Palestine
Palestine
In 539 bce Cyrus II of the Persian Achaemenian dynasty followed up his triumph over Media by conquering Lydia and Babylonia, thus making himself ruler of the greatest empire thitherto known.
In the administrative reforms implemented by Darius I (reigned 522–486 bce), Phoenicia, Palestine-Syria, and Cyprus constituted the fifth province (satrapy) of the Persian empire (Herodotus, The History, Book III, chapter 91).
Palestine
Palestine during the time of David and Solomon
The Persian empire
One of Cyrus’s first acts was to decree (c. 538 bce) that Judah be restored and the Temple of Jerusalembe rebuilt. A large number of Jewish exiles in Babylonia returned to Jerusalem, and work on the Second Temple was begun. The political situation was extremely unfavourable, however, since Judah south of Hebron had been occupied by Edomitesescaping from Arab pressure, while the tiny remainder north of Hebron had passed under the control of the governor of Samaria. In spite of political intrigues to prevent completion of the work of rebuilding the Temple, the Jews took advantage of the civil wars and rebellions that racked the empire after the accession of Darius I to press forward with the work. They were urged on by the fiery prophets Haggai and Zechariah. In 515 bce the Second Temple was finished, but the Jews had meanwhile aroused the suspicion of the Persian authorities, and further efforts to improve their situation were discouraged.
Matters rested in this unsatisfactory state until about 445 bce, when the Jewish royal favourite, Nehemiah, deeply stirred by reports of the sorry condition of Judah and Jerusalem, succeeded in obtaining the Persian ruler’s support for a mission to Palestine. Under Nehemiah’s leadership, Jerusalem’s walls were rebuilt. Knowledge of the exact sequence of events is complicated by the confused state of the documentary sources, and the chronology of events in the time of Nehemiah and Ezra, who became a leader of the Jews who had returned to Jerusalem from Babylonia, is not certain. There is good evidence to suggest that Ezra’s return to Jerusalem should be dated to 398 bce, early in the reign of the Persian king Artaxerxes II. The mention of Persian intervention in the priestly affairs of the high priest Johanan can reasonably be associated with Ezra’s reform activities. In any event, Nehemiah and Ezra were able to establish both the religious autonomy of Judah and the practice of normative Judaism so firmly that they continued with little change for several centuries.
Information concerning the history of Palestine in the period following the age of Nehemiah and Ezra is scanty. It is known that the province of Judah continued to be administered by high priests who struck their own coins and that the provinces of Samaria and Ammon remained under governors of the houses of Sanballat and Tobiah. In 343 Artaxerxes III (Ochus) is said to have devastated parts of Palestine in connection with his reconquest of Egypt. Eleven years later the country passed into Macedonian hands after Alexander the Great’s conquest of Phoenicia
The Ptolemies
After the death of Alexander in 323 bce, Palestine, with much of Syria and Phoenicia, fell to Ptolemy I (Soter), who established himself as satrap in Egyptthat same year and adopted the title of king by 304. (After the death of Ptolemy, the Ptolemaic dynasty ruled Egypt for 300 years.)
The successors of Alexander, including Ptolemy and Seleucus I (Nicator), defeated Antigonus I (Monophthalmus), another of Alexander’s generals, who had almost succeeded in re-creating under his sole rule Alexander’s vast empire, at the Battle of Ipsus in Phrygia in 301 bce.
This victory confirmed Ptolemy in his possession of his territory, although he had arrived too late for the battle, and Seleucus, whose participation in it had been decisive, at first disputed Ptolemy’s claim to Syria and Phoenicia and actually occupied northern Syria.
This early dispute laid the foundations of a century of bitter antagonism between the houses of Ptolemy and Seleucus that led to war five times—the so-called Syrian Wars—and was finally stilled only when Palestine, in 200 bce, became part of the Seleucid kingdom.
The northern boundary of the kingdom established by Ptolemy lay apparently slightly north of modern Tripoli, Lebanon, perhaps on the course of the Kabīr River (ancient Eleutherus), and there are no signs of any important change in this frontier throughout the next century.
This victory confirmed Ptolemy in his possession of his territory, although he had arrived too late for the battle, and Seleucus, whose participation in it had been decisive, at first disputed Ptolemy’s claim to Syria and Phoenicia and actually occupied northern Syria.
This early dispute laid the foundations of a century of bitter antagonism between the houses of Ptolemy and Seleucus that led to war five times—the so-called Syrian Wars—and was finally stilled only when Palestine, in 200 bce, became part of the Seleucid kingdom.
The northern boundary of the kingdom established by Ptolemy lay apparently slightly north of modern Tripoli, Lebanon, perhaps on the course of the Kabīr River (ancient Eleutherus), and there are no signs of any important change in this frontier throughout the next century.
Of Ptolemaic rule in the southern part of this territory, Palestine, little is known. The small amount of information there is—mainly from writers of a later period, especially the author of the First Book of Maccabees and the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus—suggests that, unlike the northern region, known as Syria and Phoenicia, the area was left in much its previous state, with considerable power and authority in the hands of the native chieftains.
More is known of taxation than of administration. A story preserved by Josephus (The Antiquities of the Jews, Book XII, section 154 ff.) indicates that tax farming, whereby the right to collect taxes was auctioned or was awarded to privileged persons, was employed for the collection of local taxes. It seems likely that there were additional extraordinary taxes levied by edict from Egypt.
Knowledge of the economic and commercial life of Palestine in the mid-3rd century bce is, on the other hand, fuller and more reliable. It is drawn from the dossier of letters received and written by one Zenon, the confidential business manager of the chief minister of Ptolemy II (Philadelphus; 285–246 bce). In 259 Zenon was sent to Palestine and Syria, where his master had commercial interests.
His letters speak particularly of a trade in slaves, especially of young girls for prostitution, in whom there appears to have been a brisk commerce, with export to Egypt. Zenon’s records also testify to a considerable trade in cereals, oil, and wine. Inevitably, like all imports to Egypt, Palestinian exports worked under state monopoly, without which the internal monopolies of Egypt would have been undermined. Palestine, like Egypt and Syria, seems to have had no economic freedom under Ptolemaic rule; in all transactions the hand of the government’s agents is clearly visible.
His letters speak particularly of a trade in slaves, especially of young girls for prostitution, in whom there appears to have been a brisk commerce, with export to Egypt. Zenon’s records also testify to a considerable trade in cereals, oil, and wine. Inevitably, like all imports to Egypt, Palestinian exports worked under state monopoly, without which the internal monopolies of Egypt would have been undermined. Palestine, like Egypt and Syria, seems to have had no economic freedom under Ptolemaic rule; in all transactions the hand of the government’s agents is clearly visible.
Far less is known of the material culture of Palestine in the Ptolemaic period. The population seems, as in Syria, to have been divided between the Hellenized cities (poleis) of the coast, notably Ascalon (modern Ashqelon, Israel) and Joppa (modern Tel Aviv–Yafo), and the rural population living in villages (komai). The fact that several cities had Ptolemaic dynastic names (Philadelphia, Philoteria, Ptolemais) must not lead to the conclusion that the early Ptolemies wanted to urbanize and raise the standard of livingof the people of Palestine. It seldom appears that they did more than rename a previously existing city (e.g., Scythopolis for Bet Sheʾan)—a practice not uncommon in the Hellenistic world. In fact, unlike the Seleucids, the Ptolemies do not appear to have been great city builders. Nor do they appear to have encouraged the outward forms of independence in local government. It seems likely from the story of the Phoenician tax farmers mentioned above that considerable authority lay in the hands of the wealthy; yet the fact that both Ascalon and Joppa issued Ptolemaic regal coinage, but apparently no autonomous bronze coinage, suggests a rigid control.
The absence of epigraphic evidence from the cities of Ptolemaic Palestine, however, renders any judgment about the conditions of the cities hazardous. Archaeology, too, helps but little, inasmuch as the buildings of Roman Palestine superseded most of the Hellenistic remains. One exception must be noted: the tombs of the Hellenized Sidonian military settlers at Marisa in Edom (Idumaea)—the walls of which are decorated with frescoes of fine hunting scenes—indicate that Hellenic civilization had been embraced by the non-Greek population in that period.
The chronic state of hostility between Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleucid house, which in much of the 3rd century bce had been concerned with the coastal regions of western Asia Minor, received a new impetus with the accession to the Seleucid throne of the energetic Antiochus III (the Great; 223–187), who aimed to win southern Syria and Palestine from Egypt, now weakly governed, and thereby establish the frontier to which Seleucus I had unwillingly renounced his claim in 301 bce. After his decisive defeat by Ptolemy IV (Philopator) at Raphia in 217, however, Antiochus was for several years occupied with internal troubles, and it was therefore not until about 200 bce that he could think again of an attack on Egypt. There a child—Ptolemy V (Epiphanes)—had recently ascended the throne, and the government was in the hands of overly powerful ministers who were more concerned with enriching themselves than with preserving the integrity of the kingdom. At Panion, on the northern boundary of Galilee, the armies of Antiochus and Ptolemy met, and Ptolemy was defeated. Thus the Ptolemaic possessions north of the Sinai desert, including Palestine, passed into the hands of the house of Seleucus.
The Seleucids
The Seleucids brought to the problem of the administration of Palestine a different tradition from that which had been behind Ptolemaic rule. The latter was based on the careful exploitation of territory that was possible in a small and closely knit land such as Egypt and had thence been extended to the Ptolemaic provinces. This had never been possible for the Seleucids, who had always been masters of regions so vast as to render a unified and absolute control impossible. There is no sign that the Seleucid government oppressed the native peoples—they seem, on the contrary, to have aimed at improving the natives’ status as far as possible, largely through bringing them into contact with Greek modes of urban existence.
It might then be supposed that Seleucid rule would have been popular in Palestine. In fact, however, it was under Seleucid rule that the great uprising of the Jewish people, the revolt of the Maccabees, occurred. The explanation of this paradox is perhaps twofold. First, the Seleucids were in need of money, and, second, the throne, at a critical time, was occupied by a tactless and neurotic king. Knowledge of Seleucid rule in Palestine before the accession of Antiochus IV (Epiphanes; 175–164 bce) is slight. The period from 188 bce onward was a lean time for the dynasty, because the war with Rome, which had ended (in 189) in a complete Roman victory, had cost it not only almost the whole of Asia Minor (Anatolia) but also a yearly indemnity of 15,000 talents. It is therefore not surprising that the first glimpse of Seleucid rule in Palestine tells of an attempt by Heliodorus, the leading minister of Seleucus IV (Philopator; 187–175 bce), to deprive the Second Temple in Jerusalem of its treasure. His failure was soon ascribed to divine protection.
With the accession of Antiochus Epiphanes, relations rapidly deteriorated. Antiochus appears to have aimed at a wholesale restoration of the Seleucid empire in the east, including an occupation of Egypt, as a counter to the loss of the western province occasioned by the Treaty of Apamea. He made an unwise beginning in Palestine by establishing a philhellene high priest, and it is clear from this and from his whole subsequent policy that he wished to extirpate Jewish religion from its central stronghold (there is no indication that he persecuted Jews of the Diaspora [Greek: “Dispersion”] living in the cities of his kingdom).
