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Israel Palestine Conflict- A study guide for MUN

Introduction

Israel is the world’s only Jewish state, located just east of the Mediterranean Sea. Palestinians, the Arab population that hails from the land Israel now controls, refer to the territory as Palestine and want to establish a state by that name on all or part of the same land. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is over who gets what land and how it’s controlled. Though both Jews and Arab Muslims date their claims to the land back a couple thousand years, the current political conflict began in the early 20th century.

Jews fleeing persecution in Europe wanted to establish a national homeland in what was then an Arab- and Muslim-majority territory in the Ottoman and later British Empire. The Arabs resisted, seeing the land as rightfully theirs. An early United Nations plan to give each group part of the land failed and Israel and the surrounding Arab nations fought several wars over the territory. Today’s lines largely reflect the outcomes of two of these wars, one waged in 1948 and another in 1967.

The 1967 war is particularly important for today’s conflict, as it left Israel in control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, two territories home to large Palestinian populations:

Note that since 1967, Israel has returned Sinai to Egypt. BBC News

Today, the the West Bank is nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority and is under Israeli occupation. This comes in the form of Israeli troops, who enforce Israeli security restrictions on Palestinian movement and activities, and Israeli “settlers,” Jews who build ever-expanding communities in the West Bank that effectively deny the land to Palestinians. Gaza is controlled by Hamas, an Islamist

fundamentalist party and is under Israeli blockade but not ground troop occupation.

Zionism and the Conflict

Zionism is Israel’s national ideology. Zionists believe Judaism is a nationality as well as a religion and that Jews deserve their own state in their ancestral homeland, Israel, in the same way the French people deserve France or the Chinese people should have China. It’s what brought Jews back to Israel in the first place and also at the heart of what concerns Arabs and Palestinians about the Israeli state.

Jews often trace their nationhood back to the biblical kingdoms of David and Solomon, circa 950 BC. Modern Zionism, building on the longstanding Jewish yearning for a “return to Zion,” began in the 19th century — right about the time that nationalism started to rise in Europe. A secular Austrian-Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl, was the first to turn rumblings of Jewish nationalism into an international movement around 1896.

Though Zionists all agree that Israel should exist, they’ve long disagreed on what its government should look like. In the most general terms, the Zionist left, which dominated the country’s politics until the late 1970s, is inclined to trade Israeli-controlled land for peace with Arab nations, wants more government intervention in the economy and prefers a secular government over a religious one. The Zionist right, which currently enjoys commanding positions in the Israeli government and popular opinion, tends to be more skeptical of “land-for-peace” deals, more libertarian on the economy, and more comfortable mixing religion and politics.

Arabs and Palestinians generally oppose Zionism, as the explicitly Jewish character of the Israeli state means that Jews have privileges that others don’t. Arabs, then, often see Zionism as a species of colonialism and racism aimed at appropriating Palestinian land and systematically disenfranchising the Palestinians that remain.

Israel – Country Formation

Social and political developments in Europe convinced Jews they needed their own country and their ancestral homeland seemed like the right place to establish it. European Jews- 90 per cent of all Jews at the time — arrived at Zionism partly because of rising anti-Semitic persecution and partly because the ‘Enlightenment’ introduced Jews to secular nationalism. Between 1896 and 1948, hundreds of thousands of Jews resettled from Europe to what was then British-controlled Palestine, including large numbers forced out of Europe during the Holocaust.

Many Arabs saw the influx of Jews as a European colonial movement, and the two peoples fought bitterly. The British couldn’t control the violence and in 1947 the United Nations voted to split the land into two countries. Almost all of the roughly 650,000 Jews went to the blue territory in the map to the right and a majority of the Arab population went to the orange. The Jewish residents accepted the deal. The Palestinians, who saw the plan as an extension of a long-running Jewish attempt to push them out of the land, fought it. The Arab states of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria all later declared war on Israel, as well (albeit not to defend the Palestinians).

Israeli forces defeated the Palestinian militias and Arab armies in a vicious conflict that turned 700,000 Palestinian civilians into refugees. The UN partition promised 56 percent of British Palestine for the Jewish state. However, by the end of war, Israel possessed 77 percent- everything except the West Bank and the eastern quarter of Jerusalem (controlled by Jordan), as well as the Gaza Strip (controlled by Egypt). It left Israelis with a state but not Palestinians.

GAZA

Gaza is a densely populated strip of land that is mostly surrounded by Israel and peopled almost exclusively by Palestinians. Israel used to have a military presence, but withdrew unilaterally in 2005. It’s currently under Israeli blockade with increased restrictions on the movement of humanitarian staff in and out of Gaza.

