Middle Eastern Dreams in Conflict: Israelis and Palestinians

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has embittered the people of the Middle East and elsewhere for the past half-century is rooted in two powerful and contradictory claims to the same territory. Each of the two parties invokes history and love of the land in defense of its claims. Beginning in the 1890s European Jews, responding to an upsurge of anti-Semitic prejudice, organized the Zionist movement in order to establish a “national home” in Palestine. At that time Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire and was inhabited largely by Arab Muslims. In the years following World War I, when the British ruled Palestine as a League of Nations Mandate, European Jews began to migrate to Palestine in large numbers, a process greatly accelerated during the and after World War II due to the Holocaust. The withdrawal of the British from Palestine and the proclamation of the independent state of Israel in 1948 made the Zionist dream a reality.

Palestine, however, had been part of the Arab Muslim world since the 7th century. Palestinians resented the coming of the Jewish colonists and they opposed the founding of the new Israeli state, as did most other Arabs in the region. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced into exile in the late 1940s, victims of the conflicts surrounding the establishment of the Israeli state. Subsequent wars between Israel and neighboring Arab states in 1967, 1973, and 1982 increased the amount of territory—and the number of Palestinians—subject to Israeli authority, most notably in the region west of the Jordan River known as the West Bank, and in the Gaza Strip.

Determined to regain their homeland and to establish an independent Palestinian state (sentiments that constitute a kind of “Zionism in reverse”), in 1964 Palestinian leaders founded the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO was initially popular among ordinary Palestinians and is still the leading Palestinian political organization. However, since the late 1980s Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement), which combines religious and political goals, has emerged as a serious rival of the PLO for the leadership of the Palestinian cause. Like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas has established a huge network of educational and social welfare institutions as a step toward the establishment of an independent Palestine based on Islamic law.

Hamas has also played a leading role in carrying out a variety of violent actions, including suicide bombings, aimed at ending Israeli rule over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Viewers of television news reports are well aware of the harsh repression carried out by the Israeli military forces against the Palestinian intifada (literally, a “shaking off”) in recent years (as recently as the early part of 2009). Each side sees its use of violence as justified by the wrongs committed by the other. The situation has deteriorated to the point that a wall was built around the West Bank and completed in 2007 (you can read the BBC News piece on that by clicking here).

The documents that I would like you to read are a mixture of personal statements, official proclamations, and maps (you can read all of them by clicking here). In the first piece Nahum Goldman, an early Zionist from Germany, discusses his first visit to Palestine in 1913. The document that follows is the 1948 Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. In the third document, Fawaz Turki, a Palestinian writer, recalls his family’s flight from Palestine in 1948 and his subsequent childhood as an exile. The fourth document is the Palestinian National Charter, which was issued by the Palestinian National Congress in 1968. Two maps that help to clarify the major territorial changes from the 1940s through the present can also be viewed by clicking here for the early map and here for the current.

After reading the documents and studying the maps, I would like you to reflect on and discuss the following: How do the documents and the maps illuminate the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians? Why did Nahum Goldman decide to go to Palestine in 1913, and remain there after his friends retuned home to Germany? What kinds of contacts did Goldman have with Palestinian Arabs? What reasons does the 1948 Israeli Declaration provide for the establishment of the new state? How is the matter of the indigenous Arab/Palestinian population addressed? What does Fawaz Turki reveal about the standard of living in the Palestinian refugee camps? What attitudes did Turki encounter in the host countries where the refugee camps were located? How does Turki explain the growing strength of Palestinian nationalism? What do you think of his view that Western countries are partly responsible for the conflicts in the Middle East? How does the 1968 Palestinian National Charter compare with the 1948 Israeli Declaration? Based on your reading of these two documents, do you see any hope for compromise? What is the relationship between Israeli and Palestinian nationalism in other parts of the world? What similarities and differences do you see? What has been the trend since 1914 regarding conflicts between people of different nationalities and religions? Have the conflicts ebbed and flowed, increased overall, stayed the same, or decreased overall? How do you explain this? How does the Israeli-Palestinian conflict compare with ethnic conflict in the Balkans? What do the maps suggest about the reasons for the intensity of the present-day conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis? What have been the big changes since the 1940s? How do you explain the changes? How might the maps be used to propose a resolution of the conflict? Is the solution the establishment of an independent Palestine adjacent to Israel? What areas would the borders of a Palestinian state include? Or, should there be one “bi-national” state that includes Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, with all of their current residents? Your thoughts…