Antiochus invaded Egypt in 170 or 169 bce, returning to Syria by way of Jerusalem, where he and his army despoiled the Temple of all its wealth. Two years later, after his humiliating expulsion from the gate of Egypt by the Roman legate, he sent a financial official to exact taxes from the cities of Judaea. Antiochus’s official attacked the city of Jerusalem by guile and largely destroyed it. He then built a fortified position on the citadel, called by the Greeks the Akra. This became the symbol of Judah’s enslavement, though in itself the presence of a royal garrison in a Hellenistic city was by no means unusual. Its imposition was followed by an open attack on religious practice, in which many rites were forbidden. Noncompliance with the order—which contained many items calculated to raise the bitterest resistance in the hearts of law-abiding Jews, such as the prohibition of circumcision and the abolition of the observance of the Sabbath—was punishable by death. Finally, on the 25th day of the Hebrew month Kislev (December) in 168 bce, the “abomination of desolation,” namely the altar of Zeus, was set up in the Temple in Jerusalem. It was this above all that summoned forth the resistance of the sons of the aged priest Mattathias; thus began the Maccabean revolt, led by Judas Maccabeus.
The resistance, it must be emphasized, came from only a section of the population. The century and a half of Greek rule had Hellenized much of the upper class of Jerusalem, and some of the characteristic features of Greek city life—such as the ephebic institute, for the training of young men, and the gymnasia—had been established on the initiative of this section of the ruling class, which was able to accept a less radical observance of Judaism and combine it with loyalty to the throne. Throughout the revolt, and indeed until the closing days of the Hasmonean dynasty established by the Maccabeans, this Hellenized element had to be taken into account.
Palestine during the Maccabean period
Judas Maccabeus proved himself a leader of high quality. He successfully resisted the weak forces sent by the Seleucid authorities, and after three years of intermittent warfare he succeeded in purifying the Temple (165 bce). The Akra, however, remained in Seleucid hands until 141 bce.
After the death of Antiochus Epiphanes in 164 bce, the numbers of claimants to the Seleucid throne made a continuous policy toward Palestine impossible, because each claimant felt the need to seek support wherever it might be found. Thus, Jewish high priests were bribed by the kings and dynasts of Syria. This development enabled Judas and those who succeeded him to hold their own and eventually to establish a hereditary dynasty, known as the Hasmonean for their ancestor Hasmoneus. Soon after Antiochus Epiphanes’ death, an agreement was reached with the Seleucid regent Lysias (who feared the appearance of a rival in Syria) through which the Jews received back their religious liberty. But, at the same time, the regular practice of pagan worship, beside the Jewish, was established, and a Seleucid nominee was appointed high priest. Thus were laid the seeds of fresh revolt.
Almost immediately Judas again took the field and scored a considerable victory over Nicanor, the Seleucid general, in which the latter was killed. Within two months, however, Demetrius I (Soter), the Seleucid king, sent Bacchides to take up a position near Jerusalem, and, in the engagement that followed, Judas lost his life (161/160 bce).
The Hasmonean priest-princes
In the following years, dynastic disputes within the Seleucid empire prevented a succession of rulers from settling the Palestinian question. These circumstances allowed first Jonathan (161/160–143/142 bce), the brother and successor of Judas, and then his brother Simon (143/142–134) to attain power. In 153 one of the Seleucid pretenders, Alexander Balas, in order to outplay the legitimateking, Demetrius, granted Jonathan the office of high priest and gave him the Seleucid rank of a courtier, thereby legitimizing his position. When Simonsucceeded Jonathan, he acquired the status of a recognized secular ruler; the year he assumed rule was regarded as the first of a new era, and official documents were dated in his name and by his regnal year. He secured from the new Seleucid monarch, Demetrius II (Nicator; 145–139 and 129–125), exemption from taxation for the Jews.
In 142–141 bce Simon forced the Syrian garrison on the Akra to surrender, and the Jews passed a decree in his honour, granting the right of permanent incumbency to Simon and to his successors, until “an accredited prophet” should arise. It was thus in Simon’s reign that the rule of the priest-prince was transformed into a secular hereditary rule. The Seleucid king recognized this, granting Simon the right to issue his own coins.
Simon’s son, John Hyrcanus I (134–104 bce), suffered an initial setback at the hands of the last great Seleucid king, Antiochus VII (Sidetes), who set out to reconquer Palestine, but at the latter’s death John renewed his father’s expansionist program, in which Samaria was conquered and destroyed. In internal policy, however, he committed the grave error of quarreling with one of the two main Jewish ecclesiastical parties, the Pharisees—who followed the Law with great strictness and with whom the Maccabean movement had in origin close affinity—and siding with their opponents, the more liberal Sadducees. This is an early instance of that denial of the revolutionary origin of the movement that became entirely obvious in the reign of Alexander Jannaeus. Hyrcanus I was succeeded by Aristobulus I (104–103), who extended Hasmonean territory northward and is said to have assumed the title of king (basileus), though on his coins he appears, like Hyrcanus I, as high priest.
The reign of his brother and successor, Alexander Jannaeus, was long (103–76 bce) and largely filled with wars. Alexander imposed his rule rigorously over an increasingly large area, including both the cities of the coast and the area east of the Jordan River. Still more clearly than Hyrcanus I, he attests the change in direction and aim of the Hasmonean house. He was the bitter enemy of the Pharisees, his coins bear Greek as well as Hebrew legends, and his title on them is simply “King Alexander.” He was succeeded by his widow, Salome Alexandra, who reversed his policy and was guided by powerful religious advisers, members of the Pharisaic movement. After her death in 67 bce her two sons Aristobulus II and Hyrcanus II fought for the succession. Hyrcanus was defeated but was encouraged to reassert his rights by Antipater, an Edomite, son of the governor of Idumaea and father of the future Herod the Great.
At that stage the Romans appeared on the scene. Pompey the Great, during his reorganization of the lands of the newly conquered Seleucid kingdom, also arranged the affairs of Palestine (63 bce). He attempted to arbitrate between the brothers and eventually, after he had laid siege to and captured Jerusalem, appointed Hyrcanus II as high priest without the title of king adopted by his predecessors. He also imposed taxes on the Jews and curtailed Jewish dominions, granting virtual autonomy to a group of 10 or 11 Hellenized cities in Syria and Palestine, thenceforth to be known as the Decapolis, and placing them under the jurisdiction of the newly appointed governor of Syria. Pliny the Elder lists these cities as Damascus, Philadelphia (modern Amman, Jordan), Raphana, Scythopolis, Gadara, Hippos, Dion, Pella, Gerasa, and Canatha. On the basis of evidence in inscriptions, Abila can be added to the list. Thus, despite the name Decapolis, the actual number appears to have been 11. All these cities, except Scythopolis, are located east of the Jordan River, extending from Damascus in the north to Philadelphia in the south. Except for Damascus, all the other cities lie immediately to the east of Galilee, Samaria, or Judaea. Whether the Decapolis geographically belonged to Syria, to Coele Syria (“Hollow Syria”; i.e., the southernmost region of Syria, which may include Palestine and is sometimes mistakenly limited to the modern Al-Biqāʿ valley), or to Arabia (often identified as the land east of the Jordan River) is not clear, especially in the ancient geographers. In any event, the Decapolis ended as a political entity when Rome annexed Arabia in 106 ce; the cities were distributed among the three provinces of Arabia, Judaea, and Syria. It appears that Philadelphia, Gerasa, and probably Dion went to Arabia, Damascus certainly to Syria, and the rest to Judaea or Syria.
After the death of Pompey, however, the power of Antipater and his family greatly increased. Hyrcanus II became a figurehead of no importance, and Antipater himself, in return for services to Julius Caesar, received Roman citizenship and was awarded the title of “procurator of Judaea,” while his sons Phasael and Herod became governors (strategoi) of Jerusalem and Galilee, respectively. The unexpected occupation of Palestine by Parthiantroops in 40 bce altered the situation. Antigonus, the son of Aristobulus and therefore a legitimate Hasmonean, won the favour of the Parthians and was established by them as king and high priest of Jerusalem. Phasael was reported to have committed suicide, while his brother Herod escaped to Rome.
The Herodian house and the Roman procurators
Herod, in Rome, was recognized by the Senate, with the approval of Octavian (later the emperor Caesar Augustus) and Mark Antony, as king of Judaea (40 bce) and returned to Palestine in 39. Shortly afterward Roman troops expelled the Parthians, whose popularity in Palestine had been and subsequently remained considerable. After struggles against Antigonus, the Parthian nominee, in which he was assisted by Roman troops, Herod eventually captured Jerusalem. At about the same time, he married a niece of Antigonus, thus probably consoling those who remained loyal to the memory of the almost defunct Hasmonean house. Antigonus, when he fell into the hands of his enemies, was executed by order of Mark Antony.
Palestine during the time of Herod the Great and his sons
The accession of Herod, a Roman protégé and an Edomite, brought to Palestine the peace that in the years of independence it had often lacked. His long reign (37–4 bce) was marked by general prosperity; his new city of Caesarea (Caesarea Maritima) received lavish praise from Josephus for its spectacular port and extensive water and sewer system. Between 31 and 20, Augustus restored to him the Jewish territories that Pompey had taken away, and in this enlarged kingdom he created a sound administrative system of Hellenistic type. Toward the end of his life the complex demands of a vast family (he had at least nine wives) led him into difficulties regarding the succession, and it was then that he developed into the gruesome and vicious figure that Christian tradition has made so familiar. He had his wife Mariamne and several of his sons put to death to prevent them from succeeding him; and on his death in 4 bce the country again entered a period of divided rule, which led to the reestablishment of direct Roman government. Augustus decided later that year, in the presence of three surviving sons of Herod, that Herod Archelausshould rule Judaea, Samaria, and Edom (i.e., central and southern Palestine); Herod Antipas should rule Galilee and Peraea (east of the Jordan River); and Philip should rule Trachonitis, Batanaea, and Auranitis (the area between the Decapolis and Damascus).
The fates of these rulers (of whom Philip and Antipas were called tetrarchs, Archelaus ethnarch) and their territories were different. Philip, the most peaceable of the three, ruled the northern area until his death in 34 ce. Antipas reigned in Galilee and Peraea until 39 ce but was then banished by the emperor Caligula on the ground that he had parleyed with Rome’s enemies. Archelaus reigned for 10 years only; he was removed at the request of his subjects in 6 ce. The region under Archelaus’s rule (i.e., Judaea, Samaria, and Edom) became the province of Judaea and passed to a series of undistinguished Roman prefects, the last of whom (Pontius Pilate, 26–36 ce) lost office for the unnecessary massacre of some Samaritans. Palestine finally was united under Caligula’s protégé, Herod Agrippa I, who succeeded Philip in the north in 37 ce. The tetrarchy of Antipas was added soon after his removal in 39, and the territories of Judaea, Samaria, and Edom were added in 41, so that from 41 to his death in 44 Agrippa ruled the kingdom of his grandfather, Herod the Great, from Jerusalem. In 44 the entire kingdom passed under Roman rule and was reconstituted as the procuratorial province of Judaea.
