Last Wednesday, I had my first protest experience in my university (The German University in Cairo). I was informed that a group of people decided to stand together carrying signs and pictures for Gaza and showing the world (other GUCians actually) that they're against what's happening in Gaza. I've been watching the news and i know how our fellow brothers and sisters in Palestine are suffering (as usual) from the inhumane actions of Israel, so i decided to join them. Although, this protest made absolutely no difference but i thought it was such a great thing to do. I mean, people all over the world are protesting. A couple of days ago there was a protest in Toronto where the number of Jews was even greater than the number of Muslims! Actually there was a protest in Israel itself! So it's on the minds of everyone, it is a matter of humanity. The fact that we are all united; Muslims,Christians and Jews really touched me. Can't the world see that religion is not the opium of the masses as claimed by Karl Marx? In fact, it is exactly the opposite; LACK of religion in our hearts is the reason for all this mess we're living in. Terrorism, wars, oppression ...all started when people walked AWAY from religion.
Anyway, after i went home i had so many thoughts in my head concerning the whole Israel-Palestine conflict thing. So i talked to my dad (who's in love with history) and asked him about the beginning of all this suffering, how it all started. And so he started narrating the story of Palestine...of course i will never be able to tell it the way he did (I'll just write it in points) and i might unintentionally drop some important events. So with the help of the internet i decided I should write it anyway to share with you guys and to keep my self reminded.
(1)
Palestine was ruled by the Ottoman Empire from the 1500's up until World War I.
In 1922, Britain got a League of Nations “mandate” to rule Palestine as a colony.
Between 1933 and 1945, the British imperialists, along with the U.S.,
severely restricted Jewish immigration into their own countries in order to push Jews toward Palestine-at a time when Jews in Europe faced the Holocaust.
(2)
In 1936, the Arabs began a major revolt against British policies and ever-increasing Jewish immigration. The revolt ended in 1939, the same year the British released a document known as the White Paper of 1939, which limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 over five years - and none thereafter. It also prohibited future land sales to Jews, and promised Palestine independence within 10 years, presumably as an Arab-dominated state.
1937, Peel Commission finds the British promises to both Arabs and Jews irreconcilable, declare it's Mandate unworkable, and recommend partition of Palestine into Arab, Jewish and British sectors. The Peel Commission is a British Royal Commission of Inquiry set out to propose changes to the British Mandate of Palestine following the outbreak of the 1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine. It was headed by the Earl Peel.
Haganah, Irgun, and the Stern Gang emerge as Jewish terrorist groups. Riots erupt and terror attacks increase from both sides.
(3)
Irgun, led by Menachen Begin, announce in 1944 a war against the Mandate and intention to assassinate all British officials who limit Jewish immigration. Most Israeli leaders then, as now were members or supporters of these Jewish terrorist organizations.
The British, after securing their oil interests in Iraq, and the Suez Canal in Egypt, drop the Palestine issue like a hot potato. In 1947, Britain told the United Nations it was ending the Palestine mandate and handed the problem to the United Nations.
A U.N. commission recommended that Palestine be partitioned into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, with Jerusalem under international control. The United States supported that idea. At that time, the Palestinians outnumbered Zionist settlers two to one and owned 92 percent of the land. But the partition gave Israel 54 percent of the land. The recommendation was endorsed by the U.N. General Assembly on Nov. 29, 1947 as U.N. Resolution 181.
The Arab states and the Arabs of Palestine rejected the U.N. partition, feeling that all the land was theirs. The Jews accepted the plan and on May 14, 1948, led by David Ben-Gurion, declared statehood for Israel. U.S. President Truman recognized Israel immediately, followed shortly after by the Soviet Union.
