman armies in 1683, however, the Ottomans began to worry about the fate of their increasingly decrepit empire. The ports of Palestine, Syria, and Egypt had once provided the sole access to the East; now, sailors steered their way around the Horn of Africa. The Spanish discovery of the New World created opportunities for major economic expansion that left the Ottomans out. The once-formidable empire became “the sick man of Europe,” and it became increasingly clear that another power would eventually fill the Ottoman vacuum.
Although small Jewish communities were present in Palestine over the 18 centuries following the Roman exile, the vast majority of the world’s Jews existed in diaspora communities throughout Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and, more recently, the Americas. Throughout this period, many Jews maintained the hope of someday returning to the ancient homeland. This ideal began gaining practical momentum in the late 19th century, when Theodor Herzl, a Jewish Austrian journalist, founded Zionism as an international political movement devoted to creating a Jewish state in Palestine. Herzl stated that the creation of such a homeland was a necessary response to the persecution Jews faced across the Diaspora. The movement began to act in earnest in 1897, when the First Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Switzerland. Herzl and the leaders of political Zionism first considered alternative sites for a Jewish state, such as Uganda and Argentina, but ultimately realized that only Palestine had the emotional and spiritual lure to unite Diaspora Jewry, and began to use their political leverage to bring about the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine.
Meanwhile, the first major waves of secular Jewish immigration to Palestine, each called an aliyah (literally “ascension” in Hebrew), began to arrive. In 1882 the First Aliyah began, bringing Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and Yemen. These immigrants founded the first modern Jewish agricultural settlements. The First Aliyah ended in 1903 and was quickly followed in 1904 by the Second Aliyah, which brought to Palestine around 40,000 Jews from Russia and Poland, most of them fleeing attacks and persecution. These new immigrants brought with them the ideals of socialism and founded the first Jewish communal agricultural settlements, or kibbutzim, in Palestine. The Second Aliyah lasted until the outbreak of WWI in 1914.
The new Jewish communities developed a complicated relationship with the local Arab population, with each side appealing to the Ottoman authorities to advance their goals. The Jews sought to gain land and security to accommodate additional immigrants, in anticipation of the founding of the Jewish state, while the Arabs preferred to maintain the status quo in which they had lived for centuries. It was at this time that tension began to develop between the two religious and ethnic groups, and in 1909 the first Jewish security organization in Palestine was founded, named HaShomer (“the Watchman”).
The outbreak of WWI in Europe brought a shift of power to the entire Middle East, and to Palestine in particular. During the War, the British government, seeking to topple the German-allied Ottomans, conducted secret and separate negotiations with both the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine to enlist their help. To obtain Arab support, Britain pledged to back “the independence of the Arabs” in exchange for an Arab declaration of war against the Ottomans. The Arab Revolt started in June 1916, facilitated by British emissary T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), who convinced and aided the Arab leader Sherif Hussein to lead attacks on Ottoman forces throughout the Middle East. The Revolt was instrumental in ending Ottoman dominance in the region.
At the same time, Britain sought political support from Jews by offering public support for the goals of the Zionist movement. The collaboration succeeded: Jewish military units under the flag of the Jewish Legion fought alongside British troops for the liberation of Palestine from Ottoman rule, and in November 1917 the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, which expressed British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine while stipulating that it should not “prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Many Arabs throughout the region were outraged, and felt that the British had violated their agreement.
To complicate matters further, the British and French had made a separate deal at the end of the War. The Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916 divided the Middle East region, newly conquered from the crumbling Ottoman Empire, into zones of British and French influence. At the war’s end, the various promises made by Britain to the Arabs, the Jews, and the French resulted in a muddled system of mandates: the newly created League of Nations awarded the Western European powers control over the territories from which the Ottomans had been expelled with the stated purpose of preparing these countries for independence. Great Britain was thus given a mandate over Palestine (which included the areas of modern-day Israel, Jordan, the West Bank, and Gaza) and Iraq, while France was accorded Syria and Lebanon.
