by The Committee for Truth and Justice
contact@truthandjustice-online.com
This is the third of a series on the history of Israel/Palestine. In the first part we learned that Jews have lived continuously in Israel for 3500 years and a Jewish state of Israel existed for over 1000 years. On the other hand, Arabs controlled an Islamic empire that included the land of Palestine for about 400 years, but there was never a state of Palestine. In part two, we found that after the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI, the land of Palestine came under the sovereignty of the British by the legal authority of the League of Nations as part of the British Mandate for Palestine. One of the goals of this Mandate was the establishment of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. The Arabs fought to prevent the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine even to the extreme of turning down a state of their own on 80 percent of the land in 1936 in order to prevent a Jewish state. As will be seen below this pattern of rejection of Jews at all cost will be the driving force of the Arabs that continues until today.
After years of Arab terror and military conflict with the Jews the British gave up their authority over Palestine in 1947 to the UN. The UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181 partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jews accepted the partition despite the small size of their land and that the land did not contain their historical lands of Judea and Samaria or their ancestral capital, i.e., Jerusalem. The Arabs rejected partition, and thus rejected a state of their own for the second time. In spite of Arab rejection and threats by surrounding Arab states, the Jews fulfilled the goal of the Mandate and established the modern State of Israel in 1948. The UN recognized the Jewish state and accepted it as a UNmember in 1949. Immediately after the declaration of the State of Israel, the surrounding Arab armies of TransJordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq attacked the nascent Jewish state. With inferior arms and much smaller army, the Jews prevailed.
During and after the War of Independence about 600,000 Arabs voluntarily left Israel with encouragement of their leaders and Arab neighbors. They were told that they would be able to return after the Arab armies destroyed the Jewish state. At the same time most of the Jews living in Arab and Muslim nations, close to 1 million, were expelled just because they were Jewish. Therefore, two groups of refugees were created, however, the Arabs were voluntary refugees whereas the Jews were expellees. Another major difference was the disposition of these refugees. The Jewish refugees spread out across the world and many immigrated to Israel such that almost all were resettled. On the other hand, all of the surrounding Arab states but Transjordan, refused to allow immigration of these Arab refugees from Palestine and put them into refugee camps where many still live today, thereby creating the longest running refugee problem in the modern history. Thus, the Arab refugee problem was not only created by the Arabs, but was and is maintained by the Arabs.
In 1949 the War of Independence ended with a cease fire signed with all attacking Arab nations. Israel had gained territory, Egypt occupied Gaza, and TransJordan annexed the West Bank (and in the process changed its name to Jordan). These boundaries and sovereignties lasted for 18 years. At no time during the Arab occupation of Gaza and the West Bank did the Palestinian Arabs ever ask for a state of their own and at no time did either Egypt or Jordan offer the land they occupied to the Palestinian Arabs for a state of their own. In fact, the long term goal of most Arabs at that time was a pan-Arab state that included most the Middle East.
The annexation of the West Bank by Jordan resulted in the purging of the Jewish presence in the Judea and Samaria. The Arabs expelled all of the Jews from Jerusalem, desecrated every Jewish holy site, destroyed over 50 synagogues, used the grave stones from Jewish cemeteries to pave their roads, and prevented Jews from entering East Jerusalem to pray at their holiest site, the Temple Mount. This attempt to purge Jews from Palestine was and is a major force driving the terror by Arabs against Jews.
Between 1948 and 1967 the Egyptians sent army officers to Gaza to train the Palestinian Arab fedeyeen in terror attacks against Israel. Also, at this time the president of Egypt, Gamal; Abdul Nasser, was gathering power to act on his goal of a pan-Arab state. He began by arming Egypt and allying with the USSR and then he signed military agreements with Syria and Jordan. His first major act of aggression was the nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956. This act of war began the Suez Campaign in which Israel, France and Britain aligned against Egypt and the USSR. Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, but returned it when the UN agreed to station a peace keeping force to guarantee passage of Israeli ships through the Gulf of Aqaba.
In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed. Its goal was the destruction of Israel. Article 24 of the original PLO Charter wrote: “(The PLO) does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom or in the Gaza Strip.” Therefore, the goal of the PLO was to liberate Palestine, but this Palestine was not Gaza or the West Bank, it was Israel. To this end the PLO engaged in terrorism against Israel that continues until today.