Disturbances in the early years of procuratorial rule were frequent and caused largely by maladministration. Serious trouble arose under Ventidius Cumanus (48–52); and under his successor, the imperial freedman Felix (52–60), rebellion was open though sporadic. The incompetence and anti-Jewish posture of Gessius Florus, procurator 64–66, led in 66 to the decisive and final outbreak, known as the First Jewish Revolt. Florus, the heir to a long tradition of hostility between the large Hellenized populations of Palestine and the Jews (also a problem in the Diaspora, most notably at Alexandria during the reign of Caligula), allowed the Greek population of Caesarea Maritima to massacre the Jews of that city with impunity. Greeks in other towns of Palestine repeated the assault. In turn, the Jews responded by slaughtering Gentiles in Samaria, Galilee, and elsewhere. Soon Florus lost control of the situation. The organization of the Jews was better than it previously had been, and they were successful in an early engagement against the governor of Syria, who had advanced to Palestine with two legions to assist the hard-pressed procurator.
In 67, however, Vespasian, the future emperor, with his son Titus, arrived with a force of about 60,000 men, and the war became increasingly bitter. By the end of 67 Galilee was captured, and Judaea was reduced in three campaigns, which ended with the fall of Jerusalem in 70. The Temple was destroyed, though tradition recorded that Titus gave orders that it was to be spared, and the city became the permanent garrison town of a Roman legion. By 73 all resistance had ceased.
Events in Palestine during the first decades of the Christian era were of crucial importance to the development of Christianity as a world religion and to the re-creation of Judaism as a Diaspora community and the eventual establishment of Rabbinic Judaism as the normative expression of Jewish religious and cultural life. For a discussion of the founding of Christianity, see Jesus Christ, Christianity, and biblical literature; for the subsequent history of Judaism following the dispersion, see Judaism and Diaspora.
ʿAbbāsid rule
Umayyad rule ended in 750. Along with Syria, Palestine became subject to ʿAbbāsid authority, based in Baghdad, and, like Syria, it did not readily submit to its new masters. Unlike the Umayyads, who leaned on the Yemeni (South Arabian) tribes, the ʿAbbāsids, in Syria, favoured and indeed used the Qays (North Arabian) tribes. Enmity between the two groups was, therefore, intensified and became an important political factor in Palestine. Pro-Umayyad uprisings were frequent and received Palestinian support. In 840/841 Abū Ḥarb, a Yemenite, unfurled the white banner of the Umayyads and succeeded in recruiting a large number of peasant followers, mainly among the Palestinian population, who regarded him as the saviour whose appearance was to save the land from the hated ʿAbbāsids. Though the insurrection was put down, unrest persisted.
The process of Islamization gained momentum under the ʿAbbāsids. ʿAbbāsid rulers encouraged the settlement and fortification of coastal Palestine so as to secure it against the Byzantine enemy. During the second half of the 9th century, however, signs of internal decay began to appear in the ʿAbbāsid empire. Petty states, and some indeed not so petty, emerged in different parts of the realm. One of the first to affect Palestine was the Tūlūnid dynasty(868–905) of Egypt, which marked the beginning of the disengagement of Egypt and, with it, of Syria and Palestine from ʿAbbāsid rule. During that period Palestine also experienced the destructive operations of the Qarmaṭians, an Ismāʿīlī Shīʿite sect that launched an insurrection in 903–906. After ʿAbbāsid authority was briefly restored, Palestine came under Ikhshīdid rule (935–969).
The Fāṭimid dynasty
In the meantime, the Shīʿite Fāṭimid dynasty was rising to power in North Africa. It moved eastward to seize not only Egypt but also Palestine and Syria and to threaten Baghdad itself. The Fāṭimids seized Egypt from the Ikhshīdids in 969 and in less than a decade were able to establish a precarious control over Palestine, where they faced Qarmaṭian, Seljuq, Byzantine, and periodic Bedouin opposition. Palestine was thus often reduced to a battlefield. The country suffered even greater hardship, however, under the Fāṭimid caliph al-Ḥākim (996–1021), whose behaviour was at times erratic and extremely harsh, particularly toward his non-Muslim subjects. He reactivated earlier discriminatory laws imposed on Christians and Jews and added new ones. In 1009 he ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was severely damaged as a result.
In 1071 the Seljuqs captured Jerusalem, which prospered as pilgrimages by Jews, Christians, and Muslims increased despite political instability. The Fāṭimids recaptured the city in 1098 only to relinquish it a year later to a new enemy, the Crusaders of western Europe.
The Crusades
A year after the capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders, the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was established (Christmas Day, 1100). Thereafter there was no effective check to the expansion of the Crusaders’ power until the capture of their stronghold at Edessa (modern Şanlıurfa, Turkey) by the atabeg (governor) of Mosul, ʿImād al-Dīn Zangī ibn Aq Sonqur, in 1144. Zangī’s anti-Crusader campaign was carried on after his death by his son Nūr al-Dīn Maḥmūd (Nureddin) and, more effectively, by the sultan Ṣalāh al-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb (commonly known in the West as Saladin), a protégé of the atabeg’s family. After consolidating his position in Egypt and Syria, Saladin waged relentless war against the “infidel” Franks (Western Christians). On July 4, 1187, six days after the capture of Tiberias, he dealt the Crusaders a crushing blow at the decisive Battle of Ḥaṭṭīn (Ḥiṭṭīn). Most of Palestine was once again Muslim. Further attempts by the Crusaders to regain control of Palestine proved ineffective, primarily because of incessant quarrels among the Crusaders themselves. Ironically, it was left to an emperor of dubious Christian standing, Frederick II, to negotiate in 1229, while under excommunication, a 10-year treaty that temporarily restored Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem to the Christians. In 1244, however, the Ayyūbid sultan al-Ṣāliḥ Ayyūb definitively restored Jerusalem to Islam.
While the Ayyūbids of Saladin’s house were losing ground to the Turkish-speaking Mamlūks in Egypt, the Mongol sweep westward continued, placing the Crusaders, as it were, between two fires. To make matters worse, the Crusaders themselves were hopelessly riddled with dissension. In 1260 the Mamlūk leader Baybars I emerged as a champion of Muslim resurgence. After taking part in the defeat of the Mongols at the Battle of ʿAyn Jālūt in Palestine, he murdered the incumbent sultan and seized the throne; in the years 1263 to 1271 he carried out annual raids against the harassed Franks. His efforts were continued by the sultan al-Ashraf Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Khalīl, during whose reign the last of the Crusaders were driven out of Acre (May 18, 1291). A chapter in the history of Palestine thus came to an end. The Mamlūks and subsequent Muslim regimes ruled the area with only brief interruptions for the next 600 years.
Palestine under the Mamlūks in the 14th century saw a period of prosperity for some; this was especially notable in Jerusalem, where the government sponsored an elaborate program to construct schools, establish lodgings for travelers and Muslim pilgrims, and renovate mosques. Tax revenues, collected mainly from the villages, were spent largely on support of religious institutions. Palestine formed a part of the district of Damascus, second only to Egypt in the Mamlūk domains. The region suffered the ravages of several epidemics, including the great pestilence, the same Black Deaththat in 1347–51 devastated Europe. The fall of the Baḥrī Mamlūks and the rise of the Burjī Mamlūks (1382–1517) contributed to a gradual economic deterioration and a decrease in security. During the reigns of the second Burjī sultan, Faraj (1399–1405 and 1405–12), the last onslaught of the Mongols, which made the name of Timur (Tamerlane) a synonym of destruction and plunder, took place. Although Palestine was spared the pillage of his hordes, it could not escape its disastrous repercussions as the Mamlūks moved through in a vain attempt to defend Damascus against the invader. The death of Timur in 1405, and the weakness of Iran in the ensuing century, pitted the Mamlūks against the rising power of the Ottoman Empire for the control of western Asia. Hostilities broke out in 1486 when Sultan Qāʾit Bāy contested with Bayezid II the possession of some border towns. The climax came three decades later on August 24, 1516, when the Ottoman sultan, Selim I, routed the Mamlūk armies at the Battle of Marj Dābiq. Palestine began its four centuries under Ottoman domination.
Ottoman rule
Under the Ottoman Turks, Palestine continued to be linked administratively to Damascus until 1830, when it was placed under Sidon, then under Acre, then once again under Damascus until 1887–88, at which time the administrative divisions of the Ottoman Empire were settled for the last time. Palestine was divided into the districts of Nāblus and Acre, both of which were linked with the province of Beirut and the autonomous district of Jerusalem, which dealt directly with Istanbul. With varying fortunes often accompanied by revolts, massacres, and wars, the first three centuries of Ottoman rule isolated Palestine from most outside influences. The prosperity of 16th-century Ottoman Palestine was followed by an economic and political decline in the 17th century. Ottoman control in the 18th century was indirect. Ḍāhir al-ʿUmar (c. 1737–75) dominated the political life of northern Palestine for nearly 40 years. Aḥmad al-Jazzār, the Ottoman governor of Acre, had control of most of Palestine, and in 1799, with English and Ottoman help, he successfully defended Acre against Napoleon I.
Both Ḍāhir and al-Jazzār presided over a tightly controlled Palestine, where trade with Europe as well as taxation were growing. They used their new wealth from these sources to gain influence in Istanbul, which allowed them to gain local autonomy and even intermittent control of many areas outside Palestine.
This period came to an end with Napoleon’s abortive attempt (1798–1801) to carve for himself a Middle Eastern empire. Egypt, always a determining factor in the fortunes of Palestine, was placed, after the French withdrawal, under the rule of the viceroy Muḥammad (Meḥmet) ʿAlī, who soon embarked on a program of expansion at the expense of his Ottoman overlord. In 1831 his armies occupied Palestine, and for nine years he and his son Ibrāhīm gave it a centralizing and modernizing administration. Their rule increasingly opened the country to Western influences and enabled Christian missionaries to establish many schools; at the same time, however, taxes were increased, and urban rebellions broke out against the harshness of the regime. When in 1840 the British, the Austrians, and the Russians came to the aid of the Ottomans, the Egyptians were forced to withdraw, and Palestine reverted to the Ottoman Empire. Increased European interest, however, led the powers to establish consulates in Jerusalem and in Palestine’s port cities.
After 1840 the reforms the sultan promulgatedgradually took effect in Palestine. Increased security in the countryside and the Ottoman Land Law of 1858 encouraged the development of private property, agricultural production for the world market, the decline of tribal social organization, growth of the population, and the enrichment of the notable families. As the Ottomans extended the central government’s new military, municipal, judicial, and educational systems to Palestine, the country also witnessed a marked increase in foreign settlements and colonies—French, Russian, and German. By far the most important, in spite of their initial numerical insignificance, were the Jewish agricultural settlements, which foreshadowed later Zionist endeavours to establish a Jewish national home and still later a Jewish state (Israel) in Palestine. The earliest of these settlements was founded by Russian Jews in 1882. In 1896 Theodor Herzl issued a pamphlet entitled Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) and advocated an autonomous Jewish state, preferably in Palestine. Two years later he himself went to Palestine to investigate its possibilities and, possibly, to seek the help of the German emperor William II, who was then making a spectacular pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
World War I and after
During World War I the great powers made a number of decisions concerning the future of Palestine without much regard to the wishes of the indigenous inhabitants. Palestinian Arabs, however, believed that Great Britain had promised them independence in the Ḥusayn-McMahon correspondence, an exchange of letters from July 1915 to March 1916 between Sir Henry McMahon, British high commissioner in Egypt, and Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, then emir of Mecca, in which the British made certain commitments to the Arabs in return for their support against the Ottomans during the war. Yet by May 1916 Great Britain, France, and Russia had reached an agreement (the Sykes-Picot Agreement) according to which, inter alia, the bulk of Palestine was to be internationalized. Further complicating the situation, in November 1917 Arthur Balfour, the British secretary of state for foreign affairs, addressed a letter to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild(the Balfour Declaration) expressing sympathy for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people on the understanding that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” This declaration did not come about through an act of generosity or stirrings of conscience over the bitter fate of the Jewish people. It was meant, in part, to prompt American Jews to exercise their influence in moving the United States to support British postwar policies as well as to encourage Russian Jews to keep their nation fighting.
