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The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is one of the most enduring and
complex in the modern world. But, why did the conflict break out? Who is
demanding what, and why is peace so difficult to achieve?
The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict tackles the subject and analyses the conflict from its
historical roots in the late nineteenth century to the present attempts at conflict
resolution in the twenty-first century.
Framing the debate and analysis around issues such as Zionism, Palestinian
nationalism, international peace efforts, the refugees, state-building, democracy
and religious opposition, and highlighted by first-hand quotes and sources of the
conflict from its major participants, Beverley Milton-Edwards explores the deep
impact of the conflict on regional politics in the Middle East and why the enmity
between Palestinians and Israelis has become a number one global issue drawing
in the world’s most important global actors.
An essential insight into the complexities of one of the world’s most enduring
conflicts, this textbook is designed to make a complex subject accessible to all. Key
features include:

• Chronology of events
• Annotated further reading at the end of each chapter

The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict is an ideal and authoritative introduction to aspects

of politics in Israel and among the Palestinians – a vitally important issue for those
studying the politics of the Middle East.

Beverley Milton-Edwards is Professor in the School of Politics, International

Studies and Philosophy at Queens University Belfast. She is the author of Islamic
Fundamentalism Since 1945 (Routledge 2004) and Contemporary Politics in the Middle
East (2006).
The Israeli–Palestinian
Conflict
A people’s war

Beverley Milton-Edwards
First published 2009
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

© 2009 Beverley Milton-Edwards

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Milton-Edwards, Beverley.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict: a people’s war / Beverley Milton-Edwards.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Arab–Israeli conflict. I. Title.
DS119.7.M497 2008
956.04—dc22 2008001509

ISBN 0-203-89426-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–41044–4 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0–415–41043–6 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–89426–X (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–41044–1 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–41043–4 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–89426–2 (ebk)
To Cara daughter of Bethlehem and light of our lives
Contents

List of Illustrations x
Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1
1 Roots of conflict 9
Ottoman idyll? 10
Zionism 13
The Palestinian nationalist ‘awakening’ 17
The First World War and its consequences 21
Balfour bombshell 23
Parallel points 27
Further reading 29
2 Between the wars 32
The gloves are off: determining the future of Palestine 33
The mandate 35
Ascendance 39
Prelude to revolt 40
Sheikh, rattle and revolt 41
The Palestinian revolt 43
Resistance 45
The Peel Commission: partition of Palestine 47
The revolt and the Zionists 48
End of an era 49
World war and rethinking the mandate 51
Further reading 52
3 Palestine after the Holocaust 54
War clouds 55
After the dust has settled 57
viii Contents
The UN Partition Plan of 1947 59
The future decided 63
British blight? 66
What came next 68
Whose history? The events of 1947–48 70
Legacy 72
Further reading 73
4 Israel reborn 76
Divine model or democracy by expediency 78
Political parties and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict 82
Labour Zionism 83
Revisionist Zionism 85
The religious Zionists 87
Between a rock and a hard place: the Israeli Arabs 90
Israel’s democratic future 94
Further reading 96
5 The dispossessed 98
Becoming refugees: origins of an issue 99
We who are refugees 101
Refugees: the key to peace? 108
Compensation 111
Talking about refugees 113
Further reading 117
6 The occupation generation 119
The Six-Day War 119
Spoils of war 121
A framework for control 123
Facts on the ground: Israel’s settlements 125
Resistance under occupation 131
Liberating Palestine through an organization 132
Occupation and employment 136
The pressure cooker 137
Further reading 139
7 The war of the stones and guns 141
Insurrection 143
Palestinian political goals 145
An Arab ‘shaking off’? 147
Israel responds 148
The strategy for change 150
 Contents ix
Consolidation and political progress 152
Actions speak louder than words: getting to the second Intifada 153
The al-Aqsa armed Intifada 154
Operation Defensive Shield: unequivocal victory? 157
Further reading 160
8 A global concern 161
Date with destiny: America and the conflict 165
A regional concern 172
The international arena 176
A European approach 178
A concert of actors? 179
Further reading 180
9 Moving from zero 182
The broken path to peace: resolving or managing the conflict 187
Making it to Madrid 188
Oslo and all that 190
Opposition to Oslo 193
Camp David and the second Intifada 195
The second Intifada and death of peace 197
Disengaging for peace? 200
The rocky road to peace 202
Annapolis or bust 202
Further reading 204

Chronology 206
Bibliography 210
Index 223
Illustrations

Figure
6.1 Image of subversion: Handala, the small Palestinian boy penned
by cartoonist Naji al-Ali 138

Tables
8.1 Important United Nations resolutions 177
9.1 Israeli–Palestinian peace process 1993–2006 198
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Joe Whiting at Routledge for persuading me to tackle this
most difficult and complex of current day political conflicts. I hope the book will
offer some alternative perspectives to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the ways
in which it can be understood. I’d like to extend my especial gratitude to Ray
Dolphin and Stephen Farrell, both of whom helped me with the thinking and
writing of the book.
During my time as a visiting scholar at the Kenyon Institute in Jerusalem I was
fortunate enough to access some rare books and other sources that have allowed
me to add real colour and depth to this project. I am thus deeply indebted to all
the staff there, including Yuri Stoyanov, Tim Moore and chief librarian, Hussein
Gheith, for their assistance and help. The lively lectures and debates to which
many Israelis and Palestinians attended also allowed me the opportunity to
explore many ideas associated with the conflict and responses to them.
To the many Israelis and Palestinians who have helped with this book I would
like to offer my sincere thanks for their insights over the years. I also truly benefited
from the help of Rema Hammami, Bassima, Mustafa, Sanabel, Ghassan and
Mohammed Qawasmi, Ra’ad Malki, Khalil and Saha Malouf, Hassan Bazarlit,
Khalid Ifrangi, Nancy, Edin and Liel Zeitlin, Colin Smith, Michael Pearson,
Nabil Feidy, Barbara Surk, Mouin Rabbani, Alex Pollock, Nuha Awadallah
Muslih, Fares Akram, Abu Bilal, Ashraf al-Masri, Abu Mahmoud, Ilan and Galia
Katsir, Dina Masri and Nadim Shehadi for some unique insights into the daily
dynamics of conflict and coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis.
My final thanks, as ever, to Graham, Cara and Joshua for their continuing
support.
Beverley Milton-Edwards
December 2007
Introduction

What the colonial in common with Prospero lacks, is awareness of the world of
Others, a world in which Others have to be.
(Frantz Fanon, 1969: 107)