Throughout the inter-war years, rising Arab and Jewish nationalism and increasing instances of mutual violence constantly tested British mandatory rule in Palestine. On the Jewish side, the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Aliyot, prompted by continued persecution of Jews in Europe and by the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, had swelled the Jewish population in Palestine to 450,000 by 1940. The intervening 30 years of British rule saw a considerable expansion of the Jewish demographic, as well as institutional and economic development, under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion’s labor-oriented party, Mapay. During these years, the small security organization HaShomer was expanded and upgraded into the paramilitary HaHaganah (“the Defense”), whose main task was to repel Arab attacks on Jewish settlements. The top priority of the Jewish leadership in Palestine at this time was the continuation of Jewish immigration and the expansion of local Jewish land ownership, mostly by purchasing from Arab owners.
At the same time, the Arab population of Palestine grew anxious of losing its clear majority and influence in the region. Distinctly Palestinian Arab nationalist organizations, such as the Higher Arab Committee were established in an effort to combat Zionist activities and to exert organized influence on British policy. Muslim religious leaders, such as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, sought support abroad for the termination of the British mandate and the cessation of Zionist activities toward the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
The British tried various unsuccessful tactics to appease each side. To assuage Arab fears about mass Jewish immigration, they issued the White Paper of 1939, which strictly limited the number of legal Jewish immigrants per year. Jews argued that these quotas were particularly unacceptable given the dire state of the Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe, and continued to facilitate illegal immigration. Underground Jewish efforts to assist illegal immigration led to greater friction between the Zionists and the Mandatory Government, culminating in a 1946 bombing of the British headquarters in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by the militant Zionist groups Irgun and Lechi. Meanwhile, growing Arab discontent with the developing situation led to the Arab Revolt of 1936-39, which the British were only able to put down with considerable military force. With the outbreak of WWII, mainstream Zionist leaders tried to patch up their relationship with the British to support the war effort against Germany. Elements of the Palestinian Arab leadership, discouraged by England’s ambiguity, negotiated with the Germans for control of Palestine and continued to try to thwart the Zionist effort at establishing a Jewish state.
The 1948 War. Shortly after the conclusion of WWII, Great Britain, weary of trying to mediate between the Jews and Arabs and rule a contested piece of land, submitted the question of Palestine to the newly formed United Nations. The UN General Assembly voted in 1947 to accept a partition plan for Palestine, splitting the territory into two states, Jewish and Arab, and putting the contested holy city of Jerusalem under international control. The Jewish leadership accepted the resolution with some reluctance, while Palestinian Arab leaders and the governments of neighboring Arab states rejected the plan completely, denying the UN’s authority to divide and distribute territories they considered to be Arab patrimony. The Arabs also criticized the UN’s decision to assign over half of the land of Mandatory Palestine to the Jewish State, even though the Jews at that time represented only a third of the area’s population. As the British prepared to evacuate Palestine in accordance with the partition resolution, Jews and Arabs clashed in sporadic skirmishes, purchased arms overseas, and planned for war.
On May 14, 1948, the British mandate over Palestine ended and David Ben-Gurion declared the independence of the State of Israel. The new state was quickly recognized by the two major world powers—the United States and the Soviet Union—and by a host of additional countries. The next day, the combined armies of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan, aided by troops from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, mobilized for war against Israel. In the war that ensued, called the War of Independence by Israelis and al-Nakbah (“the catastrophe”) by Arabs, the newly established Israeli Defense Forces were able to conquer large swaths of land, some of which were not originally allotted to the Jewish state according to the UN partition plan. When the final armistice agreement was signed in late 1949, the vast majority of mandatory Palestine was under Israeli control, with the Gaza Strip being held by Egypt, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem (containing the Old City and its holy sites) in Jordanian hands. During the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs, who either fled from their homes or were banished by Israeli forces, became refugees. They crowded into massive temporary camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and bordering Arab states, expecting to soon return to their original homes, in accordance with UN Resolution 194. The Arabs that remained in areas conquered by Israeli forces were ultimately given full Israeli citizenship, but placed under martial law until the 1960s. Israel, in the meantime, had asserted itself as a legitimate independent state in the region, and began the process of building its national institutions and infrastructure.