Sykes-Picot Agreement Map of the Sykes-Picot Agreement
Palestine was hard-hit by the war. In addition to the destruction caused by the fighting, the population was devastated by famine, epidemics, and Ottoman punitive measures against Arab nationalists. Major battles took place at Gaza before Jerusalem was captured by British and Allied forces under the command of General Sir Edmund (later 1st Viscount) Allenby in December 1917. The remaining area was occupied by the British by October 1918.
At the war’s end, the future of Palestine was problematic. Great Britain, which had set up a military administration in Palestine after capturing Jerusalem, was faced with the problem of having to secure international sanction for the continued occupation of the country in a manner consistent with its ambiguous, seemingly conflicting wartime commitments. On March 20, 1920, delegates from Palestine attended a general Syrian congress at Damascus, which passed a resolution rejecting the Balfour Declaration and elected Fayṣal I—son of Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, who ruled the Hejaz—king of a united Syria (including Palestine). This resolution echoed one passed earlier in Jerusalem, in February 1919, by the first Palestinian Arab conference of Muslim-Christian associations, which had been founded by leading Palestinian Arab notables to oppose Zionist activities. In April 1920, however, at a peace conference held in San Remo, Italy, the Allies divided the former territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire. Of the Ottoman provinces in the Syrian region, the northern portion (Syria and Lebanon) was mandated to France, and the southern portion (Palestine) was mandated to Great Britain. By July 1920 the French had forced Fayṣal to give up his newly founded kingdom of Syria. The hope of founding an Arab Palestine within a federated Syrian state collapsed and with it any prospect of independence. Palestinian Arabs spoke of 1920 as ʿām al-nakbah, the “year of catastrophe.”
Uncertainty over the disposition of Palestine affected all its inhabitants and increased political tensions. In April 1920 anti-Zionist riots broke out in the Jewish quarter of Old Jerusalem, killing several and injuring scores. British authorities attributed the riots to Arab disappointment at not having the promises of independence fulfilled and to fears, played on by some Muslim and Christian leaders, of a massive influx of Jews. Following the confirmation of the mandate at San Remo, the British replaced the military administration with a civilian administration in July 1920, and Sir Herbert (later Viscount) Samuel, a Zionist, was appointed the first high commissioner. The new administration proceeded to implement the Balfour Declaration, announcing in August a quota of 16,500 Jewish immigrants for the first year.
In December 1920, Palestinian Arabs at a congress in Haifa established an executive committee (known as the Arab Executive) to act as the representative of the Arabs. It was never formally recognized by the British and was dissolved in 1934. However, the platform of the Haifa congress, which set out the position that Palestine was an autonomous Arab entity and totally rejected any rights of the Jews to Palestine, remained the basic policy of the Palestinian Arabs until 1948. The arrival of more than 18,000 Jewish immigrants between 1919 and 1921 and land purchases in 1921 by the Jewish National Fund (established in 1901), which led to the eviction of Arab peasants (fellahin), further aroused Arab opposition that was expressed throughout the region through the Christian-Muslim associations. On May 1, 1921, more serious anti-Zionist riots broke out in Jaffa, spreading to Petaḥ Tiqwa and other Jewish communities, in which nearly 100 were killed. An Arab delegation of notables visited London in August–November 1921, demanding that the Balfour Declaration be repudiated and proposing the creation of a national government with a parliament democratically elected by the country’s Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Alarmed by the extent of Arab opposition, the British government issued a White Paper in June 1922 declaring that Great Britain did “not contemplate that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be founded in Palestine.” Immigration would not exceed the economic absorptive capacity of the country, and steps would be taken to set up a legislative council. These proposals were rejected by the Arabs, both because they constituted a large majority of the total mandate population and therefore wished to dominate the instruments of government and rapidly gain independence and because, they argued, the proposals allowed Jewish immigration, which had a political objective, to be regulated by an economic criterion.
The British mandate
In July 1922 the Council of the League of Nationsapproved the mandate instrument for Palestine, including its preamble incorporating the Balfour Declaration and stressing the Jewish historical connection with Palestine. Article 2 made the mandatory power responsible for placing the country under such “political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish National Home…and the development of self-governing institutions.” Article 4 allowed for the establishment of a Jewish Agency to advise and cooperate with the Palestine administration in matters affecting the Jewish national home. Article 6 required that the Palestine administration, “while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced,” under suitable conditions should facilitate Jewish immigration and close settlement of Jews on the land. Although Transjordan—i.e., the lands east of the Jordan River—constituted three-fourths of the British mandate of Palestine, it was, despite protests from the Zionists, excluded from the clauses covering the establishment of a Jewish national home. On September 29, 1923, the mandate officially came into force.
Palestine was a distinct political entity for the first time in centuries. This created problems and challenges for Palestinian Arabs and Zionists alike. Both communities realized that by the end of the mandate period the region’s future would be determined by size of population and ownership of land. Thus the central issues throughout the mandate period were Jewish immigration and land purchases, with the Jews attempting to increase both and the Arabs seeking to slow down or halt both. Conflict over these issues often escalated into violence, and the British were forced to take action—a lesson not lost on either side.
Arab nationalist activities became fragmented as tensions arose between clans, religious groups, and city dwellers and fellahin over the issue of how to respond to British rule and the increasing number of Zionists. Moreover, traditional rivalry between the two old preeminent and ambitious Jerusalem families, the Ḥusaynīs and the Nashāshībīs, whose members had held numerous government posts in the late Ottoman period, inhibited the development of effective Arab leadership. Several Arab organizations in the 1920s opposed Jewish immigration, including the Palestine Arab Congress, Muslim-Christian associations, and the Arab Executive. Most Arab groups were led by the strongly anti-British Ḥusaynī family, while the National Defense Party (founded 1934) was under the control of the more accommodating Nashāshībī family. In 1921 the British high commissioner appointed Amīn al-Ḥusaynī to be the (grand) mufti of Jerusalem and made him president of the newly formed Supreme Muslim Council, which controlled the Muslim courts and schools and a considerable portion of the funds raised by religious charitable endowments. Amīn al-Ḥusaynī used this religious position to transform himself into the most powerful political figure among the Arabs.
Ḥusaynī, Amīn al- Amīn al-Ḥusaynī. Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, Jerusalem
Initially, the Jews of Palestine thought it best served their interests to cooperate with the British administration. The World Zionist Organization(founded 1897) was regarded as the de facto Jewish Agency stipulated in the mandate, although its president, Chaim Weizmann, remained in London, close to the British government; the Polish-born emigré David Ben-Gurion became the leader of a standing executive in Palestine. Throughout the 1920s most British local authorities in Palestine, especially the military, sympathized with the Palestinian Arabs, whereas the British government in London tended to side with the Zionists. The Jewish community in Palestine, the Yishuv, established its own assembly (Vaʿad Leumi), trade union and labour movement (Histadrut), schools, courts, taxation system, medical services, and a number of industrial enterprises. It also formed a military organization called the Haganah. The Jewish Agency came to be controlled by a group called the Labour Zionists, who, for the most part, believed in cooperation with the British and Arabs, but another group, the Revisionist Zionists, founded in 1925 and led by Vladimir Jabotinsky, fully realized that their goal of a Jewish state in all of Palestine (i.e., both sides of the Jordan River) was inconsistent with that of Palestinian Arabs. The Revisionists formed their own military arm, Irgun Zvai Leumi, which did not hesitate to use force against the Arabs.
British rule in Palestine during the mandate was, in general, conscientious, efficient, and responsible. The mandate government developed administrative institutions, municipal services, public works, and transport. It laid water pipelines, expanded ports, extended railway lines, and supplied electricity. It was less assiduous in promoting education, however, particularly in the Arab sector, and it was hampered because it had to respond to outbreaks of violence both between the Arab and Jewish communities and against itself. The aims and aspirations of the three parties in Palestine appeared incompatible, which, as events proved, was indeed the case.
There was little political cooperation between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. In 1923 the British high commissioner tried to win Arab cooperation by offers first of a legislative council that would reflect the Arab majority and then of an Arab agency. Both offers were rejected by the Arabs as falling far short of their national demands. Nor did the Arabs wish to legitimize a situation they rejected in principle. The years 1923–29 were relatively quiet; Arab passivity was partly due to the drop in Jewish immigration in 1926–28. In 1927 the number of Jewish emigrants exceeded that of immigrants, and in 1928 there was a net Jewish immigration of only 10 persons.
Nevertheless, the Jewish national home continued to consolidate itself in terms of urban, agricultural, social, cultural, and industrial development. Large amounts of land were purchased from Arab owners, who often were absentee landlords. In August 1929 negotiations were concluded for the formation of an enlarged Jewish Agency to include non-Zionist Jewish sympathizers throughout the world.
This last development, while accentuating Arab fears, gave the Zionists a new sense of confidence. In the same month, a dispute in Jerusalem concerning religious practices at the Western Wall—sacred to Jews as the only remnant of the Second Temple of Jerusalem and to Muslims as the site of the Dome of the Rock—flared up into serious communal clashes in Jerusalem, Ẓefat, and Hebron. Some 250 were killed and 570 wounded, the Arab casualties being mostly at the hands of British security forces. A royal commission of inquiry under the aegis of Sir Walter Shaw attributed the clashes to the fact that “the Arabs have come to see in Jewish immigration not only a menace to their livelihood but a possible overlord of the future.” A second royal commission, headed by Sir John Hope Simpson, issued a report stating that there was at that time no margin of land available for agricultural settlement by new immigrants. These two reports raised in an acute form the question of where Britain’s duty lay if its specific obligations to the Zionists under the Balfour Declaration clashed with its general obligations to the Arabs under Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. They also formed the basis of the Passfield White Paper, issued in October 1930, which accorded some priority to Britain’s obligations to the Arabs. Not only did it call for a halt to Jewish immigration, but it also recommended that land be sold only to landless Arabs and that the determination of “economic absorptive capacity” be based on levels of Arab as well as Jewish unemployment. This was seen by the Zionists as cutting at the root of their program, for, if the right of the Arab resident were to gain priority over that of the Jewish immigrant, whether actual or potential, development of the Jewish national home would come to a standstill. In response to protests from Palestinian Jews and London Zionists, the British prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, in February 1931 addressed an explanatory letter to Chaim Weizmann nullifying the Passfield White Paper, which virtually meant a return to the policy of the 1922 White Paper. This letter convinced the Arabs that recommendations in their favour made in Palestine could be annulled by Zionist influence at the centre of power in London. In December 1931 a Muslim congress at Jerusalem was attended by delegates from 22 countries to warn against the danger of Zionism.