The sporadic rocket fire that’s hit Israel from there since its pullback has strengthened Israeli hawks’ political position, as they have long argued that any Palestinian state would end up serving as a launching pad for attacks on Israel. Egypt controlled Gaza until 1967, when Israel occupied it (along with the West Bank) in the Six-Day War. Until 2005, Israeli military authorities controlled Gaza in the same way they control the West Bank, and Jews were permitted to settle there. In 2005, the then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pulled out Israeli troops and settlers unilaterally.

Gaza is governed by the Islamist group Hamas, which formed in 1987 as a militant “resistance” group against Israel and won political power in a 2006 US-based election. Hamas’s takeover of Gaza prompted an Israeli blockade of the flow of commercial goods into Gaza, on the grounds that Hamas could use those goods to make weapons to be used against Israel. Israel has the blockade over time, but the cut-off of basic supplies like fuel still does significant humanitarian harm by cutting off access to electricity, food and medicine.

Hamas and other Gaza-based militants have fired thousands of rockets from the territory at Israeli targets. Israel has launched a number of military operations in

Gaza, including an air campaign and ground invasion in late 2008 and early 2009, a major bombing campaign in 2012, and another air/ground assault in the summer of 2014.

Middle eastern countries involved in the conflict

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a huge issue in the region. Israel has fought multiple wars with each of its four neighbours, all of whom nominally support the Palestinian national cause. Today, it has peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, but its relations with its other neighbours, Syria and Lebanon, are fraught. There are large, mistreated Palestinian refugee communities in all of Israel’s neighbours but Egypt. Outside of its immediate neighbours, the three most important regional states in the conflict are Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Here’s a guide to each country’s role:

Egypt: Egypt’s 1978 peace treaty with Israel, the first signed by any Arab state, is underwritten by both Egypt and Israel. The treaty also forbids Egypt from a military presence in the bordering Sinai Peninsula, which has helped militant and criminal groups flourish there.

Syria: The Syrian government is still quite hostile to Israel. Syria is aligned with Iran, Israel’s greatest adversary in the region today. Syria also wants the Golan Heights, militarily useful land Israel seized during their 1967 war, back then.

Lebanon: Lebanon is home to Hezbollah, a virulently anti-Israel, Shia Islamist group said to be funded by Iran. Hezbollah is a major force in Lebanese politics, so it is questionable to say that Lebanon will play any role in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in the near future!

Jordan: Israel’s eastern neighbour both has a peace treaty with Israel and houses the largest concentration of Palestinians refugees. It is also one of Israel’s neighbours where Palestinians have full citizenship rights. Despite this, many refugees are shoved into crowded camps and generally poorly treated, which is why Palestinians are skeptical of their neighbour’s claim to support the Palestinian cause.

Iran: The Iranian government believes Israel is fundamentally illegitimate and supports the most hard-line anti-Israeli Arab factions. Israel sees Iran as a direct and existential threat, as it has provided significant military and financial backing to Hezbollah, Hamas, and Syria — the so- called “axis of control” to Israeli and Western interests in the Middle East.

Turkey: Long on good terms with Israel, Turkey has become increasingly pro-Palestinian in recent years. Its Islamist Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has positioned himself as a champion of the Palestinian cause for ideological, domestic, and geopolitical reasons. Israeli-Turkish conflict over an Israeli raid on a Turkish aid mission to Gaza severed diplomatic relations between the two countries for years. They renormalized in 2016, but are still fragile.

Saudi Arabia: The kingdom donates hundreds of millions of dollars to the Palestinian Authority and is the driving force behind an Arab league peace plan floated as an alternative to traditional Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Though Saudi Arabia has yet to recognize Israel, the two nations’ mutual hostility toward Iran has led to an unprecedented working relationship between the Saudi and Israeli governments.

Israel and Palestine’s Approach

Neither side thinks the other is in any position to make a real deal and it’s not exactly clear how the US government could change their mind.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas doesn’t trust the Israeli government, which is currently said to be led by a right-wing coalition. Settlement expansion is one of the main reasons; settlement construction reached a seven year high under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership. Abbas sees the rapid expansion during Netanyahu’s time in office as strong evidence that Israel is attempting to make a Palestinian state impossible. While Netanyahu did freeze settlement expansion everywhere but Jerusalem for 10 months starting on November 2009, Palestinians wanted a total freeze and so only sat down to talk in the ninth month but to no effect. Netanyahu has been a critic of a two-state solution to the conflict for decades, and while he’s expressed support for one now in theory, many believe his commitment isn’t genuine. He’s the first leader of Likud, Israel’s major right-wing party, to endorse a two-state solution while in power, which he did under heavy American pressure in 2009.