Turn right moments after you pass the Israeli and then Palestinian military check-
points that control the West Bank town of Jericho and you enter the tightly
guarded compound of Palestine’s only casino and hotel complex with its darkened
windows and glitzy OASIS signage glinting amidst the desert dust.
Deathly quiet, the Oasis building echoes to the gambling ghosts of the past who
came in their thousands from Israel to try their luck at the gaming tables and the
slot machines under a star-studded ceiling. The $50 million Oasis Casino was but
one part of a venture to turn ‘peace into tourism’ benefiting both Israelis and
Palestinians alike. On the opposite side of the road the Palestinian refugee camp of
Aqabat Jaber, however, remains full of life and its residents remain in eternal hope
of a peace settlement that means a return to their homes. Today the Oasis Casino
is closed, the gamblers have gone home and the peace deal that heralded it in 1993
feels like a hopeless mirage.
In its heyday the Oasis Casino was a surreal epitome of a peace process that
had been inaugurated by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Chairman
of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat, when they signed the
Oslo Accords on the lawn of the White House in September 1993.
This iconoclastic institution represented the trashy transient reality of a peace
process that failed to resolve the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
A thousand news photographs rendered into one archetype the handshake
between Rabin and Arafat that September day in 1993. ‘A Peace of the Braves’
was declared as first Rabin and then Arafat spoke of ‘war, blood, tears, and battles’
and how they would transform them into ‘peace, co-existence, and dignity’. But
the archetype belied the true face of a deal that so many more declared stillborn.
Within less than a decade the peace process would be in tatters, Rabin would be
dead and Yasser Arafat in his last throes holed up in his presidential compound in
the West Bank city of Ramallah. Violence and bitter enmity would stalk Israeli
and Palestinian towns and a sense of empathy would be lost.
While it is true that the Oslo Accords represented a turning point in the
  Introduction
Israeli–Palestinian conflict, it was not the peace deal that so many deluded them-
selves into believing it was. True some condemned the deal as a ‘Palestinian
Versailles’ or a heresy against the Jewish covenant with God in the Holy Land.
Others truly believed that peace was possible and that the international environ-
ment typified by the New World Order would make the task of healing between
the Israelis and Palestinians viable. If international statesmen like President
Clinton could bring peace to Northern Ireland and the Israelis and Palestinians
then maybe the USA deserved its global pre-eminence after all.
Explaining why and how it went wrong is one of the tasks that will be under-
taken in this book.
The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is one of the most enduring and
intractable to beset the contemporary world order. Today the ‘battle’ between the
citizens of the state of Israel and the stateless Palestinian people is part of a charred
and twisted landscape of increasingly envenomed enmity. The relationship
between Israelis and Palestinians is deeply complex and thus lacks a simple expla-
nation or solution. This absence of a single or simple explanation has made the
conflict hard for other people to understand. Too many questions and not enough
answers commonly dog anyone that starts to consider the conflict. This book is an
attempt to identify and analyse the most important features of the conflict. The
book takes both the historical and contemporary dimension into consideration
when outlining the ways in which relations between Jews and Arabs have been
altered and affected by the context of Palestine.
The conflict over national ideals, colonialism, religion, class, economy, land,
self-determination and sovereignty is also a motif for the wider debates and issues
that have characterized the international system. The historical ebbs and flows of
the Israeli–Palestinian conflict thus also reflect the dynamics of larger political
themes that have animated the study of the international political system
throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Issues such as reconciling
the demands of nationalism not merely as a concept but as a set of demands for
statehood and territoriality in the world order are epitomized by the Israeli–
Palestinian conflict as two nations establish themselves and a sense of distinct iden-
tity. The dynamic of defining statehood and nation is thus reflected as a case study
when examining, as we do in this book, the development of identity as a means to
acquire power and independence. In many ways the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
has also been shaped by the ways in which developments in the international
arena, such as the superpower rivalry between the USA and the former USSR,
the declining power of European colonial powers such as Britain, the rise of a
hegemonic global power such as the USA, have enveloped the Middle East. In the
twenty-first century it is not uncommon for major external powers to cite the reso-
lution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a major, if not the major, foreign policy
objective of their state and yet the conflict appears to be getting harder, not easier,
to resolve.
The resolution of the conflict is perceived as the key to securing better pros-
perity, security and stability in the wider Middle East region and thus within the
international system and international economy. As the former Palestinian
 Introduction 
National Security Advisor, Jibril Rajoub, contends, ‘building peace is to want
peace and to want to pay the price of peace . . . in this way we will find security,
peace and prosperity for Israel and the Palestinians’ (Rajoub, 2007). This in part
explains why this conflict matters so much to the rest of the globe. In some respects
the course of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has altered and affected the politics of
neighbouring states such as Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, as well as regional
issues such as Arab unity, Muslim identity and the growing notion that the Middle
East has come to represent a cradle of modern violence and terrorism. Moreover,
throughout the history of the conflict a variety of regional and international actors
including independent sovereign states such the USA or Britain, regional organi-
zations such as the European Union and the Arab League, as well as international
actors such as the United Nations or the World Bank have all been drawn into this
conflict.
But it is the people – Israeli and Palestinian – constituted as distinct nations and
with competing aspirations for statehood over the same territory that truly explain
why this conflict came about. This is why the conflict may be considered to be a
people’s war and a war of people’s increasingly irreconcilable perspectives and
ambitions. In this conflict there have been episodes of war when the army of Israel
has faced the armies of Syria, Egypt and Jordan (and others) on the battlefield. But
the historical and contemporary norm has seen the mobilization of two competing
nations: Israeli versus Palestinian in a conflict with each other that is military,
economic, political, cultural, and religious in expression at one time or another. As
one Western journalist acerbically noted, ‘this is not about them [Israelis and
Palestinians] not being on the same page but they are not even sharing the same
book when they talk about the conflict and the way they see it’.
Some nine themes will be dealt with in the analysis that follows in this book.
Each chapter will explore one theme in order that some aspects of the subject can
be broken down and made more comprehensible. The first theme as outlined in
Chapter 1 is that this conflict has an important historical background. The book
then will begin with an examination of late nineteenth-century Palestine – a
Muslim Ottoman province and largely rural society. Palestine, as a province of the
Ottoman Empire, with its centre of power in Constantinople (Istanbul), caught the
attention of Western Europeans. The European interest in the land was motivated
by a number of factors: spiritual, cultural, colonial, economic and political/stra-
tegic. Some factors – such as the spiritual attachment and renaissance in romantic
Christian associations with Zion and the Jewish people – led to a growing
sympathy for the Zionist cause of Jewish nationalism.
It is from these sorts of historic roots that the British supported the growth of
Jewish settlement and the Zionist movement in establishing a homeland there. In
turn, when Britain ended up in control of the country it led them to view with
sympathy Zionist aspirations to settle the territory under their control. Such devel-
opments inevitably encouraged the development of parallel points of identity
issues and politics between Jews and Arabs and their nascent nationalist ideologies
– including Zionism and Palestinian nationalism. But this led to growing tensions
between the Jews and Arabs associated with Jewish land settlement and growing
  Introduction
Palestinian frustration and revolt at British intervention and interference in the
incipient conflict.
This means that the roots of contestable conflict are outlined. The conflict
resulted from the growing consciousness of both Jews and Palestinian Arabs of a
new political identity forged in the ideologies of nationalism and self-determina-
tion. The context in which this was occurring was also coloured by the incipient
national interest of Britain (in competition with France) to enhance its role in the
Middle East (and by extension India). Western rivalry in the region during the
First World War and its effects on Palestine were thus deeply significant. In 1917,
for example, the British had issued a declaration to the leadership of the Jewish
national movement: the Zionists, outlining their support for the establishment of a
Jewish homeland in Palestine. But they had already agreed, in secret promises to
both the French and the Arabs, a different future for Palestine. The advent of
British interference and rule changed the course of history with respect to the
desire for statehood and independence as expressed in the nationalist ideologies of
both the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs at the time.
In 1918 at the end of the First World War Britain and France persuaded the
new League of Nations, in which they were the dominant powers, to give them
authority over the Ottoman territories that had fallen into their hands during the
war. The whims of the British mandatory power – rather than the principle of the
mandate system – would determine the future of Palestine and in Chapter 2 I will
critically examine its impact. These new British and French regimes were known
as mandates and protectorates. Britain obtained the Mandate for Palestine in
1920–23, plus the newly established states of Transjordan and Iraq. Britain then
tried to persuade the Arabs to embrace the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine
as underscored in the written terms of the mandate for British rule in Palestine
when it was formally issued in 1923. The incompatible promises made as wartime
expediency to the Arabs and the Zionists began to cause problems for the British
in terms of fulfilling their mandate in Palestine.
The rise of Nazism in Hitler’s Germany, new waves of Jewish immigration,
plus restive nationalism leading to the outbreak of the 1936–39 Uprising and
general strike by Palestinians will also be analysed in Chapter 2. British responses
– including the somewhat pointless commissioning of one government committee
of investigation after another, repression, and attempt to play the old colonial card
of divide and rule – demonstrated the inability of the British authorities to do
justice to the Palestinian Arabs or respond sensitively to the growing force of
Zionism made manifest in Jewish immigration and settlement activity. Re-
thinking the mandate and the rising conflict in Palestine resulted in a proposal for
the partition of territory.
In Chapter 3 the process of British withdrawal from Palestine as it sought an
exit strategy from the unfolding conflict will be examined within the framework of
the wider international environment after the Second World War and the perpe-
tration of the Holocaust and decimation of the Jewish population of Europe. The
focus, therefore, will be on issues of immigration, political development of
opposing elements, the incipient military campaign waged by the Zionists against
 Introduction 
the British and the concurrent developments within the Zionist movement with
respect to the aspiration for Jewish statehood. The UN Partition Plan will be
examined along with the Zionist acceptance and Arab rejection debate. The
prelude to war – including the controversial Zionist violence and the massacres of
1947–48 – will be debated within the framework of contemporary analysis of
ethnic cleansing, population transfer and other dimensions of ethnic and national
politics. The issue of international intervention also needs to be explained in terms
of the Second World War, the Holocaust and Western guilt and reparation issues
to the Jewish people. The British decision to withdraw from Palestine and relin-
quish its mandate will be explored in terms of both domestic and foreign factors.
The events of 1947–48 and their consequences in terms of the following decade
for the new state of Israel and its evolving polity will be explored in Chapter 4. The
chapter will then analyse the institutions of the Jewish state, state- and nation-
building and the growing issue of enmity with Israel’s Arab neighbours. This eval-
uation of the new state will delineate the nature of Israeli society including its
secular and religious dimensions as well as the emergence of the Israeli political
party system. This evolving political system also reflected Israeli concerns and
responses as a state to the Palestinian people, their demands and the threats that
Israel perceived them as posing. This threat has led the Israeli state to develop as a
highly militarized democratic system on near-permanent war footing and often
compelled to concern itself with strategic issues as they relate to the military
balance in the wider Middle East region, demographic warfare through encour-
aging Jewish immigration, and territorial expansion.
According to the United Nations, ‘by far the most protracted and largest of all
refugee problems in the world today is that of the Palestine refugees’ (UNHCR,
2006). Estimating refugee numbers is a highly ‘political debate’ but it is estimated
that today there are over 7 million Palestinian refugees and their descendents.
Moreover, the entire nation of the Palestinian people has been stateless since 1948.
Dispossession and statelessness have thus increasingly defined the Palestinian
experience. Chapter 5 examines the establishment of the refugee phenomenon in
1948 and 1967 as well as responses to it by a variety of actors. The chapter will
outline the effective dismemberment of Palestine between Israel, Jordan and
Egypt after the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948. Post-1948 it will look at the impact
in terms of the regional nature of the conflict, and the political disempowerment of
the Palestinians as a result of their refugee status. The chapter will also examine
the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in 1964
with Egyptian help, including its structure in relation to refugees in the Arab states
of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, armed activities, and the burgeoning culture of
nationhood without a state. The chapter will focus on themes such as human
rights, citizenship and the ‘right of return’ and examine the response of the inter-
national community.
It was not only the events of the June 1967 Six-Day War that changed the
dynamic of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict but the consequent process of Israeli
occupation, Israeli settlement, Arab crisis, Palestinian dispossession again and the
emergence of a Palestinian resistance force and the state-like entity of the PLO.
  Introduction
Hence Chapter 6 addresses themes such as occupation, settlement policies,
terrorism, and the continuing internationalization of the conflict – either through
peace settlement (between Israel and Egypt in 1978) or Israeli military adventure
(in Lebanon in 1978 and again in 1982) and the subsequent expulsion of the PLO
and its factionalism. By looking at, for example, settlement policy and the estab-
lishment of ‘facts on the ground’ the economic and geographic dimensions of the
conflict will also be revealed.
Human rights debates will be examined through the growing intimacy between
these enemies that became constructed around the institutions and mechanisms of
occupation. In this way the chapter will demonstrate the effects that occupation
had on the dynamics of both Israeli and Palestinian society.
In Chapter 7 of the book the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising in December
1987, known as the Intifada, both challenged and changed perceptions of the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The future viability of the Israeli occupation was called
into question and the prospects for a peaceful resolution to the enmity between
Israel and the PLO were seen to increase.
The political strategies adopted and pursued by the Palestinians and the Israelis
during this period had an effect on their internal polities and created new pres-
sures and a demand for responses that centred on the principle of conflict resolu-
tion through negotiation. Palestinian political strategies during this period
included the pursuit of mass-based civil disobedience as a means of resisting the
occupation and demanding statehood and independence. Palestinians were
perceived differently as a result of the media focus on Israel’s action and, perhaps
for the first time in their history, the Western perception of them was as victims
rather than terrorists. This led to a political momentum that some argue culmi-
nated in the 1991 Madrid peace talks and the 1993 Oslo Accords otherwise known
as the Declaration of Principles. Aspects of the conflict also changed. On both
sides of the divide the voice of the religious right, the fundamentalists and conser-
vatives emerged amidst the cacophony of chaos that the Intifada induced. In both
cases the conservative and religious elements acted as spoilers on the attempts
coming from both sides to build peace and seek a ‘land for peace’ deal.
Throughout the early 1990s the movement for peace, on both sides of the
divide, appeared to gain momentum and culminated in a series of events that
concluded in the Oslo Accords being signed in 1993. This process and those who
both supported and rejected it will also be examined in this chapter. The return of
PLO Chairman, Yasser Arafat, first to Gaza and then the West Bank and the
establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and Gaza Strip
were greeted with immense optimism. But because Oslo was not a peace deal but
the framework for final status negotiation on issues such as settlements, borders,
refugees and Jerusalem things began to unravel throughout the middle to late
1990s.
The advent of proto-state politics, institutions and structures with the
Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) and the elections of 1996 will be addressed
in this chapter, particularly in respect of wider debates about state-building, sover-
eignty, civil society, corruption and authoritarianism. Spoilers and rejectionists
 Introduction 
and their impact on the peace process will be analysed in the context of categories
such as the religious elements, etc. Israeli withdrawal and Palestinian autonomy
will be reviewed. The Hebron massacre and the killing of Yitzhak Rabin will be
presented in terms of the difficulties associated with moving societies from militari-
zation and violence to normalization and peace. The settlements factor, the poli-
tics of precariousness, stalemate and suicide bombings will also be considered. The
beginning of the dissolution of the Oslo process – Netanyahu, Wye, Camp David,
Taba – the resumption of the armed struggle and the outbreak of the armed or
‘Al-Aqsa’ Intifada of 2000 and its impact on the conflict will be examined at the
end of this chapter.
One unique dimension of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has been its ‘interna-
tional character’. Chapter 8 focuses on a series of debates and discussions about
the role of regional and other international actors in the conflict and the various
effects this has had in both exacerbating and contributing to the resolution of the
conflict. Various ‘circles of interaction’ will be revealed with respect to such
regional actors as Arab states, including the Arab League, plus radical versus
conservative regimes and their role in the conflict. It will examine the ‘Muslim
dimension’ of the conflict as well as the response and symbolism of the conflict for
the worldwide Jewish Diaspora and Christianity. This is important because these
vital constituencies of support in turn have lobbied, supported and played a part in
shaping the conflict. Additionally international actors such the USA, the former
Soviet Union, and Britain will be scrutinized for their involvement and foreign
policy motivations. Finally the role of international and regional organizations
such as the United Nations (UN), the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC),
and the European Union (EU) will be debated with respect to historical turns in
the international order as well as with respect to the specific issues that determine
the nature and character of this conflict.
The last chapter of this book will introduce the idea of peacemaking and
conflict resolution and its impact on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It will examine
the ways in which the later events of 1987 and the outbreak of the Palestinian
uprising changed the perceptions internally and externally of the conflict. This
includes looking at or examining issues of conflict settlement or peace-building
such as civil disobedience, mass protest, the role of civil society, victims versus
terrorists, and popular resistance. I will examine dimensions of conflict resolution
and transition from conflict that have been proposed, attempted, succeeded at and
failed in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian dynamic. Hence the themes exam-
ined will include: transfer, annexations, one-state versus two-state solutions, and
how to end conflict. Issues of state recognition, legitimacy, strategies for negotia-
tion, asymmetry, and reciprocity will be debated. Ceasefires, ‘periods of calm’,
and military and civilian evacuations for territory will be assessed for their contri-
bution in creating or maintaining the ‘resolution momentum’. In this chapter the
economic (particularly in terms of wider discourses of global capital and interna-
tional and regional competitiveness) will be examined in the context of both soci-
eties as well as future integration ambitions. The chapter ends by examining the
prospects for peace in the wake of the collapse of the Oslo process following the
  Introduction
outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000, the Road Map issued by the international
community in 2002, the election of the Hamas government by the Palestinians in
January 2006, and the regular changes of government in Israel. It reflects on the
decline of people-to-people peace-building efforts, the growing internal political
infighting that gripped both the Israeli and Palestinian domestic arena and the
huge obstacles that now seem to block the path to peace through the formula of a
two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinian people.
1 Roots of conflict