Western Wall The Western Wall, also known as the Wailing Wall, in the Old City of Jerusalem
From the early 1930s onward, developments in Europe once again began to impose themselves more forcefully on Palestine. The Nazi accession to power in Germany in 1933 and the widespread persecution of Jews throughout central and eastern Europe gave a great impetus to Jewish immigration, which jumped to 30,000 in 1933, 42,000 in 1934, and 61,000 in 1935. By 1936 the Jewish population of Palestine had reached almost 400,000, or one-third of the total. This new wave of immigration provoked major acts of violence against Jews and the British in 1933 and 1935. The Arab population of Palestine also grew rapidly, largely by natural increase, although some Arabs were attracted from outside the region by the capital infusion brought by middle-class Jewish immigrants and British public works. Most of the Arabs (nearly nine-tenths) continued to be employed in agriculture despite deteriorating economic conditions. By the mid-1930s, however, many landless Arabs had joined the expanding Arab proletariat working in the construction trades on the edge of rapidly growing urban centres. This was the beginning of a shift in the foundations of Palestinian economic and social life that was to have profound immediate and long-term effects. In November 1935 the Arab political parties collectively demanded that Jewish immigration cease, land transfer be prohibited, and democratic institutions be established. A boycott of Zionist and British goods was proclaimed. In December the British administration offered to set up a legislative council of 28 members, in which the Arabs (both Muslim and Christian) would have a majority. The British would retain control through their selection of nonelected members. Although Arabs would not be represented in the council in proportion to their numbers, Arab leaders favoured the proposal, but the Zionists criticized it bitterly as an attempt to freeze the national home through a constitutionalArab stranglehold. In any event, London rejected the proposal. This, together with the example of rising nationalism in neighbouring Egypt and Syria, increasing unemployment in Palestine, and a poor citrus harvest, touched off a long-smoldering Arab rebellion.
The Arab Revolt
The Arab Revolt of 1936–39 was the first sustained violent uprising of Palestinian Arabs in more than a century. Thousands of Arabs from all classes were mobilized, and nationalistic sentiment was fanned in the Arabic press, schools, and literary circles. The British, taken aback by the extent and intensity of the revolt, shipped more than 20,000 troops into Palestine, and by 1939 the Zionists had armed more than 15,000 Jews in their own nationalist movement.
The revolt began with spontaneous acts of violence committed by the religiously and nationalistically motivated followers of Sheikh ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Qassām, who had been killed by the British in 1935. In April 1936 the murder of two Jews led to escalating violence, and Qassāmite groups initiated a general strike in Jaffa and Nāblus. At that point the Arab political parties formed an Arab Higher Committeepresided over by the mufti of Jerusalem, Amīn al-Ḥusaynī. It called for a general strike, nonpayment of taxes, and the closing of municipal governments (although government employees were allowed to stay at work) and demanded an end to Jewish immigration, a ban on land sales to Jews, and national independence. Simultaneously with the strike, Arab rebels, joined by volunteers from neighbouring Arab countries, took to the hills, attacking Jewish settlements and British installations in the northern part of the country. By the end of the year, the movement had assumed the dimensions of a national revolt, the mainstay of which was the Arab peasantry. Even though the arrival of British troops restored some semblance of order, the armed rebellion, arson, bombings, and assassinations continued.
A royal commission of inquiry presided over by Lord Robert Peel, which was sent to investigate the volatile situation, reported in July 1937 that the revolt was caused by Arab desire for independence and fear of the Jewish national home. The Peel Commission declared the mandate unworkable and Britain’s obligations to Arabs and Jews mutually irreconcilable. In the face of what it described as “right against right,” the commission recommended that the region be partitioned. The Zionist attitude toward partition, though ambivalent, was overall one of cautious acceptance. For the first time a British official body explicitly spoke of a Jewish state. The commission not only allotted to this state an area that was immensely larger than the existing Jewish landholdings but recommended the forcible transfer of the Arab population from the proposed Jewish state. The Zionists, however, still needed mandatory protection for their further development and left the door open for an undivided Palestine. The Arabs were horrified by the idea of dismembering the region and particularly by the suggestion that they be forcibly transferred (to Transjordan). As a result, the momentum of the revolt increased during 1937 and 1938.
In September 1937 the British were forced to declare martial law. The Arab Higher Committee was dissolved, and many officials of the Supreme Muslim Council and other organizations were arrested. The mufti fled to Lebanon and then Iraq, never to return to an undivided Palestine. Although the Arab Revolt continued well into 1939, high casualty rates and firm British measures gradually eroded its strength. According to some estimates, more than 5,000 Arabs were killed, 15,000 wounded, and 5,600 imprisoned during the revolt. Although it signified the birth of a national identity, the revolt was unsuccessful in many ways. The general strike, which was called off in October 1939, had encouraged Zionist self-reliance, and the Arabs of Palestine were unable to recover from their sustained effort of defying the British administration. Their traditional leaders were either killed, arrested, or deported, leaving the dispirited and disarmed population divided along urban-rural, class, clan, and religious lines. The Zionists, on the other hand, were united behind Ben-Gurion, and the Haganah had been given permission to arm itself. It cooperated with British forces and the Irgun Zvai Leumi in attacks against Arabs.
However, the prospect of war in Europe alarmed the British government and caused it to reassess its policy in Palestine. If Britain went to war, it could not afford to face Arab hostility in Palestine and in neighbouring countries. The Woodhead Commission, under Sir John Woodhead, was set up to examine the practicality of partition. In November 1938 it recommended against the Peel Commission’s plan—largely on the ground that the number of Arabs in the proposed Jewish state would be almost equal to the number of Jews—and put forward alternative proposals drastically reducing the area of the Jewish state and limiting the sovereignty of the proposed states. This was unacceptable to both Arabs and Jews. Seeking to find a solution acceptable to both parties, the British announced the impracticability of partition and called for a roundtable conference in London.
No agreement was reached at the London conference held during February and March 1939. In May 1939, however, the British government issued a White Paper, which essentially yielded to Arab demands. It stated that the Jewish national home should be established within an independent Palestinian state. During the next five years 75,000 Jews would be allowed into the country; thereafter Jewish immigration would be subject to Arab “acquiescence.” Land transfer to Jews would be allowed only in certain areas in Palestine, and an independent Palestinian state would be considered within 10 years. The Arabs, although in favour of the new policy, rejected the White Paper, largely because they mistrusted the British government and opposed a provision contained in the paper for extending the mandate beyond the 10-year period. The Zionists were shocked and enraged by the paper, which they considered a death blow to their program and to Jews who desperately sought refuge in Palestine from the growing persecution they were enduring in Europe. The 1939 White Paper marked the end of the Anglo-Zionist entente.
Progress toward a Jewish national home had, however, been remarkable since 1918. Although the majority of the Jewish population was urban, the number of rural Zionist colonies had increased from 47 to about 200. Between 1922 and 1940 Jewish landholdings had risen from about 148,500 to 383,500 acres (about 60,100 to 155,200 hectares) and now constituted roughly one-seventh of the cultivatable land, and the Jewish population had grown from 83,790 to some 467,000, or nearly one-third of a total population of about 1,528,000. Tel Aviv had developed into an all-Jewish city of 150,000 inhabitants, and hundreds of millions of dollars of Jewish capital had been introduced into the region. The Jewish literacy rate was high, schools were expanding, and the Hebrew language had become widespread. Despite a split in 1935 between the mainline Zionists and the radical Revisionists, who advocated the use of force to establish the Zionist state, Zionist institutions in Palestine became stronger in the 1930s and helped create the preconditions for the establishment of a Jewish state.
World War II
With the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Zionist and British policies came into direct conflict. Throughout the war Zionists sought with growing urgency to increase Jewish immigration to Palestine, while the British sought to prevent such immigration, regarding it as illegal and a threat to the stability of a region essential to the war effort. Ben-Gurion declared on behalf of the Jewish Agency: “We shall fight [beside Great Britain in] this war as if there was no White Paper and we shall fight the White Paper as if there was no war.” British attempts to prevent Jewish immigration to Palestine in the face of the Holocaust—the terrible tragedy befalling European Jewry and others deemed undesirable by the Nazis—led to the disastrous sinking of two ships carrying Jewish refugees, the Patria (November 1940) and the Struma (February 1942). In response, the Irgun, under the leadership of Menachem Begin, and a small terrorist splinter group, LEHI (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), known for its founder as the Stern Gang, embarked on widespread attacks on the British, culminating in the murder of Lord Moyne, British minister of state, by two LEHI members in Cairo in November 1944.
During the war years the Jewish community in Palestine was vastly strengthened. Its moderate wing supported the British; in September 1944 a Jewish brigade was formed—a total of 27,000 Jews having enlisted in the British forces—and attached to the British 8th Army. Jewish industry in general was given immense impetus by the war, and a Jewish munitions industry developed to manufacture antitank mines for the British forces. For the Yishuv the war and the Holocaust confirmed that a Jewish state must be established in Palestine. Important also was the support of American Zionists. In May 1942, at a Zionist conference held at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City, Ben-Gurion gained support for a program demanding unrestricted immigration, a Jewish army, and the establishment of Palestine as a Jewish commonwealth.
The Arabs of Palestine remained largely quiescentthroughout the war. Amīn al-Ḥusaynī had fled—by way of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Italy—to Germany, whence he broadcast appeals to his fellow Arabs to ally with the Axis powers against Britain and Zionism. Yet the mufti failed to rally Palestinian Arabs to the Axis cause. Although some supported Germany, the majority supported the Allies, and approximately 23,000 Arabs enlisted in the British forces (especially in the Arab Legion). Increases in agricultural prices benefited the Arab peasants, who began to pay accumulated debts. However, the Arab Revolt had ruined many Arab merchants and importers, and British war activities, although bringing new levels of prosperity, further weakened the traditional social institutions—the family and village—by fostering a large urban Arab working class.
The Allied discovery of the Nazi extermination camps at the end of World War II and the undecided future of Holocaust survivors led to an increasing number of pro-Zionist statements from U.S.politicians. In August 1945 U.S. President Harry S. Truman requested that British Prime Minister Clement Attlee facilitate the immediate admission of 100,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors into Palestine, and in December the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives asked for unrestricted Jewish immigration to the limit of the economic absorptive capacity of Palestine. Truman’s request signaled the U.S. entry into the arena of powers determining the future of Palestine. The question of Palestine, now linked with the fate of Holocaust survivors, became once again the focus of international attention.
As the war came to an end, the neighbouring Arab countries began to take a more direct interest in Palestine. In October 1944 Arab heads of state met in Alexandria, Egypt, and issued a statement, the Alexandria Protocol, setting out the Arab position. They made clear that, although they regretted the bitter fate inflicted upon European Jewry by European dictatorships, the issue of European Jewish survivors ought not to be confused with Zionism. Solving the problem of European Jewry, they asserted, should not be achieved by inflicting injustice on Palestinian Arabs. The covenant of the League of Arab States, or Arab League, formed in March 1945, contained an annex emphasizing the Arab character of Palestine. The Arab League appointed an Arab Higher Executive for Palestine (the Arab Higher Committee), which included a broad spectrum of Palestinian leaders, to speak for the Palestinian Arabs. In December 1945 the league declared a boycott of Zionist goods. The pattern of the postwar struggle for Palestine was unmistakably emerging.
