The First Zionist Congress met in Basle, Switzerland, to discuss
the ideas set out in Theodor Herzl's 1896 book Der Judenstaat (The
Jewish State). Herzl, a Jewish journalist and writer living in
Vienna, wanted Jews to have their own state - primarily as a
response to European anti-Semitism.
The Congress issued the Basle Programme to establish a "home for
the Jewish people in Palestine secured by public law" and set up
the World Zionist Organisation to work for that end.
A few Zionist immigrants had already started arriving in the area
before 1897. By 1903 there were some 25,000 of them, mostly from
Eastern Europe. They lived alongside about half a million Arab
residents in what was then part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. A
second wave of about 40,000 immigrants arrived in the region
between 1904 and 1914.
At the time of World War I the area was ruled by the Turkish
Ottoman empire. Turkish control ended when Arab forces backed by
Britain drove out the Ottomans.
Britain occupied the region at the end of the war in 1918 and was
assigned as the mandatory power by the League of Nations on 25
April 1920.
During this period of change, three key pledges were made.
In 1916 the British Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, had
promised the Arab leadership post-war independence for former
Ottoman Arab provinces.
However, at the same time, the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement between
war victors, Britain and France, divided the region under their
joint control.
Then in 1917, the British Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour committed
Britain to work towards "the establishment in Palestine of a
national home for the Jewish people", in a letter to leading
Zionist Lord Rothschild. It became known as the Balfour
Declaration.
The Zionist project of the 1920s and 1930s saw hundreds of
thousands of Jews emigrating to British Mandate Palestine,
provoking unrest in the Arab community.
In 1922, a British census showed the Jewish population had risen to
about 11% of Palestine's 750,000 inhabitants. More than 300,000
immigrants arrived in the next 15 years.
Zionist-Arab antagonism boiled over into violent clashes in August
1929 when 133 Jews were killed by Palestinians and 110 Palestinians
died at the hands of the British police.
Arab discontent again exploded into widespread civil disobedience
during a general strike in 1936. By this time, the militant Zionist
group Irgun Zvai Leumi was orchestrating attacks on Palestinian and
British targets with the aim of "liberating" Palestine and
Transjordan (modern-day Jordan) by force.
In July 1937, Britain, in a Royal Commission headed by former
Secretary of State for India, Lord Peel, recommended partitioning
the land into a Jewish state (about a third of British Mandate
Palestine, including Galilee and the coastal plain) and an Arab
one.
Palestinian and Arab representatives rejected this and demanded an
end to immigration and the safeguarding of a single unified state
with protection of minority rights. Violent opposition continued
until 1938 when it was crushed with reinforcements from the
UK.
Britain, which had ruled Palestine since 1920, handed over
responsibility for solving the Zionist-Arab problem to the UN in
1947.
The territory was plagued with chronic unrest pitting native Arabs
against Jewish immigrants (who now made up about a third the
population, owning about 6% of the land). The situation had become
more critical with the displacement of hundreds of thousands of
Jews fleeing the Nazi persecution in Europe. Some six million Jews
were killed in the Holocaust during World War II.
The UN set up a special committee which recommended splitting the
territory into separate Jewish and Palestinian states. Palestinian
representatives, known as the Arab Higher Committee, rejected the
proposal; their counterparts in the Jewish Agency accepted
it.
The partition plan gave 56.47% of Palestine to the Jewish state and
43.53% to the Arab state, with an international enclave around
Jerusalem. On 29 November 1947, 33 countries of the UN General
Assembly voted for partition, 13 voted against and 10 abstained.
The plan, which was rejected by the Palestinians, was never
implemented.
Britain announced its intention to terminate its Palestine mandate
on 15 May 1948 but hostilities broke out before the date
arrived.
The death of British soldiers in the conflict made the continuing
presence in Palestine deeply unpopular in Britain. In addition, the
British resented American pressure to allow in more Jewish refugees
- a sign of growing US suport for Zionism.
Both Arab and Jewish sides prepared for the coming confrontation by
mobilising forces. The first "clearing" operations were conducted
against Palestinian villages by Jewish forces in December.