(4)
In May 1948-after the Palestinians and the Arab countries refused to accept the UN partition-Israel launched a war against Palestinians. Israeli forces massacred 250 villagers in Deir Yassin, including 100 women and children. Israel used this atrocity to spread terror among the Palestinian people, and many fled their homes in panic. By the war's end in January 1949, nearly 800,000 Palestinians-two-thirds of the population-had been driven into exile; Israel had seized 77 percent of the land.To the Arab world, the war was a humiliating defeat, another instance of pan-Arab unity proving unequal to the power of outsiders. It remains a source of bitterness to this day, with the story of how the war drove Palestinians off their lands referred to as al-Nakba, "the disaster."
By the time the 1948 war ended - through a 1949 agreement called the Rhodes Armistice - some 700,000 Palestinians had left their homes, most moving into the area now known as the West Bank and creating the refugee crisis that still exists. At the same time, a similar number of Jewish refugees fled their homes in neighboring areas and other Arab countries because of the turmoil.
Israel increases the size of its territory by 40% possessing approximately 8,000 square miles of Palestine - reducing the Arab lands set up in the 1947 U.N. partition by some 50 percent. Jerusalem was divided, with Arabs on the east side of the armistice line - the Green Line - and the Jews on the west.
Curiously, Israel still refuses to accept any identified boundaries, and, Israel was established as a state for "Jewish People", not as a state for its citizens.
(5)
The 1960s saw a revolutionary upsurge among Palestinians. Palestinian guerrilla organizations launched armed struggle against Israel in 1965, with the aim of creating a democratic, secular (non-religious) state throughout Palestine. In March 1968 Palestinian fighters held off a major Israeli attack at Karameh, Jordan. In 1967 the Israelis launched the “Six Day War” and seized the remaining 23 percent of historic Palestine-the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem-along with Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and Syria's Golan Heights.
UN Resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from all areas seized in the 1967 war. But the Israelis began to build heavily armed settlements in the occupied areas. Since 1967, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have been under harsh military occupation, denied basic rights and unable to develop any viable
(6)
On Oct. 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. The attack caught Israel off guard. It was Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, and most of Israel was shut down for the holiday.
Six days into the fighting, the U.S. began a massive, $2.2 billion airlift of fighter planes, tanks, helicopters and munitions to Israel. It was worth it, Nixon said, "to maintain a balance of forces and achieve stability in the Middle East."
Eventually, Israel was able to turn back the Syrian and Egyptian armies and even pursue them into their own territories. In the end, Egypt lost about 7,700 soldiers; the Syrians, 3,500.
The battle between the Israelis and the Arabs raised the tensions between the superpowers considerably, and on Oct. 22 the U.S. and Russia moved to halt the hostilities by proposing U.N. Resolution 338, which called for an immediate end to the fighting and the resumption of efforts toward peace under the guidelines set out in Resolution 242. The resolution passed unanimously.
The war left Israel as the Mideast's dominant military power once again, but it also established the Arab states' ability to inflict heavy damage on Israel.
It also inaugurated the tradition of huge U.S. military aid to Israel, which continues to this day - in recent years, about two-thirds of the roughly $3 billion a year in U.S. aid to Israel has gone to the Israeli military.
(7)
At Camp David 1978, the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state is hammered out.
In return for peace with Egypt, Israel agrees to hand back the Sinai and remove all Jewish settlements there. A highway is to be built between Jordan and Egypt that Israel guarantees "Free and Peaceful Passage". Israeli airbases built in Sinai to be handed over to Egyptian civil authorities.
Notice That: The reluctance of Arab states to take Palestine refugees, and the wish of many Palestinians to keep their identity and status as a dispossessed people, led to the continuation of the refugee camps set up!
(8)
The first Palestinian intifada (uprising/ shaking off) that erupted in the late 1980s deeply shook Israel and the U.S. imperialists.
The tactics were far less violent than those seen in confrontations these days; Palestinians threw stones and Molotov cocktails, and Israelis fired rubber bullets in response. Strikes and boycotts were also used. Palestinians believe the power of the intifada, along with the worldwide attention it generated, pressured Israel to begin negotiating seriously with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) .
In addition to outright bloody suppression, the U.S. and Israel initiated a so-called “Peace Process.” A key part of U.S. strategy has been the “two-state solution”: official Palestinian “recognition” of Israel and end to all resistance, in return for a small state in the West Bank and Gaza. By the late 1980s Yasser Arafat and the PLO had basically agreed to this.
