Many questions like: “why was the PLO founded before the occupation?”, “why did the Arab countries attack Israel in 1948?” “When and how were the Palestinian people invented?” “Why was there violence against Jews back in the 20’s?” “Why did they reject the Partition Plan in 47?” and more can be answered only after fully understanding the evolution and the chronology of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

 

 

1882 – all the area that is now known as Syria, Lebanon Jordan, Palestine and the land of Israel was a unit called “greater Syria”.  In the area of Palestine (between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River) lived a majority of Arabs and a minority of Jews (Jews lived for centuries mainly in the cities: Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed and Hebron). According to the Institute for Zionist Strategies, at that time there were almost half a million Arabs and about 45 thousands Jews lived in this region. At this year the first wave of Jewish immigration began.
The relationship between Jews and Arabs are good.

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1891 – The famous Zionist Asher Zvi Ginsberg (Ahad ha’am), comes to Palestine and writes an essay about life in Palestine and mentions the relationship between Arabs and the newly immigrants.
 

"We must surely learn, from both our past and present history, how careful we must be not to provoke the anger of the native people by doing them wrong….. The farmers are happy to have a new Hebrew colony founded in their midst since they receive a good wage for their labor and get wealthier from year to year, as experience shows; and the owners of large properties are also happy with us, since we pay them a huge price--more than they dreamed possible--for stony and sandy land. However, if the time comes when the life of our people in Eretz Israel develops to the point of encroaching upon the native population, they will not easily yield their place"
 

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1905 – Jews in Britain ask the government land for a Jewish stat. The British Empire doesn’t have a hold on Palestine therefore they offer the Zionists land in Uganda. The Zionists refuse.

 

1907 – Educator Itzhak Epstein criticizes the Zionist leadership and its disregarding the native Arabs and writes in the paper “HaShiloah” about the “disappeared question” :

We have forgotten one small matter: There is in our beloved land an entire nation, which has occupied it for hundreds of years and has never thought to leave it. . . 
 

 1914 – World War I started and The Jewish minority in Palestine had increased and constituted about 10% of the population. Jews and Arabs still live peacefully with each other.

                   
Great Britain and France anticipate the fall of the Ottoman Empire and secretly negotiated the future division of land between them.
In 16th of December 1915 British Colonel Mark Sykes comes to Downing 10 and says: "I should like to draw a line from the e in Acre to the last k in Kirkuk."
Sykes wanted to have a territorial continuation from oil fields located near Kirkuk (In Iraq) to the port of Haifa. Apart of oil, Britain wanted to create a British buffer zone to distance the French from the Suez Canal that was under British rule at the time.
In these negotiations, French negotiator François Georges-Picot , refuses to give up the area of Palestine to Britain and both sides agree that this area would be an international area.
Britain was unsatisfied from this agreement and tried to find ways to bypass it.
Furthermore, Britain needed USA’s support in the ongoing war, which until then objected to interfere and join it.
At the beginning of 1917, US president Woodrow Wilson made a speech in which he said he objects imperialism. Britain understood that occupying Palestine wouldn’t be tolerated by the US.
On the other hand, Wilson talked about his endorsement of Liberation of people.
Britain found a gateway to Palestine, if it would endorse Zionism, Britain won’t be subjected as imperialist but as a liberator of people and would still have control on the region that they desired.














British and Jewish minister Herbert Samuel had promised his British colleagues that Jews world wide and two million Jews who live in the US in particular would be grateful and help British efforts 1, British leaders met with notable Zionists (Chaim Weizmann, Nahum Sokolow, Aaron Aaronsohn and Herbert Samuel) to make sure that both sides have common interests and on the 2nd of November, one month BEFORE Britain conquered Palestine, Balfour Deceleration was given.
After Britain took over the territory between Iraq and Palestine the Mosul-Haifa oil pipeline was built and activated.
 
The Balfour Declaration was taken has a surprise by the native Arabs who brought up their resentments:

 

1. “The Jews who live with us before the British occupation are compatriots, our brothers and all Jews all over the worlds are our brothers of human kind”.
   taken from Nazareth’s petition against Zionist immigration 20/3/1920

2. "Even if Jews lived a long time in Palestine and left behind impressive monuments, it doesn’t give them the right to come back to this land. There is regularity in human history. A nation rises and another falls, a land rises on the ruins of another. In the same manner Arabs can reclaim Spain and Cyprus, the Turks reclaim the Balkan and the Romans can reclaim Britain. One can not draw the world map according ancient history”.
   Taken from the protest to the administrator 3/11/1918.