But while campaigning during the 2015 Israeli election, which his party won fairly resoundingly, Netanyahu announced that there would be no Palestinian state under his watch. It’s a statement he’s tried to walk back, but one that’s consistent with his long held belief that Palestinians can’t be trusted to be peaceful neighbours.

Israel has real reasons to be skeptical of the Palestinian side. One major one is the Hamas-Fatah split. Since Hamas took control of Gaza, Israel has been concerned that any peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority wouldn’t stick in Gaza, where it has no real control. That’s especially worrying for the Israeli leadership given Hamas’s public commitment to Israel’s destruction. Moreover, it’s not clear that Abbas could sell Palestinians on the concessions he’d inevitably need to make in order to make a deal with Israel.

The two sides’ basic skepticism of each other’s willingness and ability to make peace is the fundamental reason that the peace push led by US Secretary of State John Kerry fell apart in April 2014. Since then, the Palestinians have turned toward a pressure campaign designed to isolate Israel internationally and put pressure on the Israeli leadership to make peace, which has had little success.

The World and the Conflict

Non-Muslim countries recognize Israel’s legitimacy and maintain diplomatic relations with it but most are critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and ongoing occupation of the West Bank. Global public opinion at present is generally more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, creating real concern among Israelis that an international boycott movement, called BDS, could pick up some support.

Eighty-three percent of the world’s countries and almost every country that isn’t Arab or Muslim majority, recognizes Israel:

Note that this map, from 2009, doesn’t reflect Turkey and Israel severing relations.

That being said, Israel is extremely unpopular worldwide. In one BBC poll of 22 countries, Israel was the fourth disliked nation.

It’s clear that West Bank settlements are a key cause of Israel’s poor global standing. Most of the world believes that Israel’s continued control of the West Bank is an unlawful military occupation and that settlements violate the Fourth

Geneva Convention. Though this view is supported by most legal scholars, Israel and pro-Israel conservatives dispute it. They argue that the West Bank isn’t occupied and even if it were, the Fourth Geneva convention only prohibits “forcible” population transfers, not voluntary settlement.

The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, which coalesced in 2005, aims to capitalize on international anger with Israel. The movement’s strategy is to create costs to Israel’s Palestinian policy through boycotts of Israeli goods and institutions, divestment from Israeli companies, and sanctions on the nation itself (hence the name BDS).

BDS plans to continue boycotting Israel until 1) all of the settlements are dismantled, 2) they believe Palestinians have been given equal rights inside Israel’s borders, and 3) Palestinians refugees are granted the “right of return,” which means to return to the land and homes they used to inhabit in what is now Israel.

That last goal has led BDS’s critics to label it a stealth movement to destroy Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. While BDS does not take an official position on Israel’s existence, the size of the Palestinian refugee population means that if it gets what it wants on the right of return, Palestinians could potentially outnumber Israelis, ending Israel’s status as a Jewish state and giving Palestinians the power to dismantle the Israeli state.

Proposed Solutions to the Conflict

The Two State Solution

The “two-state solution” would create an independent Israel and Palestine, and is the mainstream approach to resolving the conflict. The idea is that Israelis and Palestinians want to run their countries differently; Israelis want a Jewish state, and Palestinians want a Palestinian one because neither side can get what it wants in a joined state, the only possible solution that satisfies everyone involves separating Palestinians and Israelis.

The One State Solution

The “one-state solution” would merge Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip into one big country. It comes in two versions. One, favoured by some leftists and Palestinians, would create a single democratic country. Arab Muslims would outnumber Jews, thus ending Israel as a Jewish state. The other version, favoured by some rightists and Israelis, would involve Israel annexing the West Bank and either forcing out Palestinians or denying them the right to vote. Virtually the

entire world, including most Zionists, rejects this option as an unacceptable human rights violation.

Most polling suggests that both Israelis and Palestinians prefer a two-state solution. However, the inability of Israelis and Palestinians to come to two-state terms has led to a recent surge in interest in a one-state solution, partly out of a sense of hopelessness and partly out of fear that if the sides cannot negotiate a two-state solution, a de facto one-state outcome will be inevitable.

https://www.ochaopt.org/theme/gaza-blockade

Links for detailed research:

https://www.aljazeera.com/topics/subjects/israelipalestinian-conflict.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-44124396

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/26/politics/trump-israeli-palestinian/index.html

https://in.reuters.com/article/israel-palestinians/gaza-israel-border-falls-quiet-as-ceasefire-takes-hold-idINKCN1SC04F

https://www.cfr.org/article/democratic-candidates-israeli-palestinian-conflict

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-religion-eid-palestinians-alaqsa/palestinians-and-israeli-police-clash-at-jerusalem-holy-site-idUSKCN1V107C