The State of Israel, the first Jewish state for nearly 2,000 years,
was proclaimed at 1600 on 14 May 1948 in Tel Aviv. The declaration
came into effect the following day as the last British troops
withdrew. Palestinians remember 15 May as "al-Nakba", or the
Catastrophe.
The year had begun with Jewish and Arab armies each staging attacks
on territory held by the other side. Jewish forces, backed by the
Irgun and Lehi militant groups made more progress, seizing areas
alloted to the Jewish state but also conquering substantial
territories allocated for the Palestinian one.
Irgun and Lehi massacred scores of inhabitants of the village of
Deir Yassin near Jerusalem on 9 April. Word of the massacre spread
terror among Palestinians and hundreds of thousands fled to
Lebanon, Egypt and the area now known as the West Bank.
The Jewish armies were victorious in the Negev, Galilee, West
Jerusalem and much of the coastal plain.
The day after the state of Israel was declared five Arab armies
from Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq immediately invaded
Israel but were repulsed, and the Israeli army crushed pockets of
resistance. Armistices established Israel's borders on the frontier
of most of the earlier British Mandate Palestine.
Egypt kept the Gaza Strip while Jordan annexed the area around East
Jerusalem and the land now known as the West Bank. These
territories made up about 25% of the total area of British Mandate
Palestine.
Since 1948 there had been fierce competition between neighbouring
states to lead an Arab response to the creation of Israel. That
left the Palestinians as passive onlookers.
In January 1964, Arab governments - wanting to create a Palestinian
organisation that would remain essentially under their control -
voted to create a body called the Palestine Liberation Organisation
(PLO).
But the Palestinians wanted a genuinely independent body, and that
was the goal of Yasser Arafat who took over the chairmanship of the
PLO in 1969. His Fatah organisation (founded in secret five years
earlier) was gaining notoriety with its armed operations against
Israel.
Fatah fighters inflicted heavy casualties on Israeli troops at
Karameh in Jordan in 1968.
Mounting tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbours culminated
in six days of hostilities starting on 5 June 1967 and ending on 11
June - six days which changed the face of the Middle East
conflict.
Israel seized Gaza and the Sinai from Egypt in the south and the
Golan Heights from Syria in the north. It also pushed Jordanian
forces out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Egypt's powerful air force was put out of action on the first day
of fighting when Israeli jets bombed it on the ground in a
pre-emptive strike.
The territorial gains doubled the area of land controlled by
Israel. The victory heralded a new age of confidence and optimism
for Israel and its supporters.
The UN issued Security Council Resolution 242, stressing "the
inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war" and calling
for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied
in the recent conflict".
According ot the UN, the conflict displaced another 500,000
Palestinians who fled to Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.
Unable to regain the territory they had lost in 1967 by diplomatic
means, Egypt and Syria launched major offensives against Israel on
the Jewish festival of the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur. The
clashes are also known as the Ramadan war.
Initially, Egypt and Syria made advances in Sinai and the Golan
Heights. These were reversed after three weeks of fighting. Israel
eventually made gains beyond the 1967 ceasefire lines.
Israeli forces pushed on into Syria beyond the Golan Heights,
though they later gave up some of these gains. In Egypt, Israeli
forces regained territory and advanced to the western side of the
Suez Canal.
The United States, the Soviet Union and the United Nations all made
diplomatic interventions to bring about ceasefire agreements
between the combatants.
Egypt and Syria jointly lost an estimated 8,500 soldiers in the
fighting, while Israel lost about 6,000.
The war left Israel more dependent on the US for military,
diplomatic and economic support. Soon after the war, Saudi Arabia
led a petroleum embargo against states that supported Israel. The
embargo, which caused a steep rises in petrol prices and fuel
shortages across the world, lasted until March 1974. In October
1973 the UN Security Council passed resolution 338 which called for
the combatants "to cease all firing and terminate all military
activity immediately... [and start] negotiations between the
parties concerned under appropriate auspices aimed at establishing
a just and durable peace in the Middle East".
