From Occupied Palestine

Palestine, Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Primer
JOEL BEININ and LISA HAJJAR
Middle East Research and Information Project

Introduction

The conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Jews is a modern phenomenon, which began around the turn of the 20th century. Although these two groups have different religions (Palestinians include Muslims, Christians and Druze), religious differences are not the cause of the conflict. It is essentially a struggle over land. Until 1948, the area that both groups claimed was known internationally as Palestine. But following the war of 1948-49, this land was divided into three parts: the state of Israel, the West Bank (of the Jordan River) and the Gaza Strip.

Palestine, Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Primer
JOEL BEININ and LISA HAJJAR
Middle East Research and Information Project

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)

The Arab League established the PLO in 1964 as an effort to control Palestinian nationalism while appearing to champion the cause. The Arab defeat in the 1967 war enabled younger, more militant Palestinians to take over the PLO and gain some independence from the Arab regimes.

The PLO includes different political and armed groups with varying ideological orientations. Yasser Arafat is the leader of Fatah, the largest group, and has been PLO chairman since 1968. The other major groups are the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and, in the occupied territories, the Palestine Peoples Party (PPP, formerly the Communist Party). Despite factional differences, the majority of Palestinians regard the PLO as their representative.

Part I - An introduction to the Israel-Palestine conflict
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN
Updated September 2002

Background

To resolve what was called the "Jewish question" - i.e., the reciprocal challenges of Gentile repulsion or anti-Semitism and Gentile attraction or assimilation - the Zionist movement sought in the late nineteenth century to create an overwhelmingly, if not homogeneously, Jewish state in Palestine. (1) Once the Zionist movement gained a foothold in Palestine through Great Britain's issuance of the Balfour Declaration, (2) the main obstacle to realizing its goal was the indigenous Arab population. For, on the eve of Zionist colonization, Palestine was overwhelmingly not Jewish but Muslim and Christian Arab. (3)

Part II - An introduction to the Israel-Palestine conflict
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN
Updated September 2002

Expulsion Redux

The Oslo process was premised on finding a credible Palestinian leadership to cloak Israeli apartheid: a Nelson Mandela to act the part of a Chief Buthelezi. (54) Camp David signaled the defeat of this strategy: Arafat refused - or, due to popular resistance, wasn't able - to play the assigned role. Without such a legitimizing Palestinian facade, the reality of Israeli apartheid stands fully exposed and subject to the same withering criticism as its South African precursor. "If Palestinians were black, Israel would be a pariah state subject to economic sanctions led by the United States," the London Observer editorialized after the outbreak of the new intifada. "Its development and settlement of the West Bank would be seen as a system of apartheid, in which the indigenous population was allowed to live in a tiny fraction of its own country, in self-proclaimed `bantustans,' with `whites' monopolizing the supply of water and electricity. And just as the black population was allowed into South Africa's white areas in disgracefully under-resourced townships, so Israel's treatment of Israeli Arabs - flagrantly discriminating against them in housing and education - would be recognized as scandalous too." Mainstream figures across the political spectrum, from President Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to South Africa's Anglican Archbishop and Nobel Laureate, Desmond Tutu, have since issued similar denunciations. "I have been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land," Tutu declared. "It reminded me so much of what happened to us blacks in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about." (55)

MERIP primer on the uprising in Palestine
MIDDLE EAST RESEARCH AND INFORMATION PROJECT
Spring 2002

On April 4, George W. Bush dispatched Secretary of State Colin Powell to Israel-Palestine to attempt to stop the "storm of violence" that has kept the Middle East on American front pages throughout the spring of 2002.