Israel – why conflict?
The on-going conflict in the Middle East isn’t simply about religion or race. It’s about identity, land – and justice. The Holy Land is perhaps the most historically intense 21,000 square kilometres on Earth and justice has been challenged by many conflicting points of view over the centuries. Yet, for much of that time, Druze, Jew, Christian and, later, Muslim did live together in peace in the land, before twentieth century events triggered new tensions that religion, race and ancient history are often used to inflame.
When the British approached Arabs in Palestine to help oust the ailing Ottoman Empire from the region in 1915, they promised to put in place the beginnings of Palestinian self governance in return. By the time the British were officially mandated to run Palestine by the League of Nations, however, the subsequent Balfour Declaration of 1917 omitted any mention of this promise.
At the end of WWII, the horror of the holocaust was the final straw for Europe’s conscience – after years of anti-semitism had lead to waves of Jewish emigrants seeking sanctuary in the Holy Land – and continental powers gave Zionist leaders the right to dramatically step up their vision of settling the country. The first safe Jewish homeland for countless centuries was sold to the world as: ‘a land without people for a people without land’. Except, of course, that the land did have people. A people that now felt conspicuously over-looked.
By the late forties, as settlers had increased in number and often in their indifference to Arab residents, so tensions between the groups had grown and grown. The British had never quite known how to manage the two groups’ opposing visions for the country, but as Zionist leadership became more uncompromising and Arab Palestinian anger grew, the region errupted into full scale war in 1947 and the British simply pulled out, declaring Palestine ‘ungovernable’. In the conflict, thousands of Arabs found themselves turned out of homes they’d lived in for countless generations; intimidated to leave or taken away to deportation camps, divorced from families and livelyhoods to make way for a new, single-minded state, ideologically Jewish and, many felt, firmly American-supported.
Officially declared by June 1948, Israel now owned 30% more of the land than had already been granted to it by the international community but with effective control over the whole nominally partioned region. Many Arabs fled over borders to other countries, forming communities that to this day are waiting to be allowed home. As those left behind struggled to adapt to a very different political reality in Palestine, with some one hundred and forty Arab villages destroyed and a new sense of separatism over the country, these formative years for the fledgling state of Israel left many scars of violence and resentment.
In 1967, the year after the international community had agreed the Green Line that legally marked out Palestinian/Israeli borders, tensions with Arab neighbours lead Israel to respond to Egyptian-Jordanian sabre rattling with a full-scale invasion of land that the two states held in the Golan Heights, Gaza and Sinai. To this day, Israel has refused international pressure to retreat from contested land but has instead continued a policy of building settlements on what comparatively little land Palestinians have left, and of allowing Jews a legal Right Of Return to the country while still denying the Palestinian diaspora the same right. Such policies – and many others – continue to feed a sense of injustice that now spans three generatons.
But there are many in Israel who are today trying to write a new story. The Elijah Trust works to support partners among the Arab Citizens of Israel in particular who, through education, campaigning and legal challenge are seeking peace, reconciliation and justice.
The Elijah Trust The land of Israel Elijah Trust resources
Elijah Trust news Contact the Elijah Trust Home