Chapter outline
• Ottoman idyll? 10
• Zionism 13
• The Palestinian nationalist ‘awakening’ 17
• The First World War and its consequences 21
• Balfour bombshell 23
• Parallel points 27
• Further reading 29

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is one of the most enduring of the modern era and
it continues to entangle and engage the international community to the present
day. The ongoing battle between the Israelis and Palestinians is rooted in a
struggle between the two peoples over land, national identity, political power and
the politics of self-determination. The initial context of the conflict lies in the
decline of Ottoman Muslim power and the opposition from within this society
from a new breed of nationalist. European territorial ambitions and the emer-
gence of new notions of territorial nationalism that would come to bind both the
Palestinian and Jewish people to ambitions for independence and statehood in the
same territory are also clearly significant factors shaping the period that can be
considered as epitomizing the roots of the conflict.
By the late nineteenth century the leaders of the Ottoman Empire, who were
based in Constantinople (Istanbul) in Turkey, had ruled over much of the Arab
world for centuries. Palestine and its principal city of Jerusalem had been charac-
terized by Ottoman rule for some 500 years. The subject inhabitants of the territo-
ries known as Palestine included native Muslims, Christians and Jews. While the
Muslims constituted the majority this religiously mixed population had lived in
relative harmony for hundreds of years but this situation was soon to change.
This chapter, then, will outline the historical background to the conflict. It will
begin with an examination of late-nineteenth-century Palestine – an Ottoman
province and largely rural society. It will then outline emerging discourses on
10 Roots of conflict
Jewish nationalism and the ascendance of Palestinian national identity. It will
trace the events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in respect of
rising European interest in Palestine and the outbreak of the First World War in
1914 and its impact in the arena of the Middle East. This is because the region
became subject to the competing strategic and other ambitions of European
powers, of Britain and France in particular. Moreover, the dominant Ottoman
Turkish authorities sided with Germany during the war, leading to a series of
battles and revolts in its empire territories of the Middle East between and on
behalf of the warring parties.
The writing will draw out parallel points of identity issues and politics between
Jews and Arabs and their nascent nationalist ideologies – including Zionism and
Palestinian nationalism. The chapter will address growing tensions between the
Jews and Arabs associated with Jewish land settlement and growing Palestinian
frustration and revolt at British mediation of the incipient conflict. This means
that the roots of the conflict are outlined. It will detail Western rivalry in the region
during the First World War and its effects on Palestine. This will thus include
examination of French–British machinations, including the Sykes–Picot
Agreement of 1916, in addition to an explanation of the Balfour Declaration of
1917 as well as the earlier Hussein–McMahon Correspondence of 1915. This
gives a dimension of much needed political analysis in terms of theories of state,
nation and colonial ambition as well as attitudes towards the region.

Ottoman idyll?
The story of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is rooted in the last decades of
Ottoman Turkish rule over Palestine. The Ottomans ruled over Palestinian terri-
tory for hundreds of years but in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the
early decades of the twentieth events conspired to bring change instead of
Ottoman continuity. Although ethnic difference may have divided the Ottoman
Turkish rulers from their Arab subordinates the common faith of Islam had largely
united the Middle East. Jews and Christians, minority subjects, also enjoyed a
close relationship with the Ottoman authorities, where the usual strictures about
non-Muslim subjects were often overlooked (Levy, 2002).
This common unity of Muslim faith between Turk and Arab was, however,
challenged by growing foreign infiltration and involvement in Palestine, leading to
a variety of European rivalries and contests, which often cost the local population
dearly. In this respect matters in Palestine were a mirror of events elsewhere in the
Ottoman Empire as its grip on power declined in the face of growing European
penetration. Economic as well as political and religious imperatives largely explain
the changes that would beset the area. Such changes would impact on a local
population that was mostly rural, Muslim, and had largely contented itself with a
way of life that they had enjoyed as a result of centuries of relatively stable
Ottoman rule.
The population of Palestine, as previously noted, was mostly Muslim, but did
include other religious minorities, such as Christians and Jews, in major cities and
 Roots of conflict 11
towns such as Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Jaffa and Hebron. By the 1870s this minor
cosmopolitan mix was described as a patchwork quilt of different cultures, reli-
gions and ways of life:

spawned by the endless waves of invasion [which] had produced a network of

anarchic bonhomie where Maghribi mystics, Armenian craftsmen, Talmudic
scholars, British mercenaries, Turkish gendarmerie and Greek orthodox
traders lived side by side with the merchants, landowners and religious elite
who made up the upper echelon of Sunni Muslim society.
(Smith, 1984: 8)