3. "Judaism is a religion and not a nation. Apart of religion Jews have nothing in common with one another. Hebrew is a dead language and Jews are citizens of the country they live in.Herbert Samuel and Lord Riding can not be British citizen and Jewish land citizen as well."
   Taken from the Arab leadership’s report to the Paris peace conference 3/2/1919.

4. "The Balfour Declaration has a contradiction: one can not be “in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and  at the same time say “that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.
   Taken from a memorandum to the League of Nations in 1922

5. According to British numbers, at the year 1918 there were 573,000 Arabs in Palestine (61,000 Christians and 512,000 Muslim) and only 66,000 Jews. Jewish property was estimated as less than 1 percent. For this reason it is absurd to let a minority rule over a majority of people.
   Taken from Jaffa’s protest to General Gilbert Clayton 8/11/1918 and at the Paris peace conference in 3/2/1919.

The birth of the Palestinian people
France and Britain arbitrary divided Great Syria against the will of its inhabitants (according to King-Crane commission 1,500 petitions were singed against the division of Great Syria), thus creating the birth of the Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, Iraqi and Palestinian nations.
https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/The_King-Crane_Report

While Syrians, Jordanians, Lebanese and Iraqi people unwillingly accepted this division, the Palestinians found themselves in a situation where they were trying to unify themselves as a new nation and they had compete with Jewish immigrants who had the greatest empire in the world as a patronage, on the same land.  

1919 – The king-crane commission came to the region and examined the future of the region. In its recommendation they referred the Zionist program and claimed that it constitutes a problem due to the fact that the land is not empty and it might harm the natives.
Click here to read King-Crane commission’s recommendations from 1919.
 

1920-1921– First two violent national riots between the Arabs and Jews in Palestine.

 

1922 – Britain starts to understand that the Balfour Declaration brought great tension in the Arab Population and Churchil arrives to Palestine and tries to calm them down:

 "Unauthorized statements have been made to the effect that the purpose in view is to create a wholly Jewish Palestine. Phrases have been used such as that Palestine is to become "as Jewish as England is English." His Majesty's Government regard any such expectation as impracticable and have no such aim in view. Nor have they at any time contemplated, as appears to be feared by the Arab delegation, the disappearance or the subordination of the Arabic population, language, or culture in Palestine. They would draw attention to the fact that the terms of the Declaration referred to do not contemplate that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be founded in Palestine."

 

1923 – Ze'ev Jabotinsky  writes his essay “The Iron Wall” where he explains that The Arabs in Palestine are the natives and that is why they are going to resist any colonial movement such as Zionism.
Therefore Jabotinsky recommend the Jews in Palestine to get ready towards the inevitable war.

 

"The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage…. Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuse to admit not only new masters but, even new partners or collaborators.  This is equally true of the Arabs…. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and the Sioux for their rolling Prairies… Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised."

 

1929- As Jabotinsky predicted, another inevitable circle of violence had erupted between Jew and Arabs in Palestine. At the end of 1928 (at the Jewish holiday of Atonement) Jews tried to change the status quo at the Western wall and put a barrier between women and men. The Arabs saw this as a provocation and violence started rising, mainly by Arabs towards the Jews. The violence escalated and got to its peak in 23/8/1929 when Arabs in Hebron conducted a massacre and killed 67 Jews. 

1929-1947 – All along the British mandate on Palestine, the British government tried to maneuver between the promise to the Jews about the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people and the promise to the Arabs that it won’t harm them.
Britain lost out both ways, the Arabs tried to revolt against the British mandate
(1936-1939) and from the end of the 30’s the Jews in Palestine revolted against them as well.
The Arab revolt had crushed the Arab society in Palestine causing five thousands killed, 108 executed and 12,622 detained.

 

29.11.1947 - Britain had enough and decides to throw responsibility on the UN. The UN decides to divide Palestine so that 55% will be a Jewish state and 45% will be an Arab state. It is important to know that Jews constituted about 33% of the entire population at the time and were mostly comprised of new immigrants.
The Palestinians regarded the division as a Solomon Trial- The mother who loves her baby won’t let it be divided by anyone. The Palestinians refuse the partition, the Jews accepted it. The UN voted for the Partition Plan.

29/11/1947-14/05/1948 -
Since the decision to divide the land, Jews and Arabs inside Palestine fought each other “to the bitter end”.
The Jews were well organized and well trained while the Palestinians were divided and still in a state of shock after the Arab revolt less than ten years before. Until the middle of May 1948, around 300 thousands Palestinians had fled Palestine to neighboring countries who hear the horrific stories (like Deir Yassin massacre) and cries for help.