The early postwar period
The major issue between 1945 and 1948 was, as it had been throughout the mandate, Jewish immigration to Palestine. The Yishuv was determined to remove all restrictions to Jewish immigration and to establish a Jewish state. The Arabs were determined that no more Jews should arrive and that Palestine should achieve independence as an Arab state. The primary goal of British policy following World War II was to secure British strategic interests in the Middle East and Asia. Because the cooperation of the Arab states was considered essential to this goal, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin opposed Jewish immigration and the foundation of an independent Jewish state in Palestine. The U.S. State Department basically supported the British position, but Truman was determined to ensure that Jews displaced by the war were permitted to enter Palestine. The issue was resolved in 1948 when the British mandate collapsed under the pressure of force and diplomacy.
Palestine Illegal Jewish immigrants seeking homes in Palestine, 1946. Stock footage courtesy The WPA Film Library
In November 1945, in an effort to secure American coresponsibility for a Palestinian policy, Bevin announced the formation of an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. Pending the report of the committee, Jewish immigration would continue at the rate of 1,500 persons per month above the 75,000 limit set by the 1939 White Paper. A plan of provincial autonomy for Arabs and Jews was worked out in an Anglo-American conference in 1946 and became the basis for discussions in London between Great Britain and the representatives of Arabs and Zionists.
In the meantime, Zionist pressure in Palestine was intensified by the unauthorized immigration of refugees on a hitherto unprecedented scale and by closely coordinated attacks by Zionist underground forces. Jewish immigration was impelled by the burning memories of the Holocaust, the chaotic postwar conditions in Europe, and the growing possibility of attaining a Jewish state where the victims of persecution could guarantee their own safety. The underground’s attacks culminated in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946, when the Irgun blew up a part of the King David Hotel containing British government and military offices, with the loss of 91 lives.
On the Arab side, a meeting of the Arab states took place in June 1946 at Blūdān, Syria, at which secret resolutions were adopted threatening British and American interests in the Middle East if Arab rights were disregarded. In Palestine the Ḥusaynīs consolidated their power, despite widespread mistrust of the mufti, who now resided in Egypt.
While Zionists pressed ahead with immigration and attacks on the government, and Arab states mobilized in response, British resolve to remain in the Middle East was collapsing. World War II had left Britain victorious but exhausted. After the war it lacked the funds and political will to maintain control of colonial possessions that were agitating, with increasing violence, for independence. When a conference called in London in February 1947 failed to resolve the impasse, Great Britain, already negotiating its withdrawal from India and eager to decrease its costly military presence in Palestine (of the more than 280,000 troops stationed there during the war, more than 80,000 still remained), referred the Palestine question to the United Nations (UN).
Jewish and Arab representatives submitting their views on the Palestine issue to the United Nations, May 1947. Stock footage courtesy The WPA Film Library
On August 31, 1947, a majority report of the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) recommended that the region be partitioned into an Arab and a Jewish state, which, however, should retain an economic union. Jerusalem and its environs were to be international. These recommendations were substantially adopted by a two-thirds majority of the UN General Assembly in Resolution 181, dated November 29, 1947, a decision made possible partly because of an agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union on partition and partly because pressure was exerted on some small countries by Zionist sympathizers in the United States. All the Islamic Asian countries voted against partition, and an Arab proposal to query the International Court of Justiceon the competence of the General Assembly to partition a country against the wishes of the majority of its inhabitants (in 1946 there were 1,269,000 Arabs and 678,000 Jews in Palestine) was narrowly defeated.
UN partition plan for Palestine adopted in 1947
The Zionists welcomed the partition proposal both because it recognized a Jewish state and because it allotted slightly more than half of (west-of-Jordan) Palestine to it. As in 1937, the Arabs fiercely opposed partition both in principle and because nearly half of the population of the Jewish state would be Arab. Resolution 181 called for the formation of the UN Palestine Commission—which it tasked with selecting and overseeing provisional councils of government for the Jewish and Arab states by April 1, 1948—and set the date for the termination of the mandate no later than August 1, 1948. (The British later announced that the mandate would be terminated on May 15, 1948.)
Civil war in Palestine
Soon after the UN resolution, fighting broke out in Palestine. The Zionists mobilized their forces and redoubled their efforts to bring in immigrants. In December 1947 the Arab League pledged its support to the Palestinian Arabs and organized a force of 3,000 volunteers. Civil war spread, and external intervention increased as the disintegration of the British administration progressed.
Jerusalem Newsreel footage of unrest between Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem following passage of the United Nations resolution on the partition of Palestine, 1947. Stock footage courtesy The WPA Film Library
Alarmed by the continued fighting, the United States in early March 1948 expressed its opposition to forcibly implementing a partition. A March 12 report by the UN Palestine Commission stated that the establishment of provisional councils of government able to fulfill their functions would be impossible by April 1. Arab resistance to the partition in principle precluded the establishment of an Arab council, and, although steps had been taken toward the selection of the Jewish council, the commission reported that the latter council would be unable to carry out its functions as intended by the resolution. Hampering efforts altogether was Great Britain’s refusal in any case to share with the commission the administration of Palestine during the transitional period. On March 19 the United States called for the UN Palestine Commission to suspend its efforts. On March 30 the United States proposed that a truce be declared and that the problem be further considered by the General Assembly.
The Zionists, insisting that partition was binding and anxious about the change in U.S. policy, made a major effort to establish their state. They launched two offensives during April. The success of these operations coincided roughly with the failure of an Arab attack on the Zionist settlement of Mishmar Ha ʿEmeq; the death in battle of an Arab national hero, ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Ḥusaynī, in command of the Jerusalem front; and the massacre, by Irgunists and members of the Stern Gang, of civilian inhabitants of the Arab village of Dayr Yāsīn. On April 22 Haifa fell to the Zionists, and Jaffa, after severe mortar shelling, surrendered to them on May 13. Simultaneously with their military offensives, the Zionists launched a campaign of psychological warfare. The Arabs of Palestine, divided, badly led, and reliant on the regular armies of the Arab states, became demoralized, and their efforts to prevent partition collapsed.
On May 14 the last British high commissioner, General Sir Alan Cunningham, left Palestine. On the same day the State of Israel was declared and within a few hours won de facto recognition from the United States and de jure recognition from the Soviet Union. Early on May 15 units of the regular armies of Syria, Transjordan, Iraq, and Egypt crossed the frontiers of Palestine.
In a series of campaigns alternating with truces between May and December 1948, the Arab units were routed, and by the summer of 1949 Israel had concluded armistices with its neighbours. It had also been recognized by more than 50 governments throughout the world, joined the United Nations, and established its sovereignty over about 8,000 square miles (21,000 square km) of formerly mandated Palestine west of the Jordan River. The remaining 2,000 square miles (5,200 square km) were divided between Transjordan and Egypt. Transjordan retained the lands on the west bank of the Jordan River, including the eastern portion of Jerusalem (East Jerusalem), although its annexation of those lands in 1950 was not generally recognized as legitimate. In 1949 the name of the expanded country was changed to the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan. Egypt retained control of, but did not annex, a small area on the Mediterranean coast that became known as the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Arab community ceased to exist as a cohesivesocial and political entity.
Palestine and the Palestinians(1948–67)
The partition of Palestine and its aftermath
If one chief theme in the post-1948 pattern was embattled Israel and a second the hostility of its Arab neighbours, a third was the plight of the huge number of Arab refugees. The violent birth of Israel led to a major displacement of the Arab population, who either were driven out by Zionist military forces before May 15, 1948, or by the Israeli army after that date or fled for fear of violence by these forces. Many wealthy merchants and leading urban notables from Jaffa, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem fled to Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan, while the middle class tended to move to all-Arab towns such as Nāblus and Nazareth. The majority of fellahin ended up in refugee camps. More than 400 Arab villages disappeared, and Arab life in the coastal cities (especially Jaffa and Haifa) virtually disintegrated. The centre of Palestinian life shifted to the Arab towns of the hilly eastern portion of the region—which was immediately west of the Jordan River and came to be called the West Bank.
Like everything else in the Arab-Israeli conflict, population figures are hotly disputed. Nearly 1,400,000 Arabs lived in Palestine when the war broke out. Estimates of the number of Arabs displaced from their original homes, villages, and neighbourhoods during the period from December 1947 to January 1949 range from about 520,000 to about 1,000,000; there is general consensus, however, that the actual number was more than 600,000 and likely exceeded 700,000. Some 276,000 moved to the West Bank; by 1949 more than half the prewar Arab population of Palestine lived in the West Bank (from 400,000 in 1947 to more than 700,000). Between 160,000 and 190,000 fled to the Gaza Strip. More than one-fifth of Palestinian Arabs left Palestine altogether. About 100,000 of these went to Lebanon, 100,000 to Jordan, between 75,000 and 90,000 to Syria, 7,000 to 10,000 to Egypt, and 4,000 to Iraq.
The term “Palestinian”
Henceforth the term Palestinian will be used when referring to the Arabs of the former mandated Palestine, excluding Israel. Although the Arabs of Palestine had been creating and developing a Palestinian identity for about 200 years, the idea that Palestinians form a distinct people is relatively recent. The Arabs living in Palestine had never had a separate state. Until the establishment of Israel, the term Palestinian was used by Jews and foreigners to describe the inhabitants of Palestine and had only begun to be used by the Arabs themselves at the turn of the 20th century; at the same time, most saw themselves as part of the larger Arab or Muslim community. The Arabs of Palestine began widely using the term Palestinian starting in the pre-World War I period to indicate the nationalist concept of a Palestinian people. But after 1948—and even more so after 1967—for Palestinians themselves the term came to signify not only a place of origin but, more importantly, a sense of a shared past and future in the form of a Palestinian state.
Diverging histories for Palestinian Arabs
The Israeli Arabs
Approximately 150,000 Arabs remained in Israel when the Israeli state was founded. These Israeli Arabs represented about one-eighth of all Palestinians and by 1952 roughly the same proportion of the Israeli population. The majority of them lived in villages in western Galilee. Because much of their land was confiscated, Arabs were forced to abandon agriculture and become unskilled wage labourers, working in Jewish industries and construction companies. As citizens of the State of Israel, in theory they were guaranteed equal religious and civil rights with Jews. In reality, however, until 1966 they lived under a military jurisdiction that imposed severe restrictions on their political options and freedom of movement. Most of them remained politically quiescent, and many accepted Zionist Israel as a reality and sought to ameliorate their circumstances through electoral participation, education, and economic integration.
Israel sought to impede the development of a cohesive national consciousness among the Palestinians by dealing with various minority groups, such as Druze, Circassians, and Bedouin; by hindering the work of the Muslim religious organizations; by arresting and harassing individuals suspected of harbouring nationalist sentiments; and by focusing on education as a means of creating a new Israeli Arab identity. By the late 1960s, as agriculture declined and social customs related to such events as bride selection and marriage broke down, the old patriarchal clan system had all but collapsed. For almost 20 years after Israel was established, Israeli Arabs were isolated from other Arabs.
The UNRWA camps
In December 1949 the UN General Assembly created the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to assist the Palestinian refugees. In May 1950 UNRWA established a total of 53 refugee “camps” on both sides of the Jordan River and in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, and Syria to assist the 650,000 or more Arab refugees it calculated needed help. Initially refugees in the improvised camps lived in tents, but after 1958 these were replaced by small houses of concrete blocks with iron roofs. Conditions were extremely harsh; often several families had to share one tent, and exposure to the extreme winter and summer temperatures inflicted additional suffering. Loss of home and income lowered morale. Although the refugees were provided with rent-free accommodations and basic services such as water, health care, and education (UNRWA ran both elementary and secondary schools in the camps, teaching more than 40,000 students by 1951), poverty and misery were widespread. Work was scarce, even though UNRWA sought to integrate the Palestinians into the depressed economies of the “host” countries.