The U.S. and Israel have never intended to allow a truly independent Palestinian state. Under the Oslo “peace process” begun in 1993, Israel transferred about 40 percent of the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority (PA). But this PA territory is only about 10 percent of historic Palestine and consists of small disconnected pieces of land surrounded by areas under Israeli control. The main roads, key water resources, and access to neighboring countries and the sea are all controlled by Israel. And the Oslo agreement made no provisions for the four million Palestinian refugees living outside of Israel, West Bank, and Gaza. During the years of the “peace process” (1993 through 2000), the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank doubled.
The U.S. and Israel dropped this “peace process” and pursued even more unrestrained tactics after the year 2000. Meanwhile Israeli settlements have multiplied, now numbering hundreds, with Israeli troops protecting their land grab and aggression.
(9)
The second intifada began in September 2000 after years of failed peace negotiations and a provocative visit by Ariel Sharon-the man responsible for the 1982 massacre of hundreds at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon- to the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, an area known as the Temple Mount to Jews and as Haram al-Sharif to Arabs.
Continuing to this day, the second intifada is far more violent and bloody than the first, with Palestinians employing suicide bombers and guns.
Since the late 1980s Israel has at times promoted the growth of the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas as a countervailing force against secular forces and to stoke clashes among Palestinian groups. Hamas, with its reactionary ideology, is in some ways a perfect foil for the U.S. and Israel, who try to portray themselves as modern democracies confronting obscurantist theocracies. (Enlightened people in the West who want to oppose fundamentalist theocracies can start at home: the U.S. has a president who is deeply connected to Christian fascist theocrats.) The U.S. and Israel have used the victory of Hamas in the recent Palestinian elections to justify intensifying brutality against the Palestinian people by further embedding these attacks in the overall rationale of the “war on terror.”
(10)
Israeli brutality against the Palestinian people became even more deadly after Ariel Sharon was installed as Israel's prime minister in 2001.
In 2002 Israel began erecting a fortified barrier-concrete walls, electrified fences, electric sensors, razor wire, trenches, and watchtowers-across more than 400 miles of Palestinian land in the West Bank. This apartheid wall further isolates many Palestinian towns, separates farmers from their fields, and steals more land from the Palestinians.
By early 2003, no agreements have been reached. Israel continues its policy of colonization of occupied territory (in violation of the 4th Geneva Convention) and the confiscation of precious water resources in the West Bank for new Israeli settlements.
In September 2005 Sharon carried out a “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip, dismantling Israeli settlements and military installments-as part of a plan to make Gaza into a big prison for the 1.4 million Palestinians there, while moving to annex more land in the West Bank. Sharon's successor, Ehud Olmert, has continued on this path, announcing a plan for “unilateral withdraw” from the West Bank-which means consolidating Israeli control over the most valuable and strategic territory, while intensifying the siege around the scattered Palestinian enclaves.
Further adding to the misery of the Palestinian people, the U.S. and European powers invoked Hamas' victory in the elections for the Palestinian legislature in early 2006 to cut off or restrict aid to the Palestinian Authority. This economic strangulation is having a traumatic effect on the Palestinian people. More than half of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza now live below the international poverty line of $2 a day. The UN's World Health Organization has warned of a “looming” health crisis, with hospitals and clinics running out of medicine, fuel, and other vital necessities.
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Sources:
(I apologize for i haven't got enough time to paraphrase some paragraphs)
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/nation-world/mideast/wars/
http://revcom.us/a/052/palestinefactsheet-en.html
http://unimaps.com/historic-israel-palestine2/index.html
PLEASE CHECK THESE STATISTICS: http://www.ifamericansknew.org/
If you're interested you can also check:
http://revcom.us/a/1226/palesinterview.htm
http://www.palestinehistory.com/history/brief/brief.htm
http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_history.php
http://www.palestineremembered.com/