Mass Immigration, Austerity, And The Suez Crisis. Israel’s early years were focused on receiving the huge streams of Jewish refugees coming out of post-Holocaust Europe and escaping from oppressive regimes in Arab states. Between 1948 and 1960, the population of Israel skyrocketed from 800,000 to over to two million. The massive influx of poor, and in many cases uneducated, refugees created significant social and economic challenges for the young state. The government of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, following the socialist ideology upon which the state was founded, instituted a regime of Austerity, in which the distribution of crucial items like furniture and food was centralized and heavily rationed. At the same time, the government struggled to integrate its sizable and highly diverse immigrant communities, most of which lived in temporary camps, into Israeli society. Many of the social inequalities and tensions that still plague Jewish Israeli society today originated during this time.
On the Israeli-Arab front, things stayed fairly quiet throughout the decade, with occasional attacks on Israeli civilians carried out by Palestinian Arab infiltrators (called Fedayeen in Arabic), and Israeli military retaliation against the alleged bases of these infiltrators in Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon. In 1956, Egyptian leader Gamal Abd al-Nasser, trying to rally the Arab world, engaged in a series of diplomatic standoffs with Western powers and Israel, which culminated in the closing of the Suez Canal to Israeli shipping. Acting under an agreement with France and the United Kingdom, Israeli troops conquered the Sinai Peninsula and Suez Canal in October 1956, but withdrew several months later due to American and Soviet pressure, with guarantees that the Canal would remain open to Israeli ships.
The 1967 Six-Day War. During the mid-1960s there was an increase in raids on Israel backed by the newly formed Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which served as an umbrella organization for the various Palestinian nationalist groups. In return, Israel intensified its retaliations against Palestinian refugee camps. In the meantime, tensions heightened between Israel and its Arab neighbors, with Nasser demanding a removal of UN buffer troops that had been stationed in Sinai since the 1956 Suez crisis, and Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol warning that any blockade of the Straits of Tiran, which served as the sole gateway to one of Israel’s main shipping routes, would be interpreted as an act of war. Nasser, under pressure from Syria and Saudi Arabia, initiated the blockade on May 22, 1967. Israel called up its reserve troops and Jordan, Iraq, and Syria deployed their troops along Israel’s borders. A tense waiting period ensued, during which neither side admitted it was headed for war, but both made preparations.
On June 5, Israel launched a preemptive air strike, which obliterated most of the air forces of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. A massive ground battle ensued, with Syria, Jordan, and Egypt simultaneously attacking Israel. Backed by its unchallenged air force, the Israeli army was able to quickly defeat the Arab armies, and within six days had conquered the Sinai peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank (with East Jerusalem), and the Golan Heights, increasing its territory threefold. The capturing of the Old City of Jerusalem, and in particular the Jewish holy site of the Western Wall, was an emotional high point for Israelis, and represented a symbolic return to the site of the Temple after centuries of exile and rule by foreigners. Following the war, Israel annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, though this act was never recognized by the international community. Shortly after the war, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242, which called for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories it had occupied during the war. Though the resolution was accepted by all parties, debates over ambiguous wording in its text persist even today.
For the Palestinians and the Arab countries, the war was a humiliating defeat. It created an additional 400,000 Palestinian refugees, the majority of which fled or were banished from the West Bank into Jordan, and placed those who remained in their homes under Israeli martial law. The situation on the Israeli-Egyptian border (the Suez Canal) gradually degenerated into the War of Attrition (see opposite page).
Following the influx of Palestinians, the Jordanian government and the PLO were thrown together into a tense relationship: King Hussein of Jordan wanted to hold secret peace negotiations with the Israelis, while the PLO hoped to use Jordan as its headquarters and as a base for attacks on Israeli-held territory. Responding to PLO raids, the Israeli army attacked the Jordanian town of Karameh. Though the town’s resident Palestinians were defeated, the image of Palestinian militants standing together with Jordanians against Israeli forces became a successful image for the PLO. Young recruits flocked to it, giving the PLO greater control over the refugee camps and threatening Hussein’s sovereignty.
In September 1970, Hussein’s and PLO leader Yassir Arafat’s conflicting ambitions collided. Infuriated by a hard-line PLO faction’s hijacking of a number of commercial airliners, Hussein declared war on the PLO. Martial law was imposed, and thousands of Palestinians were killed by the Jordanian army. September 1970 became known among Palestinians as Black September. After Arab League mediation and Nasser’s personal intervention, an agreement was forged, requiring the PLO to move its headquarters to Lebanon.