By the 1870s–80s Ottoman-ruled Palestine also included a highly stratified soci-

etal structure presided over by the rulers from Istanbul and their local agents,
sometimes referred to as the Effendi class. They oversaw a series of reforms called
the tanzimaat (1839–76) that were meant to modernize education, the status of
minorities, the bureaucracy of state, political and religious institutions and law and
order (Abu Manneh, 1990). The initial intent behind such reforms was also to
reassert the hegemony of Ottoman power in its Palestinian province at a time
when rebellion, banditry, lawlessness and general insecurity were said to charac-
terize the area.
European travellers at the time often described at length the extent to which
lawlessness prevailed in the Holy Land. In the 1880s William Thomson remarks
in his lengthy account of travels in ‘The Land and the Book’ that journeys in and
around the environs of Jerusalem had improved considerably as a result of
Ottoman reforms after ‘Ibrahim Pasha had broken up the nest of robbers’. For
before such changes, ‘no-one could reside outside the walls of Jerusalem for fear of
those lawless robbers, nor were the city gates kept open after sunset’ (Thomson,
1883: 61). Thomson was just one of a succession of Europeans who by the 1880s
were having an impact on Palestinian society and the way it was represented back
in Europe. The establishment of myriad competing European missions and reli-
gious societies, pilgrims, tourists, artists, writers, poets, foreign trade, and the
settlement of new communities in Palestine increasingly led to contact and impact
on the local landed and notable families. Inevitably the politics and the economy
of Palestine began to alter. New class alliances and interests emerged to challenge
and ultimately diminish the influence of traditional elements such as the tribal
chiefs and heads of clans. Urbanization and modernization gave rise to new
elements within society – Muslim, Christian, Jewish – who prospered through
trade and commerce and educated their children in modern and/or European
style schools, missions and other institutions.
Meanwhile the vast majority of the population – the peasants (fellahin) from the
many hundreds of villages and hamlets that typified the area – were part of a social
and economic system of clan and tribe and loyalty to local lords (Muslih, 1988:
47). Local networks of power and patronage were further challenged by the
impact of Ottoman reforms, which created new structures of power and chal-
lenged the hegemony of village sheikhs or mukhtars. There is some disagreement on
12 Roots of conflict
the extent to which the Ottomans were successful in altering power relations
within the village but there can be no doubting the impacts on village life in
general that the last decades of the Ottoman Empire had (Gerber, 1986: 30).
By 1900 immigration to Palestine by Jews also led to the establishment of about
20 new exclusive communities or colonies where some 5,000 Jewish immigrants
lived (Smith 1984: 15). In the wake of the anti-Jewish Russian pogroms of 1881–84
and 1903–06 thousands of Jews chose to escape to Palestine. These waves of immi-
gration were known in Hebrew as aliyah (ascent). This concept of aliyah, of an
‘ascent’ to the Holy Land by Jews through immigration, became one of the funda-
mental tenets of modern Zionism and was later enshrined in the ‘Law of Return’
by the state of Israel. The first waves of immigration to Palestine during this period
were made for ideological, pragmatic and spiritual reasons. The first aliyah dates
from the period of 1882–1903. Jews came to Palestine to settle the land. During
this time the majority of these Zionist immigrants came from Eastern Europe or
Russia and they established new communities (moshav) mostly in the countryside.
They did, however, also found new towns such as Rishon LeZion and Zikhron
Ya’akov.
The second aliyah (1904–14) was much more ideologically motivated by
socialist Zionist ideals and it was from this group of immigrants that the first
socialist utopian community known as kibbutz (gathering) was founded. These
collective communities would come to form a cornerstone of the state of Israel as
well as modern Zionism. The kibbutz communities were interpreted as a symbol
of redemption Zionism where the modern Jew could fully reach his or her poten-
tial free of the shackles of anti-Semitism and oppression that had dogged their
experiences as a minority and Diaspora community in Europe and Russia. In this
way, as will be explained in Chapter 3, the differences between Labour Zionism
with its socialist ideals and epitomized by David Ben Gurion, right-wing revisionist
Zionism led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky and the religious Zionist community also became
apparent (Segev, 2001: 209–10).
The kibbutzim are often described as one of the largest and most successful
examples of collective community. This is where the realization of the ideal of
socialism and Zionism in Palestine had been successfully achieved. The kibbutz
implied a form of communal living, which in the early years of state independence
gave rise to a generation of political, military and other leaders. The settler
founders of the kibbutz movement also saw the land that they settled as the means
to the foundation of a Jewish nation and state based on the principles of freedom
and equality. The kibbutzniks, as they became known, were considered to be
‘pioneers’, farming and growing on Palestine’s ‘empty lands’ and ‘making the
desert bloom’. With a desire for the establishment of a self-sufficient utopian enter-
prise centred on the Jew it was little surprise that contacts with the indigenous
Arab population would be tenuous at best. And although the number of kibbut-
niks was relatively small they were considered to be the ‘guardians of Zionist land,
and their patterns of settlement would to a great extent determine the country’s
borders . . . the kibbutzim also had a powerful effect on the Zionist self-image’
(Segev, 2001: 249). One critic, however, opines that such projections ‘leave out the
 Roots of conflict 13
facts that . . . Arabs were never admitted as members, that cheap (Arab or
Oriental Jew) labor is essential to kibbutz functioning, that “socialist” kibbutzim
were and are established on land confiscated from Arabs’ (Said, 1980: 21). The
same was true of later developments within Labour Zionism such as the formation
of the Jewish Labour Federation (the Histadrut) in 1920; ‘its objectives were
considered synonymous with those of the Zionist movement’ (Segev, 2001: 209).
Hence the rights of Arab labour were basically excluded. The fact is that these
early waves of settlement, on lands that had been owned or dwelled on by
Palestinians for generations, contributed to a nascent tension and hostility between
these Zionist settlers and the indigenous Palestinian population. Critics consider
this to be a form of colonization by an alien group of settlers seeking economic
output from the enterprise. This emphasis on the nationalist, Zionist and religious
sentiments behind early Jewish settlement overlooks the pressing need to escape
persecution in the European continent.

Zionism
The history of the Jewish people, like Christianity and Islam, is intimately tied to
the Holy Land or Palestine. The spiritual and historical chronicles of Judaism are
rooted in experiences that took place in and around the lands of Palestine. The
ancient kingdoms of the Jewish kings were located in cities such as Jerusalem. For
those that are seeking it, Palestine is a repository of Jewish history, spirituality,
hopes, dreams and aspirations for the reunification of a people tied to each other
through the profession of faith made modern as a form of ethnic and distinct iden-
tity. Persecution of the Jewish Diaspora communities of Europe and Russia, typi-
fied by the Dreyfus Affair in France in the 1880s and the Russian pogroms of 1881
and 1903, clearly stirred some to think anew about the promise of unification of the
Jewish people. These events served to underscore the pervasive anti-Semitic preju-
dices at large in many European societies and the belief that integration or assimi-
lation would never truly materialize. The Jews would always be considered the
‘other’ or the ‘outsider’ or a threat to notions of overarching loyalty in the newly
emergent state system of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe.
The recognition of European anti-Semitism by a range of Jewish thinkers and
ideologues led to proposals and solutions that most powerfully included ones
proposed by people like Theodor Herzl and Moses Hess of the establishment of a
Jewish national state. The ambition to establish a national state for the Jewish
people would need support not only from those within the Jewish Diaspora but
others outside it as well. The anti-assimilation argument was outlined in what
would become Herzl’s famous treatise entitled Der Judenstaat [The Jewish state]
published in 1896. Determined to promote his plan, Herzl convened the first
Zionist Congress in the Swiss town of Basle in August 1897. Nearly 200 delegates
from over 15 countries attended the congress to discuss the Zionism platform as
expressed in the aspiration for a Jewish national state and the practical steps that
could be taken to realize the project. The success of the congress spurred Herzl in
his quest for Jewish nationalism and nation state. He declared:
14 Roots of conflict
was I to sum up the Basle Congress in one word which I shall guard against
pronouncing publicly, it would be this: At Basle I founded the Jewish State.
Perhaps in five years but certainly in 50 everyone will know it.
(O’Brien, 1986: 54)

For Herzl the actual location of the new Jewish state was not initially as important
as it was to others. He would have settled on a state outside of Palestine and had
been amenable, for example, to one proposal for the Jewish state to be established
in Uganda.
The roots of Jewish nationalism and the gathering of intellectuals around this
project created a fusion of nationalist thinking and ambition that was often both
religious and fervently secular. Zionism in these early years came to symbolize
many things to many people. Some religious intellectuals and leaders coalesced
around the project for nationalism as a Jewish expression. The famous Kabbalist
Rabbi, Abraham Kook, committed himself to the new project by immigrating to
Palestine in 1904 and becoming, in 1921, its chief rabbi. Kook advocated the
fusion of faith and Zionism where religion and nationalism could be achieved.
The intimate connection between faith and practice through the physical
establishment of Zion in Palestine was urged by Kook as a means by which Jews
could achieve complete redemption within their faith.
Secularists, such as Asher Hersh Ginsberg, whose pen name was Ahad Ha’Am,
sought to track a different course for the Zionist project. For him the Jewish state
should be the embodiment of modern secular Jewish Enlightenment thinking. He
no longer believed that Jews could be successfully assimilated in Eastern European
society so the only alternative appeared to be devoting the Jewish people to a plan
for independence. These aspirations are summed up by Ginsberg in the following:

This Jewish settlement, which will be a gradual growth, will become in course
of time the centre of the nation, wherein its spirit will find pure expression and
develop in all its aspects to the highest degree of perfection of which it is
capable. Then, from this centre the spirit of Judaism will radiate to the great
circumference, to all the communities of the Diaspora, to inspire them with
new life and to preserve the over-all unity of our people. When our national
culture in Palestine has attained that level, we may be confident that it will
produce men in the Land of itself who will be able, at a favourable moment,
to establish a State there – one which will be not merely a State of Jews but
really a Jewish State.
(Ginsberg, 1897)