Palestinians who continued to live in refugee camps felt a greater sense of alienation and dislocation than the more fortunate ones who found jobs and housing and became integrated into the national economies of the countries in which they resided. Although the camps strengthened family and village ties, their demoralized inhabitants were isolated from mainstream Palestinian political activities during the 1950s.
Palestinians outside mandated Palestine
Palestinians found employment in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and the Persian Gulf states, but only a few were able to become citizens of those countries. Often they were the victims of discrimination, as well as being closely supervised by the respective governments intent on limiting their political activities.
Resurgence of Palestinian identity
The events of 1948 (also called by Palestinians al-nakbah, “the catastrophe”) and the experience of exile shaped Palestinian political and cultural activity for the next generation. The central task of reconstruction fell to Palestinians living outside Israel—both in the West Bank and Gaza communities and in the new Palestinian communities outside the former British mandate. (Arabs living within the State of Israel remained in an ambiguous, isolated situation and were regarded with some suspicion by both Israelis and Palestinians.) The new leaders came disproportionately from among those who had moved to various Middle Eastern states and to the West, even though four out of five Palestinians had remained within the borders of the former British mandate. By the mid-1960s, despite Israeli efforts to forestall the emergence of a new Palestinian identity, a young, educated leadership had arisen, replacing the discredited traditional local and clan leaders.
The role of camps
Palestinian refugee camps differed depending on the country in which they were located, but they shared one common development—the emergence of a “diaspora consciousness.” In time this consciousness grew into a renewed national identity and reinvigorated social institutions, leading to the establishment of more complex social and political structures by the 1960s. A new Palestinian leadership emerged from the schools UNRWA had established, as well as from the universities of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, western Europe, and the United States. Palestinians living in the UNRWA-administered refugee camps felt isolated, politically powerless, disoriented, bitter, and resentful. They remained unassimilated and were generating a new sense of identity based on a pan-Arabism inspired by Nasser, the cultivated memory of a lost paradise (Palestine), and an emerging pan-Islamic movement.
The role of Palestinians outside formerly mandated Palestine
By the late 1960s a class of educated and mobile Palestinians had emerged, with fewer than half of them living in the West Bank or Gaza. They were working in the oil companies, civil services, and educational institutions of most Arab states in the Middle East. Having successfully resisted the efforts of Amīn al-Ḥusaynī, Jordan, and Egypt to control and speak for them, they joined the process of reshaping Palestinian consciousness and institutions. Thus Palestinians entered a new stage of the struggle for nationhood.
The Camp David Accords and the PLO
In November 1977 the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, initiated peace negotiations that led to the agreement known as the Camp David Accords in September 1978 and to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty signed on March 26, 1979. Provisions of the accords (named for Camp David, Maryland, U.S., where they were negotiated) included the establishment of a self-governing authority in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and a transitional period of not more than five years, at the end of which the inhabitants would become autonomous. The Soviet Union during the time of the peace negotiations recognized the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians and in 1981 extended formal diplomatic recognition. The nations of western Europe announced their support of PLO participation in peace negotiations in June 1980. The PLO continued to seek diplomatic recognition from the United States, but the Carter administration honoured a secret commitment the former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger made to Israel not to deal with the PLO so long as it declined to renounce terrorism and to recognize Israel’s right to exist.
The dispersal of the PLO from Lebanon
The Likud Party government of Israel viewed the possibility of peace and compromise with suspicion. On June 6, 1982, Israel, claiming that it intended to end attacks on its territory (although a cease-fire had been in effect since July 1981) and aiming to dislodge the PLO and encourage the installation of a Lebanese government friendly to Israel, launched an invasion of Lebanon. PLO and Syrian forces were defeated by Israeli troops, and the remaining PLO forces were contained in West Beirut. After a lengthy siege and bombardment by Israel in July and August 1982, some 11,000 Palestinian fighters were allowed to leave Beirut for various destinations, under international guarantees for their own safety and that of their civilian dependents. Despite these guarantees, however, after Israeli troops had occupied West Beirut, the Phalangists, Israel’s rightist Lebanese allies, were allowed by Israeli forces into the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where they massacred hundreds (estimates vary between 700 and 3,000) of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.
Although not all PLO guerrillas were forced to leave Lebanon, the PLO infrastructure in the southern part of the country was destroyed, and Arafat’s departure from Beirut to northern Lebanon marked the effective end of the PLO’s military and political presence in the country. Ultimately, the new government of Lebanon came under the sway of Syria. The dispersal of the PLO from Lebanon significantly weakened the organization’s military strength and political militancy. It was unable to operate freely from any of the nations bordering Israel. Arafat and the other PLO leaders were also threatened by the emergence within Fatah of a faction encouraged by Syria. In December 1983 Arafat was driven out of northern Lebanon by the Syrians and their protégés inside the PLO.
After having established himself near Tunis, Tunisia, Arafat turned once again to diplomatic initiatives. He sought Egyptian and Jordanian support against Syria. He also looked to King Ḥussein as an intermediary for negotiations with the United States and Israel that might lead to a Palestinian ministate on the West Bank within a Jordan-Palestine confederation—an idea that had been favoured by the dominant factions in the PLO since the early 1980s. This policy was expressed most concretely in the meeting of the Palestine National Council in Amman in November 1984, the first time it had met there since Jordan had crushed the PLO armed forces in 1970.
Years of mounting violence
Violence escalated from the mid-1980s onward. Rejectionist elements within the PLO renewed their activities, attracting worldwide attention. In October 1985 members of the Palestine Liberation Front, a small faction within the PLO headed by Abū ʿAbbās, hijacked an Italian cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, and murdered one of its passengers. Following an Israeli bombing attack on PLO headquarters near Tunis several days before the hijacking, Arafat moved some departments to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Lebanese Shīʿite Muslim groups fought the PLO to stop its reemergence as an armed rival for supremacy in the chaotic situation prevalent in West Beirut and southern Lebanon. West Bank Arabs demonstrated and engaged in strikes in late 1986.
In Israel several new developments strengthened Arab feelings of alienation from the Jewish majority. Ultranationalists increased their demands for more Jewish settlements and the annexation of the West Bank and advocated the forceful removal of the Palestinian Arabs from the occupied territories. The Israeli parliament passed a bill in 1985 banning any political party that endangered state security—i.e., any party that was anti-Zionist. This reinforced the feeling of most Israeli Arabs that no legal political party could adequately reflect their national, economic, and political views, although the only party actually banned was the anti-Arab Kach Party. Israelis—especially West Bank settlers—became more antagonistic and militant toward Palestinians as armed attacks against Israel and Israelis living abroad increased in number. Throughout 1986–87 attacks by Arabs on Israeli settlers and by Israeli settlers on Arabs mounted. By 1988 more than half of the land in the West Bank and about a third of the land in the Gaza Strip had been transferred to Jewish control, and the Israeli population of the West Bank—mostly concentrated in 15 metropolitan satellites of Tel Aviv–Yafo and Jerusalem—had reached about 100,000.
By the late 1980s a whole generation of Palestinian youth had grown up under Israeli occupation. Nearly three-fourths of Palestinians were younger than 25 years of age. Their political status was uncertain, their civil rights diminished, and their economic status low and dependent on Israel’s economy. Between 100,000 and 120,000 Palestinians crossed daily from the occupied territories into Israel to work. They did not have much faith in Arab governments, nor did they place strong trust in the PLO, which, although still a powerful symbol of Palestinian aspirations, had not succeeded by either diplomatic or military efforts to win Palestinian self-determination. Remittances to family members left behind from those hundreds of thousands who had migrated to Jordan and the Persian Gulf states for work in the 1960s and ’70s were reduced drastically as the economies of many Middle Eastern countries were hit by falling oil prices. Increasingly, Palestinians came to rely on their own efforts.
The intifadah
When the Palestinians saw no improvement in effective support of their aspirations from other countries and no likely favourable change coming from the Israelis, they engaged, throughout 1987, in small-scale demonstrations, riots, and occasional violence directed against Israelis. The Israeli authorities responded with university closings, arrests, and deportations. Large-scale riots and demonstrations broke out in the Gaza Strip in early December and continued for more than five years thereafter. This uprising, which became known as the intifadah (Arabic: “shaking off”), inspired a new era in Palestinian mass mobilization. Masked young demonstrators turned to throwing stones at Israeli troops, and the soldiers responded by shooting and arresting them. Women, and women’s organizations, were prominent. The persistent disturbances, initially spontaneous, before long came under the leadership of the Unified National Command of the Uprising, which had links to the PLO. The PLO soon incorporated the Unified Command, but not before the local leaders had pushed Arafat to abandon formally his commitment to armed struggle and to accept Israel and the notion of a two-state solution to the conflict.
One group, Ḥamās—an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement—challenged the authority of the secular nationalist movement, especially inside Gaza, and sought to take over the leadership of the intifadah. Ḥamās was an underground wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had built up a network of religious, educational, and charitable institutions in the occupied territories, in addition to establishing an armed wing known as the Sheikh ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Qassām Brigades (named for the nationalist leader killed by the British in 1935). Ḥamās rejected any accommodation with Israel.
Tactics and tolls
The tactics of the intifadah were highly sophisticated. Union-organized strikes, commercial boycotts and closures, and demonstrations were carried out in one part of the territories, and then, after Israel had reestablished its local power there, they were transferred to a previously quiescent area. Palestinian refugee camps provided major centres for the resistance, but Palestinian Arabs living in more affluent circumstances also participated, and some Israeli Arabs showed their sympathy with the goals of the uprising. During its first year more than 300 Palestinians were killed, more than 11,500 wounded (nearly two-thirds of whom were under 15 years of age), and many more arrested. Israel closed universities and schools, destroyed houses, and imposed curfews—yet it was unable to quell the uprising. By mid-1990 the International Red Crossestimated that more than 800 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli security forces, more than 200 of whom were under the age of 16. Some 16,000 Palestinians were in prison. By contrast, fewer than 50 Israelis had been killed. Some hundreds of Palestinians in the occupied territories, accused of being collaborators with Israel, were killed by their compatriots. Political paralysis gripped Israel.
PLO declaration of independence
Arafat sought to establish himself as the only leader who could unite and speak for the Palestinians, and in mid-1988 he took the diplomatic initiative. At the 19th session of the PNC, held near Algiers on November 12–15, 1988, he succeeded in having the council issue a declaration of independence for a state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Arafat proclaimed the state (without defining its borders) on November 15. Within days more than 25 countries (including the Soviet Union and Egypt but excluding the United States and Israel) had extended recognition to the government-in-exile.
The final weeks of 1988 opened a new chapter in Palestinian-Israeli relations. In December Arafat announced that the PNC recognized Israel as a state in the region and condemned and rejected terrorismin all its forms—including state terrorism, the PLO’s term for Israel’s actions. He addressed a special meeting of the UN General Assembly convened at Geneva and proposed an international peace conference under UN auspices. He publicly accepted UN resolutions 242 and 338, thereby recognizing, at least implicitly, the State of Israel. Despite their ambiguities, UN resolution 242 (1967), which encapsulated the principle of land for peace, and resolution 338 (1973), which called for direct negotiations, were regarded by both parties as the starting points for negotiations. Although Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir stated that he was still not prepared to negotiate with the PLO, the U.S. government announced that it would open dialoguewith the PLO.