In October 1974, the Arab League declared in Rabat, Morocco that the PLO, not Jordan, was “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” This incensed King Hussein, but when the other 20 Arab nations assented to PLO representation in the League, he was forced to agree. In November 1974, the UN General Assembly granted the PLO observer status in the UN.
War Of Attrition. In 1969, with the help of Soviet military instruction and supplies, Egypt launched the War of Attrition against Israel, a drawn out series of tit-for-tat skirmishes along the Israeli-Egyptian border. The Egyptians and Soviets hoped to extract concessions from Israel by inflicting heavy material and human losses on the country. Within a few years, the war became too heavy a burden for Egypt to bear. In order to alleviate his country’s financial crisis, Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, sought to reopen the lucrative Suez Canal and reclaim the desperately needed Sinai oil fields. In 1972, he expelled the Soviet military advisors in Egypt, and, seeing little hope in negotiations, began to prepare an attack on Israel.
The 1973 War And Its Consequences. On October 6, 1973, when most Israelis were in synagogues or at home for Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), the holiest day of the Jewish year, Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise assault. In the first three days of the war, Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal, while Syrian troops swept through the Golan Heights and almost reached the Jordan River. Within a matter of days, Israel launched a series of fierce counter attacks, and relying heavily on emergency military supplies and equipment provided by the United States, was able to stop the Arab advance. The Arab states later initiated an oil embargo against the United States and Holland in retaliation for their support of Israel. The war ended when a UN-backed ceasefire went into effect on October 22.
The 1973 War had significant political ramifications for all countries in the region. In Israel, the political and military leadership faced fierce criticism for the country’s lack of preparedness for the war, and for the atmosphere of arrogant confidence that had developed within the Israeli defense establishment since the Six-Day War. In 1974, Prime Minister Golda Me’ir and her cabinet were forced to resign. For the Arab states, the 1973 War was viewed as a victory after the humiliation of 1967, even though they had not reconquered any of the territory that they had lost.
Throughout the 1970s, an increasing number of Israelis began to settle in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. On November 11, 1976, the UN Security Council condemned this policy and demanded that Israel follow the Geneva Convention’s rules regarding occupied territory. Although Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (of the left-leaning Labor Party ) discouraged permanent West Bank settlement, the right-wing Likud, which first came to power in 1977, led by Prime Minister Menahem Begin, actively encouraged the development of the settlements.
Peace With Egypt. Eager to regain the Sinai and reestablish Egypt as a leader in the Arab world, Sadat decided to seek a peace agreement with Israel. In November 1977, he made a historic visit to Jerusalem and spoke before the Israeli Knesset (the parliament). By September 1978, Begin and Sadat had forged an agreement with the help of US President Jimmy Carter at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland. This was the first official peace treaty between Israel and any Arab state. The most successful and lasting stipulation was Israel’s agreement to relinquish the Sinai in exchange for peace and full diplomatic relations with Egypt. However, the stipulations concerning Israel’s control of the West Bank and Gaza were more muddled. Sadat returned to Cairo content that Palestinians in the occupied territories would be granted full personal and territorial sovereignty within the next five years, whereas Begin maintained that nothing regarding the occupied territories had been agreed upon.
After the Camp David Accords, early hopes that other Arab states would negotiate with Israel evaporated. In October 1981, in a response to his government’s crackdown on Islamic fundamentalists, Sadat was assassinated and Hosni Mubarak, Sadat’s Vice President, was sworn in. Though sticking to the terms of the 1979 Camp David peace treaty, Mubarak kept the diplomatic air cool for most of the 1980s in an attempt to reintegrate Egypt with the rest of the Arab world. In 1984, Egypt restored relations with the Soviet Union and was readmitted to the Islamic Conference, and by 1988, the Arab League had invited Egypt to rejoin and dropped demands that it sever its ties with Israel.