Meanwhile, throughout the 1960s tensions were rising between Israel and its Arab neighbors especially Syria and Egypt. In addition, at this time Nasser became the recognized leader of the Arab world and he began to prepare for war against Israel. He strengthened his alliance with USSR, increased his military strength, and began to mobilize the Arab world with anti-Israel declarations. In 1967 this finally led to Nasser engaging in acts of war against Israel: he removed the UN peace keeping force from the Sinai, he blockaded the Straits of Tiran, engaged in military alliance with Jordan, Syria and Iraq, amassed troops on the Sinai, and he declared war on Israel. The president of Iraq declared: “Our goal is clear – to wipe Israel off the map.” Faced with certain war and its destruction Israel had no choice but to act. On the first day Israel eliminated the Egyptian air force and after six days had captured Sinai, Gaza, Golan Heights and West Bank. The PLO was forced to relocate to Jordan. Israel had no intention of keeping these territories and sought to return this land for a lasting real peace treaty, but the Arab League met at Khartoum in 1967 and responded with their notorious three “no’s”: no negotiation, no recognition, no peace.
In response to the 6-Day war, the UN voted for resolution 242 that required all parties to engage in peace negotiations and that in exchange for peace Israel should withdraw to secure borders. Israel attempted to fulfill this resolution by engaging in peace negotiations and it successfully negotiated peace with both Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994. In fulfillment of UN resolution 242 Israel returned the Sinai for peace with Egypt. The Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, who signed peace with Israel was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1981. In the Arab Muslim world negotiating peace with Israel is considered a capital offense.
The 6 Day War and refusal of Arabs to negotiate peace resulted in Israel having sovereignty over Gaza and the West Bank. Contrary to Arab propaganda, Israeli control (“occupation”) of Gaza and the West Bank was a great benefit to the Arabs of these territories. The Israelis built hospitals, schools, roads, and much infrastructure that bettered the life and increased commerce for these Arabs. Prior to the 1967 war, fewer than 60 percent of all male adults had been employed, with unemployment among refugees running as high as 83 percent. Most of this progress was the result of access to the far larger and more advanced Israeli economy: the number of Palestinian Arabs working in Israel rose from zero in 1967 to 66,000 in 1975 and 109,000 by 1986, accounting for 35 percent of the employed population of the West Bank and 45 percent in Gaza. Close to 2,000 industrial plants, employing almost half of the work force, were established in the territories under Israeli rule.
During the 1970s, the West Bank and Gaza constituted the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world-ahead of such “wonders” as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea. Per-capita GNP expanded tenfold between 1968 and 1991. Palestinian Arab per-capita income nearly doubled Syria’s, increased to more than four times Yemen’s, and became 10 percent higher than Jordan’s. Only the oil-rich Gulf states and Lebanon were more affluent.
Under Israeli rule, the Palestinian Arabs also made vast progress in social welfare. Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates in the West Bank and Gaza fell by more than two-thirds between 1970 and 1990, while life expectancy rose from 48 years in 1967 to 72 in 2000 (compared with an average of 68 years for all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa). Israeli medical programs reduced the infant-mortality rate of 60 per 1,000 live births in 1968 to 15 per 1,000 in 2000 (in Iraq the rate is 64, in Egypt 40, in Jordan 23, in Syria 22). And under a systematic program of inoculation, childhood diseases like polio, whooping cough, tetanus, and measles were eradicated.
No less remarkable were advances in the Palestinian Arabs’ standard of living. By 1986, 92.8 percent of the population in the West Bank and Gaza had electricity around the clock, as compared to 20.5 percent in 1967; 85 percent had running water in dwellings, as compared to 16 percent in 1967; 83.5 percent had electric or gas ranges for cooking, as compared to 4 percent in 1967; and so on for refrigerators, televisions, and cars.
Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, the number of schoolchildren in the territories grew by 102 percent, and the number of classes by 99 percent, though the population itself had grown by only 28 percent. Even more dramatic was the progress in higher education. In 1967, when Israeli first “occupied” Gaza and the West Bank, not a single university existed in these territories. By the early 1990’s, there were seven universities with over 16,500 students. Illiteracy rates dropped to 14 percent of adults over age 15, compared with 69 percent in Morocco, 61 percent in Egypt, 45 percent in Tunisia, and 44 percent in Syria.
Clearly by all objective measures, the “occupation” of Gaza and West Bank by Israel in the 19 years from 1967 to 1986 helped the Palestinian Arabs much more than the occupation by the Turks of the Ottoman Empire for 500 years or the occupation by Egypt and Jordan for 19 years between 1948 and 1967. However, this would all change with the return of Arafat to the territories as part of the Oslo Accords in 1993 as described in the next edition.