The move toward self-rule
The approaching end of the Cold War left the Palestinians diplomatically isolated, as did PLO support for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who had invaded Kuwait in August 1990 but was defeated by a U.S.-led alliance in the Persian Gulf War (1990–91). Funds from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Persian Gulf states dried up. The Palestinian community in Kuwait, which had consisted of about 400,000 people, was reduced to a few thousand. Economic hardship was compounded by the fact that, during the continuing conflict along the Lebanese border and in the occupied territories, Israel imposed severe travel restrictions on Palestinian day labourers. The overall result was loss of jobs, loss of morale, and loss of support for the PLO leadership in Tunis.
However, prospects for a settlement of the outstanding issues between the Palestinians and Israel became significantly altered by several factors: the convening of an international peace conference between Israeli and Arab delegates (including Palestinians from the occupied territories as part of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation) at Madrid in October 1991, sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union (after December 1991, Russia); the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December; and the replacement, in the Israeli general elections of June 1992, of Shamir and the Likud-bloc government with a Labour Partygovernment that was committed to implementing Palestinian autonomy within a year.
Although progress at the Madrid peace conference was discouraging, secret meetings held in Norway from January 1993 between PLO and Israeli officials produced an understanding known as the Oslo Accords. On this basis, on September 13, 1993, the PLO and Israel signed a historic Declaration of Principles in Washington, D.C. It included mutual recognition and terms whereby governing functions in the West Bank and Gaza would be progressively handed over to a Palestinian Council for an interim period of five years, during which time Israel and the Palestinians would negotiate a permanent peace treaty to settle on the final status of the territories.
U.S. President Bill Clinton looks on as Yitzhak Rabin (left) shakes hands with Yāsir ʿArafāt after signing the Israel-PLO accords in September 1993
Despite acts of violence committed by extremist groups on both sides attempting to sabotage the peace process, the Israelis completed their withdrawal from the West Bank town of Jericho and parts of the Gaza Strip in May 1994. On July 1 Arafat entered Gaza in triumph. Four days later he swore in members of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Jericho, which by the end of the year had assumed control of education and culture, social welfare, health, tourism, and taxation.
Violence and irreconcilable demands by radical elements in the populations of both sides obstructed talks between the PLO and the Israeli government. Nonetheless, on September 28, 1995, Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres signed an agreement in Washington providing for the expansion of Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and for elections of a chairman and a legislative council of the PA. The PA would gain control over six large West Bank towns (Janīn, Nāblus, Ṭūlkarm, Qalqīlyah, Ramallah, and Bethlehem) as well as control over most of Hebron. Israel would also gradually redeploy from some 440 villages, which would come under Palestinian rule. Security for those areas would rest with the Palestinian police, although Israeli military forces would be guaranteed freedom of movement throughout the area from which Israel redeployed. Reaffirming the commitment made in the 1993 peace accord, permanent-status negotiations were to be concluded by 1999.
In October 1995, as West Bank villages, towns, and cities were handed over to the PA, right-wing religious and extremist nationalist Israelis stepped up their rhetoric against Rabin and the peace process. On November 4, 1995, Israelis were stunned when Rabin was assassinated by a Jewishextremist. Peres, Rabin’s successor, quickly expressed his determination to continue the planned Israeli deployments.
Elections were held in PA-administered areas in January 1996, in which about three-fourths of Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza voted. Arafat secured nearly nine-tenths of the vote and assumed the presidency of the PA in February. He also remained chairman of the PLO. Fatah won 55 seats in the 88-seat legislative council. Ḥamās, however, did not participate in the election and continued its violent opposition to the peace process. The progress toward peace was further cast into doubt when Benjamin Netanyahu, right-wing leader of the Likud Party, was elected prime minister of Israel in May 1996. Netanyahu left office following defeat at the hands of the Labour Party led by Ehud Barak in May 1999. Although Netanyahu reached some accords with the Palestinians, his term in office was marked by increasing mistrust between the two sides.
Subsequent events, however, were a disappointment to all concerned, as a number of negotiating deadlines passed without an agreement. Notable among these was the May 1999 date set as a deadline for a third stage of Israeli military redeployments, an end of the interim period, and a completion of “permanent status” talks on the most contentious issues—such as the status of Jerusalem, the return of refugees, the presence of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, and the issue of Palestinian sovereignty and statehood.
Also, after a decade of negotiating, eight of those years following the signing of the Declaration of Principles, less than one-fifth of the West Bank (in 15 isolated segments) and about two-thirds of the Gaza Strip had reverted to full Palestinian control. The rest remained under Israeli military occupation (combined with PA civil administration in some areas). The number of Israelis living in West Bank settlements (that now exceeded 150) had grown by some 80,000 in that period, and more Arab land had been confiscated in the occupied territories for expanding settlements and for constructing bypass roads reserved solely for use by Israelis. Further, the gross domestic product per capita in Palestinian areas had actually declined in the nine years after the Madrid Peace Conference, Israel restricted the movement of Palestinians (and closed Jerusalem to West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestinians beginning in 1991), and accusations were widespread of corruption within the PA and of human rights abuses by its leaders. All of this made life for most residents of PA-controlled areas worse, in many respects, than it had been before the peace process.
An Israeli-Palestinian summit meeting sponsored by the United States in July 2000 failed to resolve these outstanding issues and led only to an increasingly strained situation. In the aftermath of this summit, a visit to Jerusalem’s Al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf (the Temple Mount) in September by Likud leader Ariel Sharon—reviled by Palestinians for his role in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres—was the spark that set off a conflagration. The visit was followed by demonstrations near Al-Aqṣā Mosque the next day, in which Israeli security forces killed and wounded dozens of Palestinian demonstrators. That was the signal for a renewed uprising, which reached a level of violence unseen in the first intifadah—more than 1,000 died in its first 18 months, the overwhelming majority of them Palestinian civilians—and which engulfed the still largely occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
second intifadah Palestinian protesters throwing objects at Israeli police during the second intifadah, 2000. Stock footage courtesy The WPA Film Library
Thereafter, suicide bomb attacks by Palestinians in Israeli cities increased. Large numbers of Israelis, most of them civilians, were killed and wounded, and Israeli attacks on PA targets (most located within population centres) raised the already high casualty rate among the Palestinian populace. In the spring of 2002 Israeli troops reoccupied all the towns and cities of the West Bank, reclaiming security control from the PA and tightening restrictions on movement that had earlier been placed on Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Negotiations reached a complete impasse, and the future of the occupied territories, and of relations between Palestinians and Israelis, became increasingly uncertain. Sharon, blaming Arafat for instigating the attacks against Israel, confined Arafat to his compound in Ramallah from 2001.
In 2003 the PA established the office of prime minister in an effort to circumvent Arafat and restart the peace process with Israel. Arafat installed Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate, in the post. Abbas called for an end to the intifadah, but, feeling that his efforts were thwarted by Arafat, Israel, and the United States, he soon resigned. Following Arafat’s death in 2004, Abbas was elected chairman of the PLO and president of the PA. In 2005 Israel withdrew soldiers and settlers from parts of the West Bank and from all of the Gaza Strip, which then came under Palestinian control. The pullout raised hopes for new peace talks.
In the years that followed, tensions between Ḥamās and Fatah dominated Palestinian politics. Elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council were held in 2006, and Ḥamās won a surprise victory over Fatah. Ḥamās and Fatah eventually formed a coalition government, but violence between their forces escalated in the Gaza Strip. After a week of fighting, Ḥamās forces defeated Fatah forces and took control of the Gaza Strip, leading Abbas to dissolve the Ḥamās-led government and declare a state of emergency in June 2007.
The Ḥamās takeover of the Gaza Strip added a new element of uncertainty to Israeli-Palestinian relations. Israel declared the Gaza Strip under Ḥamās a hostile entity and imposed a blockade, sealing border crossings and placing heavy restrictions on imports. Ḥamās rocket attacks on southern Israel became commonplace, as did retaliatory strikes by Israeli forces.
Israel and Ḥamās agreed in June 2008 to a six-month cease-fire in negotiations brokered by Egypt. When the agreement expired in December, Ḥamās announced that it did not intend to extend it, and there were accusations of violations by both sides. A major conflict broke out in late December when Israel launched air strikes on Ḥamās targets in response to increased rocket attacks. A week after commencing the air strikes, Israel mounted a ground offensive into the Gaza Strip. The conflict ended after 22 days, with Israel and Ḥamās each declaring a unilateral cease-fire. Thirteen Israelis and more than 1,000 Gazans were killed in the fighting.
Relations between Israel and the Palestinians soured further in May 2010 when Israeli commandos raided a civilian ship carrying pro-Palestinian activists to the Gaza Strip in defiance of Israel’s blockade. Nine people aboard the ship were killed when the commandos opened fire after being attacked by activists armed with clubs and knives. A round of direct peace talks between Israel and the PA was held in September 2010, but those talks quickly came to a halt over the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
After a four-year schism, during which Ḥamās and Fatah governed separately in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank, respectively, Palestinian officials announced in April 2011 that Ḥamās and Fatah had reached a reconciliation agreement in negotiations mediated by Egypt. The plan, signed in Cairo on May 4, called for the formation of a caretaker government ahead of presidential and legislative elections to be held within a year.
Following the failure of direct talks in 2010, Abbas had shifted his efforts toward gaining international recognition for a Palestinian state. In September 2011 he submitted a request to the UN Security Council asking for the admission of an independent Palestinian state to the UN. The action—which was opposed by Israel and the United States—had become necessary, he argued, because the U.S.-mediated peace negotiations had placed too little pressure on Israel to make concessions for peace. The bid for recognition by the Security Council stalled when it became clear that the United States would veto it and that several other members would abstain from voting.
A year after the failure of the Palestinian bid for full membership in the UN, Abbas announced that he would seek the UN General Assembly’s implicitrecognition of Palestinian statehood by submitting a draft resolution requesting that the status of the Palestinian mission to the UN (officially called Palestine within the UN) be upgraded from “permanent observer” to “nonmember observer state.” The designation, though falling short of full UN membership, would allow Palestinians to seek membership in international bodies such as the International Criminal Court. The resolution passed on November 29, 2012, with 138 countries in favour, 9 opposed, and 41 abstentions. The resolution also urged Israel and the Palestinians to resume stalled negotiations toward a two-state solution. Israeli officials opposed Abbas’s bid for recognition, saying that such unilateral actions by the Palestinians would hold up negotiations with Israel.
Abbas, Mahmoud; Ki-Moon, Ban: Palestinian statehood Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, presenting UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon with a letter requesting that the UN recognize Palestinian statehood, September, 2011. Seth Wenig/AP
The murders of three teenage yeshiva students in the West Bank in June 2014—for which Netanyahu held Ḥamās responsible—brought a new escalation of tension in and around the Gaza Strip. On July 8, 2014, Israel launched a large-scale attack against Ḥamās and other militants in Gaza that began with a week of aerial bombardment and progressed to an incursion by ground troops. After several weeks of fighting, Israel withdrew its forces from the Gaza Strip, declaring that their mission had been fulfilled.
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