The 1982 Lebanon War. Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s the PLO established a strong presence in the Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon, and began to launch raids against Israeli civilians in northern Israel. In 1981 these violent exchanges escalated, with Israel launching air strikes against the PLO, and the PLO responding by shelling northern Israel. On June 6, 1982, Israeli ground troops invaded Lebanon. The offensive, dubbed “Operation Peace of the Galilee” by Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, was supposedly intended to create a protective buffer zone; many, however, believe that the attack aimed to wipe out the PLO forces that had been operating out of Lebanon and to install a Lebanese government that would have been sympathetic to Israel. The Israeli army surrounded the PLO in Beirut and began shelling the city at an enormous civilian cost, earning both domestic and international disapproval. The war quickly deteriorated from what was supposed to be a rapid operation into a messy and drawn out campaign against guerilla forces, in the midst of a civil war in Lebanon. As a result of the clashes, the PLO leadership was forced to relocate its headquarters to Tunis. Between September 16th and 18th, 1982, Lebanese Christian militias entered the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps, which were under Israeli guard, and, as a retaliation for the assassination of Christian Lebanese President Bashir Jumayyil, massacred innocent Palestinian refugees. Israel’s failure to prevent the massacre, despite its knowledge that it was occurring, was met with a huge public outcry within Israel and internationally.
Under an agreement negotiated by the United States, most fighting ended in 1983. Worried about the Syrian presence and active Shi’a militia in Lebanon, Israel withdrew in 1985, but maintained a strip of southern Lebanese territory as a security zone until May of 2000.
Throughout most of the 1970s and 1980s a tense quiet held in the West Bank and Gaza, with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living under Israeli martial law. On December 8, 1987, an Israeli armored transport and several Arab cars collided in Gaza; four Palestinians were killed and several injured in the crash. The Palestinians’ despair after 20 years of Israeli military occupation turned demonstrations at the victims’ funerals into an upheaval that spread to the West Bank. Clashes between the Israeli military and rock or Molotov cocktail-wielding Palestinian civilians became commonplace, and the widespread unrest received the popular name intifada (“uprising” in Arabic). At first, Israeli authorities viewed the intifada as a short-lived affair that would dissolve as earlier agitations had. But after Palestinians in the territories began establishing networks to coordinate their hitherto sporadic civil disobedience, the intifada came alive, gaining its own leadership. In the midst of all the turmoil, the world began to reconsider Israel’s Palestinian policies. In the summer of 1988, King Hussein of Jordan suddenly dropped his claims to the West Bank and ceased assisting in the administration of the territories, which Jordan had been doing since 1967. Arafat seized the opportunity to assert the PLO’s international recognition as the official representative of the Palestinian people by renouncing terrorism and recognizing Israel’s right to exist. Israeli Prime Minister Yithzak Shamir presented his own proposal promising elections in the territories but insisted that neither the PLO nor PLO-sponsored candidates take part.
The Gulf Crisis began when Iraqi troops marched into Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Early on, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had slyly suggested he would withdraw from Kuwait when Israel withdrew from the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan, and when Syria withdrew from Lebanon. This gesture, along with promises to liberate Palestine, won Saddam the support of Palestinians. In fighting that lasted from January 16 to February 28, 1991, a coalition formed by the United States, various European countries, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf states forced Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. During the conflict, 39 Iraqi SCUD missiles fell on Tel Aviv and Haifa, cheered on by Arafat and the Palestinian population. Israel, under pressure from the US and fearful of a Palestinian-led conflagration in Jordan, did not retaliate.
The Madrid Conference. When the Gulf War cease-fire was announced, hope was high that parties like Israel and Syria—for the first time on the same side of a regional conflict—could be brought to the bargaining table. In July 1991, Syria surprised the world with the announcement that it would attend a regional peace conference. At a summit meeting in Moscow, US President George Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev decided to host the conference jointly. A hesitant Israeli cabinet, led by the right-wing Shamir, and uneasy about jeopardizing US aid, voted to attend the proposed conference provided that the PLO and residents of East Jerusalem not take part. On October 30, 1991, the Madrid peace conference was convened, with Israel carrying on separate negotiations with Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. While the act of convening the conference was significant in and of itself, the unprecedented gathering quickly became bogged down in discussions of Security Council Resolution 242, Palestinian autonomy and rights, Jerusalem, Israeli settlements, refugees, and the PLO’s political scope, and did not produce any substantial results. Subsequent sessions held in Washington, DC did not get much further.
