In 2018, the State of Israel turns 70. But to understand how this country was created and why, at the same time, this fact is celebrated by the Israelis and lamented as a "catastrophe" by the Palestinians, we must go back in time. It is necessary to go beyond May 1948, when Israel was created, and understand the ancestral roots of the disputes that still surround the region.
At the end of the 19th century, nationalist movements grew throughout Europe. It is at that moment that "Zionism" arose. "Zionism" refers to the theory developed at that time by the Hungarian Theodor Herzl According to which the survival of the Jewish people, who lived around the world, depended on the creation of a state of its own.
The idea is for this state to be built in the region of Palestine. At those days, Palestine was under dominion of the Ottoman Empire and the majority of its population was Arab and Muslim. The justification for the fact that Israel must be built right there was connected with biblical stories that spoke about the Land of Israel.
In 1918, with the ending of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire ground to a halt. E a região da Palestina passou a ser, então, domínio britânico. And the Palestine region then became a British rule.
The British have maintained ambiguous positions on Arab and Jewish interests in the region. Two documents show this well. The first of them, from 1917, is the Balfour Declaration.
The document was signed by the British Foreign Minister at that time, who supported the Zionist cause and boosted Jewish immigration in the following decades. But in the context of this ambiguous game, the British also published the White Paper of 1939, which limited Jewish immigration and restricted the purchase of Arab lands by Jews Meanwhile, Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe throughout the 1930s and early 1940s gave impetus to jewish immigration to Palestine, including clandestinely. In that period, the conflicts intensified in cities like the old port of Jafa, where Arabs revolted against the establishment of Jews in the territory.
They saw Zionism as an European colonial and imperialist strategy while Jews viewed immigration to Palestine as an alternative to survive from Nazi holocaust. Despite local rejection, this presence of Jews in Palestine has grown. A year after the end of World War II, in 1946, Jews were already a third of the population in the region – which was still under British rule.
By 1947, the UN had been newly founded. It was exactly the United Nations who has proposed a plan to share the territory, between Arabs and Jews, shortly after the departure of the British. The session of the General Assembly that supported this decision, expressed in Resolution 181, was presided over by a Brazilian: diplomat Oswaldo Aranha.
The document recommended the creation of two independent states and a special international regime to administer Jerusalem, city that is sacred to both Jews and Muslims – Jewish authorities have accepted the UN plan. But the Palestinian and Arab leaderships didn't. It was David Ben Gurion who declared, on May 14, 1948, the independence of the State of Israel.
In the following day, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq attacked the new country. After a year of conflict, an armistice was established in 1949. And a dividing line was drawn on the region map that became known as the "green line".
The State of Israel was created in 1948. But the Palestinian state was not created. In contrast, it ended up partly occupied by Israel and partly divided into pieces.
The Gaza Strip was brought under Egypt’s control. The West Bank and the eastern part of Jerusalem stayed with Jordan. Israel began to occupy a territory larger than the one predicted by the UN.
Some 700,000 Arabs were expelled or left their homes and towns. They have become refugees in neighboring countries such as Jordan and Lebanon. At the same time, Jews from various parts of the Middle East and Holocaust survivors in Europe began to immigrate massively to Israel.
At the beginning, in the 1950s and 1960s, Israel was ruled by politicians of socialist leanings, with collective productive units, the kibbutz, spread throughout the territory. But tensions with neighboring countries increased. In 1964, with support from the Arab League, the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded.
Until today the PLO is the main representative body of the Palestinians. In 1967, there was another major war in the region, the Six Day War, that reaffirmed the military supremacy of Israel. The country has defeated Egypt, Syria and Jordan.
And it has considerably enlarged its own territory. The Israelis then dominated the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula to the south, beyond the Golan Heights to the north, and the West Bank to the east, including the eastern portion of Jerusalem. This expansion movement is, until today, criticized by UN.
This situation, occurred in 1973, led Egypt and Syria to carry out a surprise attack on the holiest day for the Jews, Yom Kippur, which sparked a new war. Israel suffered defeats at the beginning of the conflict, but won at the end. In 1977, the right came to power for the first time in Israel, giving impetus to a policy of building Jewish settlements in the West Bank which had begun earlier in the Labor government.
