OPINION: How the war will end is not history yet, but this is how we got here
From the Canaanites to the British, Jewish News' historian Derek Taylor reflects on how the current conflict is shaped by the preceding centuries.
Over the centuries a large number of nations have ruled in Israel; the Canaanites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Turks and British are just some of them.
The attraction was originally that the country was a good trading route between North Africa and Europe, between the Mediterranean and the desert. It also became a block between Russia and the Suez Canal, protecting the British trade route to India. The Turks conquered it in 1516 and held it almost continuously until they lost it in the first World War in 1918.
The Balfour Declaration promised Israel a national home for the Jews, but the Arabs who lived there were never happy about this. There was an Arab revolt almost immediately in Jaffa in 1921 when Jewish Marxists started a march against the moderates. The Arabs thought it was against them and attacked the Jews. About 50 of each group were killed.
The Arab leader was Hajj Amin Al-Hussein, (1895-1974) the Mufti (religious head) and he wanted to organise the Arabs to drive the Jews out of Palestine. The Jewish military leader was Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940) who was initially sentenced to 15 years hard labour for organising the Jews, but benefited from an amnesty a few years later.
In 1929 in Hebron there were riots over the Western Wall and 133 Jews were killed and 340 wounded. The Arabs lost 116 members of their community and 230 were wounded.
From 1936-1939 there were further riots which Ben Gurion put down to a fear of growing Jewish economic power, opposition to mass immigration and British approval of Zionism.
After the war, in 1948, Britain gave up the mandate and five Arab armies invaded the state of Israel with the intention of destroying it; Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. They were all defeated. By resolution 973 the United Nations General Assembly authorised the membership of Israel in the organisation and the Security Council did the same with resolution 49.
Both the United States and Russia voted in favour.
The war ended by armistices but these didn’t always develop into peace. By the terms of the armistice, Israel got 78% of the land and the Arabs the rest, the West Bank. War broke out again in 1967 but only lasted 6 days before the Israelis won a resounding victory. A further war at Yom Kippur in 1973 resulted in over 2,500 Israeli deaths. The Arabs lost about 10,000 killed, 35,000 wounded, 9,000 captured and 2,250 tanks destroyed.
Since then relations between a number of Arab states and Israel have improved. Jordan and Egypt have made peace, the Gulf States were moving towards it, but the United Nations recommendation that Palestine be two states has never been approved.
Over 1,000 Jews were killed by Hamas on October 7 but many Arab states have difficulty in working together. The structure of their governments produce their own problems.
Lebanon, for example, is ruled by a group of three politicians; the President has to be a Maronite Christian, the speaker a Shi’a Moslem and the Prime Minister a Sunni Moslem. They naturally are concerned with the interests of their own communities.
The President of Egypt had to replace the Moslem Brotherhood to gain power, but Hamas are part of that organisation. He will never want the population in Gaza to live in Egypt and become a potential third column.
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