The form of nationalism that Ginsberg personified can be termed as emancipa-

tion-nationalism, for not only was the project he proposed about the establishment
of a separate state for the Jewish people but that the task of creating this state and
its ultimate realization would promote an empowered and modern emancipated
Jew who had thrown off the shackles of the ghetto and the hatreds behind centu-
ries of anti-Semitism. Ginsberg envisioned the redundancy of the perception of
 Roots of conflict 15
impotent and disempowered Jews of Europe’s ghettoes and in their place would
stand the modern Hebrews forging a new nation and state with exclusive identities
and ambitions.
In this secular vision of modern statehood faith would form part of the private
realm of expression rather than the core of a state binding the Jewish people
together. In this way Jewishness acquired an ascribed ethnic dimension that built
on primordial bonds in a much more instrumental fashion (Kimmerling, 1982).
Such early visions, of course, were purist ambitions that would, over time, become
tainted by the realities of fusing the religious with the secular in the modern state
of Israel. For these early Zionists, though, the impulse lay in persuading those
within their own communities as well as those outside it to support their cause. By
projecting an image of ‘native’ born Jews (sabra), who would redeem the land and
Jewish society through their manual effort to build the Jewish state, the Jews would
find a sense of collective belonging and nation. The sabra were, in some respects,
part of the cultural myths important to the founding of the Jewish state; they ‘star-
tled the midwives who saw them being born with a monkey wrench and pistol in
hand’ (Wasserstein, 2003: 33).
The cause was hindered from within. Some Jews simply rejected Zionism
because they felt that it undermined assimilation and gave further cause for anti-
Semites to pursue policies of exclusion and marginalization of Jewish communi-
ties. They feared that the realization of the ambition of a Jewish state for the Jewish
people would lead to their expulsion from countries and communities that had
been their homes for generations. Jewish leaders in the Reform movement, for
example, contended that Zionism contradicted the universal dimensions of
Judaism. In the USA the Reform movement in the nineteenth century also
oriented their followers away from notions of exile and messianic fulfilment
through settlement in the ancient lands of Zionism. Their sights were set on estab-
lishing a home for Jews among the pioneers of the USA. Others rejected Zionism
because of its dominant secular intellectualism, Enlightenment foundations and
betrayal of the Jewish religious belief that the restoration of the Jewish people to
Zion could in fact only take place after the return of the Messiah. To pre-empt
events by building a Jewish nation state in Zion would be an anathema to such
people.
Herzl’s successor to the mantle of Zionism was a Russian chemist called Chaim
Weizmann (1874–1952). Weizmann, as a young man, had developed an interest
in the ideas of Zionism. Weizmann became a key link between the Zionists and
the British government – or more particularly Arthur Balfour who served both as
Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. Balfour was sympathetic to the Zionist
cause. At this early stage of Zionism, however, its proponents sought support from
all, and often competing, quarters. This was because, as stated earlier, they were
often contending with as much opposition to their project from within Judaism as
they were from outside it. Many religious leaders were antagonistic to Zionism
because the dominant secularists within the movement were interpreted as seeking
to establish a modern nation state of the Jewish people where faith (rabbinic rule)
would be absent from its centre. This new nationalism of the Jewish people
16 Roots of conflict
appeared to ignore the key element that bound such people together in terms of
their primary religious identity and survival after hundreds of years of persecution.
Some orthodox Rabbis were concerned that Zionist domination would sever the
link between the spiritual and Israel. Others within the family of Judaism were also
implacably opposed to the Zionist project, fearing that such a plan would lead to
divided loyalties between state and faith, nation and belonging, and identity as
modern or ancient. Many in the Jewish community in the USA, for example,
resisted the construction of Zionism as a nationalist project where a people bound
by ties of faith were reconstituted as a nation aligned to the political project of state
construction in Palestine. Jewish citizens of the USA had already emigrated from
their European and Russian homes and were successfully integrating into a society
that constructed important myths around the notion of a ‘national melting pot’
where all faiths and creeds were united under one flag.
Within Zionism itself the lines of unity quickly broke down and early fissures
between the pragmatists and idealists, secularists and religious, revisionist and
socialist wings of the movement emerged. These differences within Zionism also
coincided with the second and third waves of aliyah (1904–23) following further
tumult in Europe and Russia, as well as rising anti-Semitism and pogroms. In
1901 the Jewish National Fund (JNF) had been founded and this organization,
along with others such as the Palestine Land Development Company, started
buying land in Palestine as a means of territorializing the ambition for Zionist
settlement (Newman, 2002). Slowly but surely these land purchases (often from
absentee landlords) contributed to the encouragement of Jewish immigration. The
new Jewish settlements and communities founded by the immigrants from Europe
were known collectively as the new Yishuv. The ‘old Yishuv’ referred to Palestine’s
pre-existing Jewish community.
For these early Zionists the issue of the pre-existing native or indigenous popu-
lation was acknowledged and sometimes even debated. Some Zionists were obliv-
ious to the native presence, others chose simply to ignore the presence of an
indigenous population, while a few saw them as an impediment to Zionist ambi-
tion. For the founding fathers of Zionism the logic of Palestine as a Promised Land
for the Jewish people implied that the indigenous non-Jewish population should in
some way be absent. An oft-repeated mantra was that Palestine was ‘a land
without a people for a people without a land’. Israel Zangwill, the author who
coined the slogan, was an early supporter of Herzl’s Zionist vision but split and
formed his own group, the Jewish Territorialist Organization, with the objective
of establishing a Jewish state in locations as diverse as Australia and Urganda.
Chaim Weizmann then became the chief banner-man of the ‘land without a
people for a people without a land’ vision.
Returning back to Jewish settlement in Palestine, ‘the idea,’ therefore, ‘that the
Palestinian Arabs must find a place for themselves elsewhere’ formed part of the
early ruminations of the Zionist leadership (Masalha, 1992: 8). Nur Masalha
contends that such ruminations were tantamount to proposals for transfer – ‘an
euphemism denoting the organized removal of the indigenous population of
Palestine’ and that such ideas would form the basis of Zionist thinking and objec-
 Roots of conflict 17
tives’ (Masalha, 1992: 1). It becomes apparent that interpretation of early Zionist
ambition leads certain authors and scholars to conclude that behind the aspiration
to settle a ‘land without a people’ was a desire that would later transform into a
specific objective, to get rid of the existing indigenous population. Such an inter-
pretation is countered with the argument that there is little by way of evidence to
prove such a hypothesis. The evidence on the ground did, however, demonstrate
that Zionist Jews and their supporters were willing to expedite their vision through
the organization of land settlement and territorialization according to nationalist
goals in Palestine. If the notion of an empty land for a repressed and exiled people
helped, then there was little by way of political resistance locally to stop its perpet-
uation.

The Palestinian nationalist ‘awakening’

It is true that the Zionists and their supporters needed to construct a series of
myths in order for their project to gain a foothold in the consciousness of those
who would help them realize their dreams. Myths are almost essential to any
nation- and state-building project (Hutchinson, 2004). Founding myths forge
much needed unity – often where none was previously present. Such myths bind
people together in a ‘collective’ experience and allow the often unpalatable truths
behind modern state construction to be ignored until a time when a nation feels
secure enough in its stability and identity within the borders of a state to revisit
such events. ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’ was one such
founding myth associated with the Zionist project in Palestine. Of course the
Zionists knew there was an existing indigenous and mostly Arab population in
Palestine. In 1895, the issue of Palestine’s existing population clearly engaged
Theodor Herzl. In his diary he proposed that:

We shall have to spirit the penniless population across the border by

procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying it employ-
ment in our own country. Both the process of expropriation and the removal
of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.
(Patai 1960: 88)

The presence of this population was clearly an obstacle, but one that could be
overcome by the Zionists and their supporters. There emerged a number of strate-
gies for dealing with this issue. First, in terms of the project to actualize Zionism in
Palestine through the establishment of the early communities of yishuv and
kibbutzim, the Arabs were to be excluded. If Jewish national identity allied to the
goal of establishing a state for the Jewish people were to stand a chance of
succeeding then it was obvious that an alternative national, ethnic or religious
presence would undermine such a goal. In this context the Zionists sought to reart-
iculate religious identity and status as the essential construct for nation and ethnic
bonding. Jews, with their distinct faith and common ties to the land of Israel,
would be constituted anew as a nation (Goldschneider, 1995). This modernization
18 Roots of conflict
of Jewish identity required the negation of alternative national identities in rela-
tion to the state-building project.
Second, as Edward Said contends, the Zionists sought to represent the Arabs to
outsiders (and principally at that time the British) as an inferior backward set of
natives who could be conveniently overlooked. Such representation was not
uncommon in the discourse of European imperialism and colonialism at its apogee
in the late nineteenth century. The Arab population was perceived and repre-
sented negatively through an ‘orientalist’ lens (Said, 1980). By extension, Zionism
as a form of European discourse about the nation and settlement could get away
with embracing a similar discourse as an echo of the colonial project as fulfilment
of a plan to establish European settlement in Palestine. If imitation was the
sincerest form of flattery then the Zionists were astute in terms of representing
Palestine to its potential European supporters as an opportunity to ‘civilize’ the
population of a territory that was different from other European colonial territo-
ries in only one respect. This one difference lay with the status of Palestine as terra
sancta (Holy Land) to those of Judaism as well as Christianity (the sacred status of
the land to Islam was simply deliberately overlooked). By the late nineteenth
century the European ‘rediscovery’ of the Holy Land was already well-established
among elite classes across Europe. But local Palestinian Muslim and Christian
society was largely depicted as populated by ‘natives’ who were nothing short of
barbarian. As Macalister states:

The native civilization, such as it is, is a painful illustration of the evils of what
may be called unredeemed practicality . . . In such a community, the interests
that to a western [person] seem almost essential to the happiness of life are
scarcely thought of. Literature is neglected; historical monuments are allowed
to fall into ruin . . . as for art . . . there is practically none.
(Macalister 1912: 123–24)

