Arab-Israeli Conflict

Decades-old dispute between the state of Israel and its Arab neighbors over issues emerging from competing claims over the territory of the Middle East region of Palestine. The Arab-Israeli conflict has claimed thousands of lives, and efforts to achieve a durable compromise have been frustrated time and again by outbreaks of violence, suicide bombings, and breaches of agreements and treaties. The clash between the Palestinian Arabs and Israel has global implications; given the wide-reaching religious, economical, and geopolitical dimensions of the conflict, many other countries have a direct interest in seeing the dispute settled.

The Creation of Israel

In its present form, the Arab-Israeli conflict began in 1948, when Israel declared its statehood. However, the roots of the dispute go far back into the troubled history of the region.

After World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust—in which millions of people, including six million Jews, were tortured and slaughtered by the Germans—thousands of European Jews migrated to Palestine, responding to earlier Zionist calls to rebuild the ancient state of Israel. Since 1920, Great Britain had been controlling the region under a mandate granted by the League of Nations. As early as 1917, Great Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, in which it declared its support for the establishment of a Jewish state in the historical region of Palestine.

By 1946, a year after the German surrender in Europe, there were approximately 680,000 Jews in Palestine. Meanwhile, new Arab countries, including Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, were being created in the region. The young United Nations, seeing an urgent need to regulate the competing claims over Palestine, decided in 1947 to partition the territory into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The fiercely disputed city of Jerusalem was to become an international city. The Arab community, however, refused to accept that solution. In keeping with the UN decision, Israel immediately declared itself a sovereign state. The stage was set for a bloody conflict, which continues to this day.

The First Wars

As soon as Israel declared its statehood, Arab forces from Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded the new nation. Jordan established its control in the Arab-populated areas of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and Egypt did the same in the Gaza Strip. Two successive UN-brokered armistices did not manage to stop the fighting for more than one month at a time. By the time the combatants finally adopted a more solid truce, Israel had succeeded in rolling back the Arab advance and, in its view, to establish its threatened security, took control of a significant stretch of territory that had not been awarded during the UN partition.

This situation created an immense refugee problem among the Arab-Palestinian population, with tens of thousands forced to leave their former homes in the new Israeli state. The status of these refugees has become one of the most pressing issues of contention between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

The uneasy armistice that characterized the period between 1949 and 1956 was by no means devoid of [Page 33]bloodshed. By the end of 1956, the Israelis were convinced of an imminent threat from Egypt, and thus launched what Israel called a preemptive strike into Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. Israel occupied the territory for several months and withdrew only after a UN peacekeeping force arrived in the region to monitor the situation.

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