The Oslo Accords And Peace With Jordan. On June 23, 1992, an Israeli election ousted Shamir’s Likud and ushered in a left-wing government led by the Labor Party and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. While Rabin’s rhetoric had been harsh against the Palestinians in the days of the intifada, he curtailed settlement growth and promised Palestinian autonomy. Optimism accompanying the first round of talks under the new Israeli government, held in November 1992, was soon undermined. Hamas, a nationalist Islamic socio-political movement struggling for Arab control of all of historic Palestine, carried out several terrorist attacks in Israel which prevented any progress.
Almost a year later, Israel and the PLO surprised the world by announcing that a group of academics and non-political representatives meeting secretly in Oslo had successfully negotiated an agreement on the framework for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict peacefully. The Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (the DOP—also known as the Oslo Accord ) was signed at the White House on September 13, 1993, with President Bill Clinton presiding over the ceremony. The DOP provided mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO and established the land-for-peace model as the basis for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. It also included a plan for immediate implementation of Palestinian autonomy in the Gaza Strip and the Jericho area, with the autonomous areas to be expanded in stages over a five-year transitional period. The DOP was followed by the negotiation of several other Israeli-Palestinian agreements. The first was the Gaza/Jericho Agreement, which provided the details for Israeli withdrawal from these areas and the creation of a Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by Yassir Arafat and a 24-member council.
The signing of the Oslo Accords was met with widespread optimism both in Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza. As Israeli troops began to pull out of cities and territories in the West Bank and Gaza, ceding security and civil responsibilities to the Palestinian Authority, hopes began to set in that the long and bitter Israeli-Arab conflict was finally coming to an end. Arafat returned to a jubilant Gaza in 1994 after 27 years in exile, and with the Palestinian issue seemingly well on its way to being solved, the Arab world began to warm toward Israel. On October 26, 1994, Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty, establishing full diplomatic relations between the two countries and opening their borders, allowing Israelis and Jordanians to visit each other’s countries for the first time since 1948. In early 1995, bilateral negotiations with Syria began, focused on peace between the two countries in exchange for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the strategic Golan Heights. Such a withdrawal would have been highly controversial within Israel, and the Israeli government stated that it would place any agreement negotiated with Syria on a national referendum to be decided upon by the Israeli public.
Assassination Of Rabin. While much of the Israeli public supported the peace agenda that Rabin’s government had pursued, the land-for-peace policies that he advocated met with a fierce resistance from a growing right-wing opposition. On November 4, 1995, after attending a massive peace rally in Tel Aviv, Rabin was shot and killed by a 25 year-old right-wing Jewish university student named Yigal Amir. Over one million shocked Israelis, Jews, and Arabs alike filed by the slain leader’s coffin in the days following the murder. Rabin’s funeral drew over 50 world leaders to Jerusalem, including United States President Bill Clinton, Jordan’s King Hussein, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and representatives from four other Arab states.
The Late 90s. Following Rabin’s assassination, the Labor Party’s Shimon Peres became Prime Minister, but he was defeated in the May 1996 elections by Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the conservative Likud party. Many attribute Peres’s loss to a series of suicide bombings that Palestinian militant groups, like Hamas, carried out throughout Israel in the months before the elections. Netanyahu’s term as Prime Minister marked a turn away from Rabin’s peace-oriented politics, and his continued support of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem prompted violent clashes. In September 1996, the Israeli government’s decision to open a tunnel entrance adjacent to the Temple Mount and to Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem sparked protests that degenerated into deadly fighting. Thirty-seven Palestinians and 11 Israelis died in the conflict as the spectacle of gunfights between Israeli soldiers and the PA’s police force seemed to announce the near-collapse of the peace process. Throughout the fall of 1996, US President Bill Clinton met with Arafat and Netanyahu to try to salvage relations between the two groups, and a 1997 agreement on an Israeli withdrawal from Hebron raised some hopes that the peace might still be possible. The persistence of suicide bombings and an Israeli reluctance to relinquish further territories, however, caused the peace process to stall until Netanyahu was defeated in the 1999 elections by the Labor Party’s Ehud Barak.