This was contrasted with the ‘Jewish agricultural colonies’, which ‘appeared to be
successful enough’, and the ‘officers of the various legitimate mission agencies . . .
doing a noble work, ministering to the spiritual and bodily needs of the dwellers in
the land’ (Macalister 1912: 125).
To a certain extent this ‘conspiracy of representation’ allowed European
support for Zionism to garner momentum unhindered by the voice of the local
Palestinian Arab community. The continuity and presence of an Arab population
was denied. This quote from two renowned British academics written in the late
nineteenth century encapsulates this point: ‘during the interval of [the last] five
hundred years Jerusalem has been without a history. Nothing has happened but
an occasional act of brutality on the part of her masters towards the Christians’
(Besant and Palmer 1899: 520). What seems remarkable about such a quote today
is that its authors, clearly uninhibited by any form of political correctness, can
simply deny history has taken place because it is Muslim and not Christian or
Jewish. Zionist leaders were similarly as open in their dismissal of the local popula-
tion and their place in their grand schemes for the creation of modern Zion in
 Roots of conflict 19
Palestine. Chaim Weizmann, leader of Zionism and Israel’s first president, wrote
to a British official that the local inhabitants consisted of the following: ‘the fellah
[who] is at least four centuries behind the times, and the effendi [who] is dishonest,
uneducated, greedy, and as unpatriotic as he is inefficient’ (Ingrams 1973: 32). As
previously noted, however, it was not only the Zionists that denied the obvious by
pretending that the Arabs of Palestine simply did not exist. This attitude was also
obvious in official British correspondence and documents. Parliamentary Under-
Secretary for the Colonies, one Honourable William Ormsby-Gore MP, had
denied that the population west of Jordan (i.e. in Palestine) were Arab though he
admitted that they were ‘Arabic speaking’ (Ingrams, 1973: 33).
If one is frank it is not difficult to understand why the penetration of such views
– when they filtered into the homes and meeting places of Palestinian elite society –
sometimes roused feelings of antipathy towards the Europeans. By the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth century, then, the first stirrings of Palestinian national
identity and opposition to foreign interference and the threats posed by Zionism in
particular were discernible. Nationalist consciousness among Palestinians was
developing. Palestinian Arab nationalist consciousness was a product of the rising
intellectual and region-wide trend of Arab nationalism in opposition to Ottoman
rule, as well as a response to the specific manifestation of European attachment to
Zionism in Palestine.
It should be understood, however, that irrespective of an indigenous and
continuous occupation of a territory for centuries by the Palestinians they were not
conceived of as a nation either by the Zionists nor the British authorities. Their
identity was contested and disputed by Jewish opponents to a Palestinian Arab
presence in the land that they refer to as Eretz Israel. Nevertheless the indigenous
Palestinian Arab population did begin to organize and resist Zionist and British
plans to determine their future. First, the elite of Palestinian society as I have
already noted were influenced by wider intellectual trends that gripped the region
with respect to ideas and ideologies associated with nationalism, identity,
autonomy and independence (Porath 1974). In this respect they were like many
other elite groups that emerged throughout many of Europe’s colonies in the
Middle East at the time. The well-educated (and often Western-educated) elite
engaged with ideas and a form of consciousness-raising that made them chafe
under the yoke of foreign rule and yearn for freedom and independence. A sense
of nation was moulded by the elite through a variety of forms – including arts,
culture, writings, myths, history, language, religion and race, and of course
economic, social and political activities (Khalidi, 1998).
A sense of national identity and national consciousness also progressed as a
reactive ideology in the face of Jewish settlers who were determined that their
experiment in nation- and state-building would be exclusive rather than inclusive.
This was experienced in a very real way during the early years of Zionist settlement
when a policy known as avodah ivrit (Jewish labour) prohibited the employment of
Arabs in the new colonies and settlements that the Zionists were establishing. This
policy was exacerbated by the formation of the Jewish labour movement
(Histadrut), which privileged Jewish over Arab labour in sectors of the developing
20 Roots of conflict
economy. The effects of such policies were primarily felt among Palestine’s
peasant classes and made them hostile to Zionism. Thus even from its earliest days
the Palestinian nationalist movement comprised elements from all quarters of
contemporary society.
Fences were not making good neighbours between the Zionist settlers and
Palestinian Arabs. Stirrings of discontent grew as the Ottoman authorities
permitted land sales and thus undermined aspects of the traditional rural land-
holding system. The Zionists were perceived as posing a very real threat to the
indigenous population and its way of life. Early clashes took place between the
Palestinians and Zionists in the late 1880s and centred, somewhat inevitably, on
issues that related to land rights and land use. The Palestinian peasantry was expe-
riencing first hand the impact of Zionist settlement on lands that they believed
they had traditional and historical entitlement to. In some respects then – whether
in the countryside, town or city – the Zionist threat was first interpreted by
Palestinian Arabs as having an economic dimension as well.
From 1900–10 Palestinian nationalist antipathies against the Zionists grew and
locally produced newspapers, pamphlets and other literature outlined the ways in
which the Zionist project in Palestine was undermining Palestinian Arab rights
and livelihoods. The local elite was obviously threatened by the external support
that the Zionists seemed to be garnering from important actors such as the
Europeans, Russians and Ottoman powers, as well as the internal impact they
were having on the fabric of traditional society. Their nationalism was defensive
and strived to resist Zionism and preserve power at the same time. Their self-
interest sometimes led them into local internal rivalries with other members of the
elite as they sought to meet the challenges presented by the great upheavals that
were besetting their society. By and large, however, their energies were absorbed
in meeting the challenges presented by the changes at the centre of Ottoman
society – where the revolution in 1908 of the ‘Young Turks’ had heralded nation-
alist change and secular reform – as well the growing impact of Zionist-inspired
immigration to Palestine. The political organization of Palestinian Arab society
would start at the highest levels but quickly filter down and generate relevance and
resonance among the majority peasant population. As Muslih notes, ‘Palestinian
peasants, urban notables and merchants . . . knew of Zionism and began to
express their opposition to it as early as 1882 [but] . . . it did not develop into fully-
fledged anti-Zionism before 1908’ (Muslih, 1988: 86). From 1908, however, the
seed of Palestinian patriotism quickly grew in the context of wider regional events
into a flower of nationalism that would blossom in fully fledged opposition to the
Zionists and their British sponsors in Palestine. Resistance would take many forms
and seek to disrupt both Zionist and British colonial ambition for Palestine.
The nascent Palestinian Arab identity would be forged in a variety of ways as
an expression of a nation with legitimate rights to self-determination and indepen-
dence in its own land. While it was true that in the late nineteenth century
Palestine’s inhabitants had many layers of identity, by the early twentieth century
the pronounced identity of being Palestinian was apparent. Khalidi contends that
it was not only among the elite that this sense of being Palestinian occurred but
 Roots of conflict 21
that it was apparent too among the peasant classes losing their lands and liveli-
hoods as a result of the process of colonization (Khalidi, 1998). Khalidi also argues
that to perceive Palestinian nationalism as solely reactive to Zionism overlooks the
intimate and diverse development of Palestinian national identity as opposed to
other emergent Arab identities in the Middle East region.
As we shall see, such rights would be thwarted in the face of the dual obstacle of
Zionism and British colonial policy. Moreover, the Zionist project for Palestine
was also seized upon by prominent Arab intellectuals elsewhere in the Arab world.
Muslih highlights the fact that one leading Egyptian-based Islamic thinker, Rashid
al-Rida, addressed the Palestine issue as early as 1898:

Think about this question [Zionism], and make it the subject of your discus-
sion to determine whether it is just or unjust . . . If you find out that you have
failed to defend the rights of your homeland and the service of your nation,
study and examine.
(Muslih, 1988: 75)

Other secular Arab thinkers also took up an early defence of Palestine against
Zionism in their writings and debates.

The First World War and its consequences

The outbreak of the First World War and the events in the Middle East that took
place throughout its duration would have profound consequences for Palestine as
well as the rest of the region. The so-called exigencies of war led to open as well as
secret alliances and accords between and among the allied European powers, to
agreements between European actors and Arab leaders, and to declarations from
European actors in support of the Zionists – all of which would lead to confusion
and conflict at the end of the war. The imprint of this war would be catastrophic
for the fortunes of Palestine’s Arabs setting off, as it did, a chain of events that
would lead to dispossession.
In Palestine itself the most immediate effect of the war was evident in the public
displays of Palestinian support for the Ottoman powers linked to Germany against
the European Allied powers. There were some, however, among the younger
generation of the notable classes, who turned their back on their Ottoman over-
lords and supported Arab nationalism and revolt. Academics though have differed
with each other on the extent to which this made for a proper Palestinian contri-
bution to Arab nationalism or not. It is fair to say that by and large pro-Zionist
scholars seek to debunk any claim to a Palestinian nationalist trend in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century. Pro-Palestinian scholars assert that there
is evidence of such a trend and its influence vis-à-vis wider debates on Arab nation-
alism, pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism at this time.
A number of deals and agreements were reached during this period and they
would impact directly on the future status of Palestine. The first deal that impacted
on Palestine transpired as early as 1915 when the leader of the Arab independence
22 Roots of conflict
movement, Sharif Hussein of Mecca, and the British High Commissioner of
Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, exchanged a series of letters – the Hussein–
McMahon Correspondence – in which in return for Arab support against the
Turks the British promised independence to the Arabs. ‘Great Britain is prepared
to recognize the independence of the Arabs in all the regions within the limits
demanded by the Sharif of Mecca’, declared Sir Henry McMahon in his famous
epistle signed on 24 October 1915 (Smith, 2004: 61). In return the Arabs, led by
Sharif Hussein’s sons, delivered victory against the Turks and ‘liberated’ Arab
territories from their rule. The Allies, however, would repay the Arabs by deposing
their leaders and carving up their territories to create new states and kingdoms
that would bedevil the region.
The second agreement affecting Palestine occurred between unlikely European
allies: Britain and France. Although until the First World War Britain and France
had often found themselves locked in sometimes bitter rivalry in the Middle East,
aspects of this relationship were put aside as they allied themselves against the Axis
powers of Germany and Turkey in the region. This alliance had led the British
and the French into a secret agreement in early 1916 to share control over large
swathes of Arab territory in the region between them and grant independence to
the Arabs only in the present-day territories of Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
The Sykes–Picot Agreement defined the spheres of power that Britain and
France would enjoy post-war. Modern-day Syria and Iraq, for example, enjoy a
common border that was determined under the terms of the Sykes–Picot
Agreement. It was agreed that Palestine would probably be subject to some form
of international administration referred to as an ‘allied condominium’ but that
further consultations with other international powers such as Russia would have
to take place first. The cities of Haifa and Acre, however, fell into the ‘bubble’ of a
British-ruled zone. The agreement could be perceived as a contradiction of the
terms laid out in the Hussein–McMahon Correspondence. In 1917, following the
Russian Revolution, Lenin exposed the Sykes–Picot Agreement and this led to
tensions with the Arabs. It appeared that the French–British agreement reneged
on the promises of independence that the Arabs thought they had secured from
the British.
British and French control included the territories of Palestine. Secrecy was the
order of the day because of fears that news of the agreement would turn nascent
Arab support for the allies against them. The Allied powers needed the Arab
promise of a revolt against the Turks as part of the wider war strategy but they
were determined that any form of ‘Arab independence’ would take place at their
convenience, would not prejudice British and French interests in the region (most
of it) or hinder any other agreements (secret or otherwise) that they might deter-
mine for the region. Thus by 1917 there were two contradictory promises made
by the British government regarding the disposal of Turkish-held territory
(including Palestine) after the war. By November 1917 the British were offering up
the promise of Palestine to a third interested party: this time to the Zionists.
By that time Palestine became subject once again to the forces of foreign occu-
pation. This time the forces were the British who were at war with Germany and
 Roots of conflict 23
its Turkish allies in the region. Yet even before the British general, General
Allenby, and his forces had captured Jerusalem, the government in London –
persuaded by the grist of the argument of the Zionists and choosing to ignore the
contradiction inherent in its previous agreements with the Arabs and even perhaps
the French – issued a statement that became known as the Balfour Declaration.