May 1948 – Israel’s independent war –preface  

Alec Kirkbride, a British delegate in Jordan tried to prevent the upcoming war depicted the days that preceded the Arab countries invasion to Palestine:
I can’t count the numerous times or write how many conversations I had with Arab leaders in which I repeated and asked them to act caution just to be proven my efforts were in vain due to cries for help from inside Israel or an arrival of a new wave of immigrants and the news they spread.  

Jordan betrays the Palestinians -
King Abdullah the 1st doesn’t really want to enter with his new country (independent since 1946) to a war and he actually just wants to enlarge his own country on the expense of the territories allocated to the Palestinian land according to the Partition Plan. King Abdullah meets secretly twice with future Israel’s Prime Minister, Golda Meir.  

Alec Kirkbride adds: “King Abdullah is under enormous public pressure to enter troops to Palestine immediately. The fact that Amman is flooded with Palestinian refugees doesn’t make it easier on him”.

Israel’s Independence War
Israel sees the 1948 war as a war between Arabian armies who tried to destroy it while the Arabs sees the war as an attempt to save and help the Palestinians not to lose their land. The war is progressing in three phases with two temporary truces. In fact, after the fist truce, Israel has more military force than all the Arab armies together.
  

Epilogue
Israel won the war and got hold of 78% of the land. Around 350 thousands more Palestinians fled from Palestine. Egypt takes responsibility over the Gaza Strip and Jordan occupies and annexes the West Bank. This unilateral annexation is considered as treason and no country in the world recognized this annexation except Great Britain and Jordan was banned from the Arab League.
Palestinians tried to revolt twice against this occupation and assassinated king Abdullah.

Palestinian refugees are in a state of shock after their defeat; some of them try to infiltrate back, some try to work their abandoned lands , some try to get their assets back, some get punished by the Israeli army and some join the Palestinian Fedayeen guerilla group.

1953 – A Palestinian terrorist entered Israel and threw a grenade inside a house killing a mother and her two children.
The Israeli army revenges and conducts a massacre in the village Qibya in the West Bank killing around 70 civilians.
 

1964 – After 15 years of Jordanian occupation, King Hussein understands that he can’t deny the Palestinian entity and welcomes the establishment of the PLO, Palestine Liberation Organization.(under Jordanian occupation there were a couple of demonstrations against the occupation, the biggest ones were in April 1963 and in 1966. these demonstrations included burning the Jordanian flag and Jordanian soldiers shooting and killing Palestinian protesters.)

 

 

1967 – The Russians give Egypt information about Israel’s deployment of troops in the north, probably to invade Syria.
This initiates an arms race between Israel, and Egypt. Egypt decides to break the status quo and enter troops to the Sinai Peninsula. In the meanwhile they understand that the information they got from the Russians was false, but it was too late, the arms race had already begun. Israel enlists its reserve troops, Syria and Jordan decide to make an alliance and Israel decided to attack first and surprise Egypt.
Israel won this war in only six days and gained the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Israel would eventually return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in a peace agreement and annex the Golan Heights.
The Israeli knows it can’t annex the West Bank and the Gaza Strip because it would require giving full citizenship to millions of Palestinians and risking Israel’s Jewish character.
Therefore Israel puts the West Bank and the Gaza Strip under Israeli military rule. At the same time, Israeli right wing decides they want to inhabitant the West Bank and colonize it with Jewish settlements.

The purposes of the Israeli settlements are to put facts on the ground and declare that the West Bank is Israel’s forever and to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

 

1987 – First Intifada- after twenty years of foreign military rule, the Palestinian revolt against Israel.

1988 – As Jabotinsky’s said in 1923 that only after Israel becomes a fact, the moderates will come and negotiate.

 

“this does not mean that there cannot be any agreement with the Palestine Arabs. ….when there is no longer any hope of getting rid of us, because they can make no breach in the iron wall…..And the leadership will pass to the moderate groups, who will approach us with a proposal that we should both agree to mutual concessions”

In December 1988 the Plo’s leadership had announced they are willing to accept UN resolutions regarding the Palestinian territories and are willing to settle on a Palestinian land over 22% of the land.

 

1993 – Oslo Accords
Israel and Palestinians sign an interim peace deal:
Due to the Israeli settlements, occupied territories are divided to two kinds: “Israeli territories” (C areas) and Palestinian territories” (A, B areas).
The Palestinians thought that in time Israel would evacuate C areas and enable the establishment of a Palestinian land over the 22% remaining of the land but actually since 1993 the number of settlers had tripled itself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 In the United States, where they number about 2,000,000, and in all the other lands where they are scattered, they would form the body of opinion whose bias, where the interest of the country of which they were citizens was not involved, would be favourable to the British Empire.