Two years later, in 1979, Menachem Begin, then Israeli Prime Minister, signed a peace agreement with Egypt, mediated by the United States. With that, Israel left Sinai. In return, the most populous Arab country in the region, Egypt, became the first one to recognize the Jewish state.
On the other hand, Palestinian militants led by Yasser Arafat, of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO, maintained attacks on Israel throughout the 1970s and 1980s. One of the bases used to launch rockets into Israel in southern Lebanon was attacked and occupied in 1982. It was from this event that the Lebanese Hezbollah Shiite group was born, one of the most militant groups to fight against the Israeli state, financed by Iran.
In 1987, a major uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza became popular among the Palestinian population. It was the first Intifada, a series of protests that were harshly repressed by Israeli forces. At same year, Hamas, a Sunni fundamentalist group based in the Gaza Strip was created which sought the liberation of Palestine, the end of Israel and that was also opposed to the PLO by Arafat.
In the midst of so many wars and misunderstandings, the year 1992 marked the beginning of what could be a positive turning point. That year, labor Ytzhak Rabin was elected Prime Minister of Israel. He was responsible for opening peace negotiations with his neighbors which led to the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1993.
The document was signed by Rabin and Arafat. The PLO recognized the existence of Israel. And Israel recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinians.
In 1994, this dialogue was extended Israel signs a peace agreement with Jordan – the second Arab country to recognize the Jewish state, after Egypt. All was well or at least was improving, until fundamentalist groups began to sabotage the peace arrangement. In 1995, a far-right Jew assassinated Rabin in a Tel Aviv public square.
Hamas, in turn, kicked off a series of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. And then the peace accords collapsed. Conversations would even gain a new momentum in 2000, after Labor Ehud Barak was elected in place of conservative Benjamin Netanyahu.
In Camp David, USA, Barak offered shared control of Jerusalem and 90% of the occupied territories to Arafat, but the negotiation did not avenge. The right returned to power with Ariel Sharon in Israel in 2002, as a consequence of the start of the Second Intifada in 2001, with the increase of suicide bomb attacks against Israelis. Israel then began to build a wall along parts of the borders with the West Bank, entering Palestinian lands, under heavy criticism from several countries.
In 2005, an Israeli retreat. Sharon withdrew troops from the Strip of Gaza which was later controlled by the Palestinian group Hamas two years later. This coming and going of gestures meant that, in the following decade, American presidents like Bush and Obama tried to take Israel and Palestine to the new negotiating table again, but it was unsuccessful.
Once again, the region plunged into a war. Israel carried out attacks on Gaza in 2009, 2012 and 2014, killing thousands of Palestinians, firing rocket launches by Hamas against Israeli territory. The chapters of violence have been repeated extensively throughout this story in various ways.
In 2015, for example, there was the so-called Knife Intifada, a series of attacks on Israelis by Palestinians armed with knives. In response, the Israeli army made new military incursions against Palestinians. Seventy years after its foundation, Israel has established itself as a power.
With American support, the country has one of the best equipped and trained Armed Forces in the world. It also has a thriving economy that produces cutting edge science and technology. All this power, however, coexists with the accusation that the country has marked its own history with numerous episodes of abuse in the use of force Abuses condemned repeatedly by the same UN which, in 1948, created the State of Israel.
On the other side, Palestine remains unrecognized as a state, lives the political divide between the West Bank, which is controlled by Fatah, more moderate, and Gaza, controlled by Hamas, more radical, and has a weak economy, which suffers from blockades imposed by Israel. By 2018, peace still seems far away. There are still ancient obstacles left.
One of them is the control of the sacred sites: many Israelis and Palestinians consider Jerusalem to be the undivided capital of their own state, while the UN proposes shared control of this site. Another point of disagreement is the return to the territory of at least 5 million Palestinian refugees. Another point: Israel refuses to negotiate with the Palestinian armed group Hamas, which is considered "terrorist" by Israel – a group, incidentally, that does not even recognize the existence of the Jewish state.
And lastly, the Palestinians denounce the expansion of settlements of Israeli settlers over the West Bank, that is a Palestinian territory occupied by the Israeli. A solution for this septuagenarian impasse remains as one of the greatest desires for those who celebrate and for those who mourn this birthday all over the world.