Balfour bombshell

Probably no other scrap of paper in history has had the effect of this brief letter, the
cause of conflict [that] still shows no sign of settlement.
(Ingrams, 1973:)

There can be little doubt that the British occupation of Palestine as part of its mili-
tary campaigns in the Middle East accelerated Zionist ambitions for the land and
played a large part in determining its future. Without British patronage the dreams
of Jewish statehood in Palestine may well have withered on the vine. The Zionists
had the dreams and the ambitions and British support resulted in the practical
wherewithal and control of the territory they sought to make their own. Balfour
was an early convert to the Zionist cause but in Britain support was also lent by
figures such as Lloyd George and Herbert Samuel. The British, however, would
not give the Zionists their homeland free of impediment. The British would ‘facili-
tate’ the process by keeping this procedure of Jewish state creation under their
control. It was hoped that under British rule:

facilities would be given to Jewish organizations to purchase land, to found

colonies, to establish educational and religious institutions . . . that Jewish
immigration . . . would be given preference so that in course of time the Jewish
people, grown into a majority and settled on the land, may be conceded such
degree of self-government that the conditions of that day may justify.
(Bowle, 1957: 175)

The statement, issued on 2 November 1917, outlined in a letter from the British
foreign minister of the time, Arthur Balfour, to the British Zionist, Lord Rothschild,
gave the following commitment:

His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a

National Home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to
facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that
nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of
existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status
enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
(Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry [AAIC], 1946: 1)

The Balfour Declaration has been interpreted in a number of ways. First its author
24 Roots of conflict
appears to have understood the paradox in British policy that the statement would
appear to cause. There is evidence of this in a memo that he wrote a couple of
years later:

The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant is even more flagrant in
the case of the independent nation of Palestine . . . For in Palestine we do not
propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present
inhabitants of the country . . . The four great powers are committed to
Zionism and Zionism, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in
future hopes. In my opinion that is.
(Sykes, 1973: 5)

There is evidence then in Balfour’s thinking that Britain could flex its muscle in
deciding the fate of other nations and people. There had been a clear decision to
ignore the facts and paradox presented by the presence of a pre-existing popula-
tion of Arabs in Palestine in order to pursue an alternate policy of not only
allowing the territory to be populated by another people but to assist and support
these people in their ambitions for statehood at the expense of others. It is also
certain that a number of issues motivated Balfour and the British government in
making this offer to the Zionist movement. Among these issues were sympathy
and support for the ideals of Zionism and the predicament of the persecuted
Jewish communities of Europe. Strategic sentiment no doubt played its part in
supporting the offer to the Zionist movement to play its part in securing a British
supported foothold in Palestine. Colonial sentiment also accounted for Britain’s
decision to ignore the political aspirations and rights of the native population of
Palestinian Arabs. For in this respect the Palestinians were a non-people, a non-
nation and devoid of meaning to those engaged with the high politics of imperial
governance.
The Balfour Declaration became significant to the people of Palestine because
it appeared to ignore their nascent political rights to self-determination and inde-
pendence. While it was true that their civil and religious rights appeared to be
recognized, their aspirations for self-rule and power were simply not reflected in
the commitment outlined by Arthur Balfour on behalf of the British government.
To this day the Palestinian people mark the issuing of the Balfour Declaration in
1917 as a day of national commiseration and mourning. During the first
Palestinian Intifada (1987–93) the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration was
marked each year by orders from the United National Leadership of the Uprising
(UNLU) and Hamas for a general strike that would shut all Palestinian institutions
such as schools, factories, universities, shops and businesses. In 2004 Hamas
leaders argued that US government ‘assurances’ to the government of Israel
amounted to ‘a new Balfour Declaration’. ‘The Balfour Declaration gave Palestine
to Jews as a national homeland at our expense. Now Bush is telling Sharon he can
keep the loots. This is another Balfour Declaration’, said Mohamed Nazzal, a
Hamas spokesman (Amayreh, 2004). The declaration is viewed as an act that
 Roots of conflict 25
fundamentally changed the course of history for the Palestinian people, leaving
them vulnerable to a chain of events dictated by others that would leave them
dispossessed and stateless.
For the Zionist movement the declaration was the first tentative step towards
achieving the support of a powerful foreign government in support for the goal of
establishing a state for the Jewish people in Palestine. Other Zionist potential
allies, such as the Germans, were out-manoeuvred by the British declaration of
support (Kimche, 1968: 21). Moreover the Declaration was approved by the US
President, as well as other important European powers active in the region of the
Middle East such as the French and the Italians. From a Zionist perspective, writes
Gerner, ‘That Palestine had an existing population, with its own history and aspi-
rations, was no more relevant . . . than was Kenyan history to the British or
Algerian society to the French’ (Gerner, 1994: 15). Balfour himself was frank in his
opinion of the Zionist project, ‘Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is of far
profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now
inhabit that ancient land’ (Segev, 2000: 45). The issuing of the Declaration was
certainly a victory but many within the movement knew and understood that this
meant that they could not rest on their laurels. They knew that a ‘homeland’ was
not the same as an independent state but they also understood that the British
promise was an important development for them.
The Balfour Declaration assumed new meaning when the British occupied
Palestine in late December 1917. General Edmund Allenby’s proclamation to the
population of Palestine in December 1917, however, gave no hint of the political
machinations that would take place once the British fully controlled Palestine post-
war:

Since your city is regarded with affection by the adherents of three of the great
religions of mankind, and its soil has been consecrated by the prayers and
pilgrimages of devout people of these three religions for many centuries,
therefore do I make known to you that every sacred building, monument,
holy spot, shrine, traditional site, endowment, pious bequest or customary
place of prayer . . . will be maintained and protected according to the existing
customs and beliefs of those to whom [these] faiths they are sacred.
(AACI, 1946: 15)

Despite being aware of the inconsistency of its policy vis-à-vis its promises to the
Arabs and its declarations of support to the Zionists, the British government
doggedly pursued this approach when it came to the post-war conferences that
would determine the future of the Middle East. Hence the British delight at the
award of a Mandate for Palestine made to them by the League of Nations and as a
consequence of the long hours of negotiations that had culminated in the Treaty
of Versailles. The award of this mandate was supported by the government of the
USA with negotiations prolonged until its formal operation on 29 September 1923.
The text of the mandate merely reinforced the status quo and communicated with
26 Roots of conflict
clarity and certainty the maintenance of British support for the Zionist project in
Palestine:

Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connexion of

the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their
national home in that country; and . . .
Whereas His Britannic Majesty has accepted the mandate in respect of
Palestine and undertaken to exercise it on behalf of the League of Nations . . .
The Mandatory shall have full powers of legislation and of administra-
tion . . . shall be responsible for placing the country under such political,
administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of
the Jewish national home.
(AACI, 1946: 4–11)

Little mention was made of provision – political, economic or otherwise – for the
Palestinian population that had been enduring British military occupation of their
land since 1917. It would be a mistake to assume that the Palestinian Arabs of
Palestine would quietly agree to the lack of rights, rule by a foreign colonial power
and the active support of this power in the immigration and establishment of a
homeland for the Jewish people. As one Palestinian Arab writer of the time
declared:

A nation which has long been in the depths of sleep only awakes if it is rudely
shaken by events, and only arises little by little . . . This was the situation of
Palestine, which for many centuries had been in the deepest sleep, until it was
shaken by the great war, shocked by the Zionist movement, and violated by
the illegal policy [British], and it awoke, little by little.
(Quoted in Khalidi, 1998: 158)

British colonialism and Zionist settlement in Palestine were actively resisted by all
elements of Palestinian society. British high-handedness and bias was greeted with
discontent, demonstration, uncooperativeness and violence in Arab ranks. As
early as 1920 and 1921 when the details of the Balfour Declaration were first made
public in Palestine riots broke out with antipathies directed at Jewish targets.
Palestinian leaders refused to be a party to British plans. By 1922 a delegation of
their leaders had travelled to London to argue their case with the British govern-
ment. According to official documents the delegation ‘declared their refusal to
cooperate in any form of government other than a government responsible to the
Palestinian people’ (AACI, 1946: 19). They also demanded a constitution for
Palestine that would accord its people equality of rights including those of minori-
ties and foreigners. Most of all they demanded independence and thus were cate-
gorically rejecting British rule and its plans for Zionist immigration and a
homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. The stage was set for contest and
conflict.
 Roots of conflict 27
Parallel points
One aspect of Western society in the twenty-first century is the extent to which our
identity appears to matter to us. The politics of identity – who belongs and who
does not, who we are and who we are not – shapes our sense of community and
nation. We are obsessed with what we look like and this in turn has established
degrees of uniformity and difference. Do we look the same as the next person or
are we different? Do we want to fit in or do we dare to be different? Identity has
come to form a core of nation and culture and established a sense of belonging in
national units that today we refer to as nation states. Identity, of course, really
starts to matter when it is challenged or altered by someone else. Some nationalist
elements that have arisen throughout contemporary history have sought to deny
and even exterminate the national identity of others. In the modern Middle East
the national identity of the Kurds has, during the manic episodic rule of Saddam
Hussein in Iraq, been subject to denial and extermination. In Palestine the politics
of identity has played out in a bitter conflict that was established between Zionist
settlers and Palestinian Arabs. The problem in Palestine, as many have previously
opined, is that ‘both Israel’s Jews and Palestinians have legitimate and inalienable
rights. These rights are rooted in the historical experience of each people’ (Tessler,
1994: xi). The parallel points that characterize the issue at this historical juncture
were: nationalism, national identity, the state, the impact of external powers and
the colonial project in the Middle East.
The idea of nation – a community bound together by common identity – is
obviously central to the story of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism in the period
that we have just been examining. In a series of more or less congruent steps
Jewish intellectuals in Europe and Arab intellectuals in Palestine and elsewhere
established modern notions of nation – the Jewish people or the Palestinian Arabs
– and to that idea tied territoriality and statehood. The role of the intelligentsia in
such a task is acknowledged in respect of their ‘vanguard’ function as literates in
the cultural norms of Western liberal thinking at the time (Anderson, 1991: 116).
In undertaking these tasks of ‘imagining’ the nation, varieties of interpretation
quickly arose within each movement (Anderson, 1991: 5–7). Within Zionism, for
example, much of the early secularist writing addressed their goal as the creation
of an advanced Jewish nation in Palestine where progressive modern Jews could
promote principles of socialism and new community. The Zionists actively worked
to establish the notion of a modern nation of Jews bound together by a common
language (modern Hebrew), a common faith (Judaism), a common history
(Jewish), common culture (Jewish) and common territoriality (Palestine). Herzl
encouraged Zionism to define the Jews as a nation (a separate ethnic group) and
for others to see the Jews as a nation. The Jewish national home in Palestine was
also envisaged by religious Zionists as offering Judaism (faith) a central and
defining role in determining the establishment of a Jewish state (Israel) in Palestine.
In other words, for the religious Zionists, Judaism would define the state and serve
as its core. This perspective was and remains a difficult one for secular Jews to
absorb. Secular Zionists see their goal as uniting the Jewish people in the right to
28 Roots of conflict
self-determination in a modern nation state that would leave them free from perse-
cution, pogrom and genocide. For them Zionism was a modern movement of
European Jews linked to emancipation theories.
Europe had failed to deliver equality to the Jews and instead discriminated
against them. Zionism was the alternative; it advocated the revival of national
identity and defence of the nation through a return to Zion where they could
achieve their independence. This notion of national identity and territory became
key: ‘The heart of the Zionist revolution was the reform of the Jew as a person . . .
The founders believed that national revolution necessitated an absolute social and
emotional break with exile’ (Sternhell, 1998: 36).
Defining the nation and its state has absorbed Jews from one end of a political
and religious spectrum to the other but, with the exception of a minority of reli-
gious Jews, they were united from the start around the idea of territoriality in
Palestine.
The congruency of Palestinian nationalism and Zionism may be denied. Critics
of this approach do not see it as a parallel point but argue that the Palestinian
nation did not exist in late Ottoman Palestine and that the Palestinian people – as
such – simply do not exist. Debating the evolution of Palestinian nationalism then
becomes highly contentious and part of the writing and analysis of the conflict
which in itself also perpetuates positions of conflict! Other writers offer evidence of
an early and evolving notion of the Palestinian people as a nation and a parallel
development of nationalist ambition and sentiment. As noted above, Palestinian
nationalism evolved within the wider emerging narratives of Arab nationalism,
pan-Islamism and anti-colonialism. Rashid Khalidi highlights the various polit-
ical, intellectual, cultural, economic and social factors that during the late
Ottoman period in Palestine led to the articulation of a discrete Palestinian iden-
tity, which then quickly found itself in contest with Zionist identity and British
colonial ambitions for their country. Khalidi, however, reminds us that Palestinian
national identity is not merely a foil to Zionism. Articulations of national
consciousness among the Palestinians predate Zionist immigration (Khalidi,
1997).
The presence of the Palestinian Arab indigenous population was also an issue
in terms of the colonial ambitions of the major European powers in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries. In one form or another then a parallel point
between the Zionists and the Palestinian Arabs was colonialism. For the
Palestinian Arab population of Palestine the penetration of their territory by
Europeans heralded an era of change that would lead by the end of the First
World War to direct rule through the British Mandate authorities. Palestine and
its Christian shrines was a prize that more than one European power coveted and
sought to underscore through the establishment of religious legations, seminaries,
schools, hospitals, restored churches, rediscovered sites and shrines, diplomatic
and trade missions. This idealized ambition was also allied to the strategic mission
of the governments of states such as Britain and France to secure their already-
established interests in neighbouring territories of the region. In terms of the
Zionists and the Palestinian Arabs one party benefited more than the other. Once
 Roots of conflict 29
again, however, there is academic dispute over the extent to which the Zionists
acted as a European settler colonial movement aided and abetted by the British or
merely benefited from British support. The first view – that Israel is the embodi-
ment of a colonial state – has long been advocated by Marxist and leftist analysts.
The second view is apparent in the more recent work of what is referred to as the
‘new Israeli historians’. Tom Segev’s account of the British Mandate period, for
example, posits the argument that the British were pro-Zionist at the expense of
the Palestinian Arab population. In this respect Segev is contending that to a
certain extent there would be no Israel were it not for British support (Segev,
2001).
In many respects then the fate of Palestine would be determined by events and
powers external to this arena. The events of the First World War, anti-Semitism in
Europe, Western theories of nation and nationalism, romanticism and sympathy
for the Zionist cause, and colonial indifference to native peoples determined the
future of Palestine’s inhabitants. High power elite politics of the type that seems
inconceivable in the twenty-first century allowed the Zionists important access to
key individuals who in turn would largely determine the future of entire nations
and regions of the globe (Smith, 2004: 84). The ‘natural rights’ of colonial
statesmen to determine the future of Palestine was, however, resisted locally and
led to an era of increasing resistance and drama as the unfolding of the Israeli–
Palestinian conflict occurred.

