The truth about how the Israel, Gaza impasse began
An Israeli soldier carries a shell as he and his comrades prepare their Merkava tanks stationed at an army deployment area along the border between Israel and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. AFP PHOTO
What you need to know:
A history lesson on how the Jewish and Palestinian entities were carved from a fractious Middle East.
A West African proverb goes thus, “Until the lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
For a long time, the Middle East Israel-Palestine conflict has been reported to the world through the exclusive lens of Western international cable news stations and newspapers.
News stations like CNN, BBC and Fox, and publications like Times and Newsweek have unashamedly carried a systematic bias in their coverage of the perpetual conflict, in the end creating a perception in the world that Israelis are the sole victims of terrorist Islamist Palestinian factions and only respond heavily militarily as a matter of self-defence rather than malice.
It is no wonder that Israel has continued to enjoy public support and goodwill especially from the Western public and other neutrals whose mindsets are artificially configured by the specific content they consume.
One can, however, understand why Israel seems to enjoy substantive goodwill in Western countries. Throughout much of Jewish history, most Jews were exiled to the Diaspora (especially during the Roman conquest).
Today, only around 43 per cent of the world’s Jewish population live in Israel. The rest live in G8 countries with the majority in the US, hence their ability to shape much of US’s policy towards Israel.
The State of Israel wasn’t formed until 1948 which came as a culmination of a strong uprising of Zionism movement (a nationalist movement of Jews in the Diaspora that supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in the hitherto Palestine territory).
This movement was incentivised by the continued anti-Semitic sentiments in most of the countries in which Jews were exiled.
This fear was visibly defined during the Second World War when millions of Jews perished in the Holocaust in Germany’s Nazi concentration camps. It was no surprise then that a Jewish country, the State of Israel was declared barely three years later on May 14, 1948.
Prior to that, in November 1947, the UN General Assembly had discussed and adopted Resolution 181 (II) regarding issue of partitioning the Palestine territory, which was then still under the British Mandate since 1922.
The plan was to replace the British Mandate with an independent Arab State (Palestine), an independent Jewish State (Israel) and a separate City of Jerusalem (under an International Trusteeship System).
The plan had provided that Britain would use its powers to facilitate the partition process. Unfortunately, neither Britain nor the UN Security Council took any action to implement the resolution.
Britain was concerned that the partition would severely damage Anglo-Arab relations. The British half-heartedly managed to withdraw from Palestine territory by May 1948 in time for Jews to proclaim their independence and set up their state. Strangely, the Arab State was never to be established (at least officially).
Obviously, the establishment of the Jewish state was not received by fanfare in the mostly Islamic Arab Middle East. The Arab League members of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq refused to accept the UN partition plan, instead declaring the right of self-determination for Arabs across the whole of Palestine.
Barely a day after declaring independence, Israel was invaded by all its Arab neighbours in a battle that lasted the latter part of 1948. This war only came to a halt in 1949 with the signing of the so called Armistice Agreements.
These staggered agreements established the Armistice Demarcation Lines between Israel and the West Bank, also known as the Green Line demarcation.
These boundaries held till the 1967 Six-Day War when Israel launched surprise strikes against Egyptians airfields after it caught wind of the mobilisation of Egyptian forces on the Israeli border.
Within six days, Israel had won a decisive land war and taken control of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan and Golan Heights from Syria (hence the common joke of Israel’s elastic borders).
The Gaza Strip had initially been allotted to the proposed Arab state of Palestine under the UN 1947 Partition Plan. It had however been occupied by Egypt after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war where it remained under Egyptian military administration.
In 1993, Israel started talks with the Palestine Liberation Organisation. This resulted in a pact known as the Israel-PLO Recognition or Letters of Mutual Recognition between the government of Israel and its Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat dated September 9.
These letters acted as the preamble to the Oslo Accords that sought to allow the Palestinian people to self-determination which were signed on September 13.
Consequently, the Israel-PLO recognition transferred the jurisdiction of the Gaza Strip to the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.
However, in many ways, Gaza remained under the indirect occupation of Israel with a 2004 opinion of the International Court of Justice treating Gaza as one of the Israel-occupied territories.
In a bid to change this perception, Israel in Feb 2005 voted to implement a unilateral disengagement plan from Gaza. This plan was implemented between August and September that year.
This included the dismantling of Israeli settlements in Gaza and the removal of all 9,000 Israeli settlers from the Gush Katif settlement area in the Strip’s southwest.
All military bases were also removed. On September 12, 2005, the Cabinet formally declared an end to Israeli military occupation of Gaza—or at least that is what they wanted the rest of the world to believe.
They say that the first casualty of war is the truth. The same seems to apply for the current Israel-Gaza impasse as each side tries to imaginatively bend the facts to suit its preferred storyline.
As we speak, the human casualty count show that Israel may be winning on the battlefield but the media stories illustrate that Gaza (Hamas) are winning the PR war.
In my follow-up column next week, I shall seek to help us understand why this is the case, and hopefully help us separate the facts from the chaff.