Barak tried to resurrect hopes in Israeli-Arab peace, voicing a renewed commitment to the land-for-peace model, and to finally tackling the long-standing core issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly refugees, Jerusalem, the settlements, and borders. In September 2000, Barak announced that Israel would withdraw its troops from southern Lebanon, where they had been positioned since the 1982 campaign. Barak hoped the pullout would indicate Israeli goodwill and encourage peace-talks with neighboring Syria. Throughout the winter, however, escalating skirmishes prompted Barak to advance the pullout to June 1, 2000. When attacks by the militant Lebanese Islamist organization Hezbollah intensified, Barak realized that holding out an extra six days would only lead to increased conflict. On May 24th, when Israeli forces executed an expedited withdrawal from all of southern Lebanon, Israel’s 20-year occupation of southern Lebanon came to a close.
Shortly after the Lebanon pullout, Barak’s attention focused to solving the core issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On July 11, 2000, Barak and Arafat convened at US President Clinton’s invitation in Camp David, with the stated purpose of working out a comprehensive framework for solving all of the core issues of the conflict. While the sides came closer than ever before on resolving the core issues, agreeing on border, land, and water arrangements, wide gaps still existed on the issues of Jerusalem and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. After two weeks of negotiations, on July 25th, the summit ended without the sides having reached a comprehensive agreement. The failure of Camp David created widespread frustration amongst the Palestinian population, and in late September 2000, when Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon made a controversial visit to the Temple Mount, violent protests broke out across the West Bank and Gaza.
The rise of Sharon’s government marked an end to the Oslo Process of the 1990s and a move away from peace negotiations. Though the Bush Administration made several attempts to negotiate a ceasefire between the sides and return them to the negotiation table, the violence continued. Sharon’s government, convinced that Arafat was actively promoting the Palestinian violence, declared that there was “no partner” on the Palestinian side, and confined Arafat to his Ramallah compound. This essentially meant the end of substantial peace talks. Meanwhile, Hamas and other militant groups continued to attack Israeli soldiers and civilians, both in Israel proper and in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel retaliated against these attacks by setting up a comprehensive system of checkpoints and beginning construction on a 436-mile security barrier (sometimes called the “separation fence” or simply the “wall”) to separate Israel from the West Bank. Israel also carried out several extensive military operations in Palestinian cities aimed at crippling the militant organizations. The barrier has since become a major source of contention, with the Palestinians claiming that it cuts into Palestinian territory and attempts to unilaterally establish borders on the ground, and the Israeli government responding that the barrier is necessary for security purposes and not related to any political disagreement over borders.
In the summer of 2005, Sharon announced the Disengagement Plan, ordering the unilateral evacuation of all Israeli settlements and military personnel from the Gaza Strip, explaining that the continued presence of settlers in Gaza had become untenable for Israel. Despite fierce and sometimes violent protests by the settlers and large parts of Israel’s right-wing population, the disengagement proceeded, removing all Israeli presence from the Gaza Strip within a matter of days.
Shortly thereafter, major changes shook up both Palestinian and Israeli leadership. Arafat became very ill and died in November 2004, leaving the largely unpopular Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) as the leader of his Fatah party and as President of the Palestinian Authority. While Israel and the United States were more willing to engage with Abbas, his lack of legitimacy among the mainstream Palestinian population prevented him from taking decisive action on many issues. In January 2006, Abbas’s Fatah was decisively defeated by Hamas in general elections that took place throughout the West Bank and Gaza. The political leader and new Palestinian Prime Minister Isma’il Haniya quickly formed a unity government with Fatah, which both Israel and the United States refused to recognize. In Israel, Sharon, after calling for new elections and creating the new centrist Kadima party, suffered a massive stroke in early January and was left in a coma. His deputy Ehud Olmert subsequently led Kadima to a victory in the elections, based on a platform of further unilateral withdrawals of settlements from the West Bank, and established a unity government together with the Labor Party in March 2006.
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For 52 years, we have published the world’s favorite budget travel guides, written entirely by students and updated every year. With pen and notebook in hand and a few changes of underwear stuffed in our backpacks, we spend months roaming the globe in search of travel bargains.
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