Further reading
As noted in the introduction to this book ‘writing the conflict’ has generated pretty
much an open war between academics themselves over the ways in which to
record the history of the conflict, its roots, and the facts and the fictions that
contribute to the many ways in which the conflict can be analysed in the present
day. Offering recommendations for further reading is another site of contest and
battle. If anyone sits down at a computer and ‘Googles’ recommended reading for
the Israeli–Palestinian conflict they will see what I mean! This further reading
section, then, is subject-specific in its recommendations but includes materials that
are viewed, by one side or another, as provocative or just plain wrong!
Stories and analysis in the English language of late Ottoman society and poli-
tics in Palestine is largely framed by the scholarly writings of Israeli, Western and
latterly Palestinian scholars. Such accounts have changed in tenor and analysis
over the past 30 years. Writings from the 1970s are often quite different from those
in the present day. This may be because the authors are using different sources,
looking at different aspects of the organization of life in late Ottoman Palestine, or
because within their studied ‘neutrality’ others discern degrees of bias or preju-
dice. Some of the work cited is deliberately designed to make a case for one
perspective or another, others are a response or reaction to the absence of the
‘stories’ or ‘history’ of their own societies in the accounts of others. In terms of
offering a general historical account of this period it is first worth looking at the
late Albert Hourani’s History of the Arab people and his chapters on the Ottoman
30 Roots of conflict
period of reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003) because this
eases the reader into the subject matter more generally. Along with Hourani’s
selected chapters other books that are worth consulting for this period include:
Mark Tessler’s book (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), Pappe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Charles Smith (Boston, MA:
Beford/St. Martins, 2004). These historical works detail the political as well as
social and economic issues that prevailed in Palestine during this period. The
account by journalist David Hirst (New York: Nation Books, 2003) is also a very
useful introductory text to the period and the roots of the conflict and its linkages
to the present day.
On the construction of Zionism a number of books are worth reading at this
juncture and they include: Walter Laqueur’s work helpfully entitled A history of
Zionism (New York: Schocken, 2003). You can read Herzl’s book on the Jewish
state (New York: Filiquarian Publishing, 2006) along with some more controver-
sial accounts of Zionism such as O’Brien’s The Siege (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1986), John Rose’s Myths of Zionism (London: Pluto Books, 2004) and
Jacqueline Rose’s The question of Zion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2005). Hertzberg’s Reader on Zionism printed by the Jewish Publication Society
of America provides documentation that addresses this early period in the Zionist
movement (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1997). Also Benny
Morris’s work entitled Righteous victims: A history of the Zionist–Arab conflict is worth
considering (New York: Knopf, 2001a). It should be noted that the reviews of this
book, and many of the others featured in the further reading section often ques-
tion the political nature of the scholarship undertaken by the author. Further
reading on Zionism can be found in Sacher (New York: Knopf, 1996), Sternhell
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998) and Vital (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1982) though some of these books may be more difficult to acquire than
others.
Some interesting counter-narratives and analyses on this period can be found
in Said (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980) who rebuts many of the
founding ‘myths’ of Zionism, Rashid Khalidi (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1997) and Muslih (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Edward
Said’s work usually invokes the ire of the pro-Israel lobby who criticize his work
almost in its entirety. Also worthy of further serious study is Walid Khalidi’s edited
collection entitled From haven to conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine problem
until 1948 (Washington, DC: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1987). Finally two more
books which are worth following up from this chapter are Kimmerling and Migdal
(Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2003), and Tom Segev (New York:
Abacus Books, 2001) – who I’ll recommend again in the following chapter. If you
are looking to access Internet materials to supplement the books recommended in
this section then there is a wide choice available. You should be aware, however,
that most of the content mined from Google or Yahoo searches using key words
such as Palestine-Israel, roots, conflict, etc., is highly partisan and should come
with warnings to that effect. Most mainstream international media organizations
also offer online timelines, background reading and information to the conflict but
 Roots of conflict 31
little in terms of the actual detail around the roots of the conflict covered in this
chapter.

Hertzberg, A. (1997) The Zionist Idea: A historical analysis and reader, New York: Jewish Publi-
cation Society of America.
Herzl, T. (2006) The Jewish State, New York: Filiquarian Publishing.
Hirst, D. (2003) The gun and the olive branch: The roots of violence in the Middle East, 3rd edn,
New York: Nation Books.
Hourani, A. (2003) A history of the Arab people, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Khalidi, R. (1998) Palestinian identity: The construction of modern national consciousness, New
York: Columbia University Press.
Khalidi, W. (1987) From haven to conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine problem until
1948, Washington, DC: Institute of Palestine Studies.
Kimmerling, B. and Migdal, J.S. (2003) The Palestinian people: A history, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Laqueur, W. (2003) A history of Zionism: From the French revolution to the establishment of the state
of Israel, New York: Schocken.
Morris, B. (2001a) Righteous victims: A history of the Zionist–Arab conflict, 1881–2001, New
York: Knopf.
Muslih, M. (1988) The origins of Palestinian nationalism, New York: Columbia University
Press.
O’Brien, C.C. (1986) The siege: The saga of Israel and Zion, London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson.
Pappe, I. (2004) A history of modern Palestine: One land, two peoples, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Rose, Jacqueline (2005) The question of Zion, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rose, John (2004) The myths of Zionism, London: Pluto Books.
Sacher H.M. (1996) A history of Israel: From the rise of Zionism to our time, 2nd edn, New York:
Knopf.
Said, E. (1980) The question of Palestine, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Segev, T. (2001) One Palestine, complete: Jews and Arabs under the British, New York: Abacus
Books.
Smith, C.D. (2004) Palestine and the Arab–Israeli conflict, Boston, MA: Beford/St. Martins.
Sternhell, Z. (1998) The founding myths of Israel: Nationalism, socialism, and the making of the
Jewish State. Translated by David Maisel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Tessler, M. (1994) A history of the Arab–Israeli conflict, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press.
Vital, D. (1982) Zionism: The formative years, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
2 Between the wars

Chapter outline
• The gloves are off: determining the future of Palestine 33
• The mandate 35
• Ascendance 39
• Prelude to revolt 40
• Sheikh, rattle and revolt 41
• The Palestinian revolt 43
• Resistance 45
• The Peel Commission: partition of Palestine 47
• The revolt and the Zionists 48
• End of an era 49
• World war and rethinking the mandate 51
• Further reading 52

At the end of the First World War in 1918 a series of peace conferences were held
to determine the future of the territories that the Allied powers had won from the
German and Axis powers. At these conferences the fate of millions of people were
to be decided in a series of deals, compromises, agreements and treaties that
created new states, new regimes, new political orders, new strategic and economic
realities in the Middle East. After the war it was not difficult for Britain and France
to persuade the members of the newly constituted international body of the
League of Nations, in which they were the dominant powers, to give them
authority over the former Ottoman territories in the Middle East that had fallen
into their hands.
In this chapter the powerful governments and their policies – rather than the
principle of the mandate system – that would, in reality, determine the future of
Palestine will be examined. These new British and French regimes were known as
mandates and protectorates. Britain obtained the Mandate for Palestine, plus the
newly established states of Transjordan and Iraq. Britain then tried to persuade
the Arabs to embrace the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine as underscored in
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