Israel-Palestine escalation: 12 charts to understand how we got here
The escalation between Gaza and Israel shows no sign of abating in intensity: we look back at the historical steps that led to the current situation.
On the morning of 7 October, a Hamas attack was launched from the Gaza Strip, taking Israel by surprise. Thousands of rockets from Gaza were fired towards the central and southern regions of Israel. At the same time, militiamen of the Palestinian Islamic group — which the United States, the European Union, and many other countries designate as a terrorist organisation — crossed the Israeli border from the Gaza Strip to initiate an aggression and take control of some locations in the south of the country. In the attack, Hamas militiamen killed at least 1,200 Israelis, almost all of them civilians, caused more than 3,000 injuries, and took some 240 people hostage. The escalation between Hamas and Israel has been described by many as the most violent in recent years and, although Hamas is not a regular army, compared to the Yom Kippur War (or October War): which began on 6 October 1973 during the Kippur celebrations. It was a joint military operation organised by Egypt and Syria that took Israel by surprise. The Hamas terrorist attack occurred one day after the 50th anniversary of the ’73 war.
The Israeli government, however, promptly came together to respond to the crisis, and while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the war unleashed by Hamas is a war that Israel will win, the government launched an air operation called ‘Iron Swords’ over the skies of Gaza. Dozens of planes then took flight and struck the Strip in an attempt to hit Hamas military targets. The Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health in Gaza reported that more than 16,000 people were killed and more than 40,000 wounded as a result of Israel’s air force bombing of the Strip.
What is the Gaza Strip and who governs it
The Gaza Strip is a 360km2 coastal region populated by more than 2 million people, of whom more than 1.4 million have refugee status. From 1967 until 2005, this area was also militarily occupied by Israel. In 2007, two years after the Israeli withdrawal, Hamas took control of the Strip and since then Israel has continued to operate a blockade, i.e. the almost total closure of border crossings with the country and access by sea and air, which continues to this day. Even the border crossing with neighbouring Egypt, the Rafah crossing, is only intermittently open. Today, more than 80 per cent of the population in Gaza live on humanitarian aid, while the unemployment rate is close to 50 per cent. Due to the continuous closures of the border crossings, the few businesses dedicated to the production of basic necessities work intermittently.
How to work
The situation in the Middle East has developed further, but in order to understand the causes of the current conflict, it is necessary to delve into the history of the region.
First task
- form groups of two
- all pairs should read the history of Palestine
- half of them will deepen the Israeli perspective of events, the other half the Arab perspective
Second task
form groups of four (one pair of “Israelis” and one pair of “Arabs”) to compare the different points of view.
Final task
Each student writes a report that:
- presents the situation in Palestine
- considers and assesses the remote and recent causes of the conflict
A bit of history: how the idea of Israel was born
To understand the origin of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we need to take a step back to the end of the 19th century when, in the wake of European nationalism and in response to the rise of anti-Semitism, Hungarian-Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl elaborated the ideology of Zionism, a political movement that claimed the right to self-determination for the Jewish people, hypothesising Palestine and Argentina as possible destinations for settlers. It was the cultural and religious connection to Jerusalem that led the Zionist movement to eventually opt for Palestine, at the time commonly defined as the geographical area bounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the west and the Jordan River to the east.
Although the migration of European Jews to this territory had already begun in the late 19th century, it became more substantial with the end of the First World War, after the British succeeded in taking it from the Ottoman Empire. The claims of the Zionist movement drew strength from the ‘Balfour Declaration’, i.e. the contents of a letter that British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote in 1917 to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, a Zionist and prominent member of the British Jewish community, in which His Majesty’s government affirmed its support for the creation of a ‘Jewish national home’ in Palestine.
At the end of the conflict, the victorious countries decided to divide up the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. At the San Remo Conference in 1920, the territory of Palestine, along with those of present-day Iraq and Jordan, was given to Britain, while the territories corresponding to present-day Syria and Lebanon came under the control of France. The presence of London and Paris in this region was then institutionalised by the League of Nations — the nucleus of what would later become the United Nations — with the creation of the Mandates. This was a system by which the colonial powers undertook to administer these territories and accompany them on their path to independence. But the granting of the Mandate of Palestine to Great Britain, a power that had publicly declared its intention to facilitate the immigration of European Jews to that territory, was badly received by the local population. The Mandate years were in fact marked by the outbreak of regular protests, often characterised by violent episodes against the British and the Jewish community, which was invigorated year after year by the arrival of new migrants. These ended up changing the demographic structure of Palestine: if in 1922 Jews represented 11% of the population, their number reached 32% in 1947 (and this despite the growth of the Arab population, which doubled in the same period).
The level of Arab discontent alarmed the British government. It set up a commission to investigate the causes of unrest in Palestine and to propose a solution. Led by William Peel, the commission investigated the situation for 6 months. In July 1937, Lord Peel published his report: he claimed there was no common ground at all between Arab and Jew communities, thus the solution would have been the partition of the country between two communities.
The Second World War represented a clear break for the British colonial system and for Palestine. Driven by the economic needs of post-war reconstruction and the complexity of the situation on the ground, London decided to hand over the Mandate to the United Nations, which in the meantime had replaced the League of Nations, and leave the decision on the future of the region to them. In November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution (number 181) that envisaged the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, and that placed Jerusalem under international jurisdiction. This decision was welcomed by the Jewish community but rejected by the Arab community, which after years of opposing the mass immigration of European Jews, rejected the possibility of them obtaining an independent state.
At that point, relations between Jews and Arabs degenerated, first into guerrilla warfare and then, with the official end of the Mandate and the departure of the British, into a full-blown armed conflict. On 15 May 1948, following the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel, the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq decided to attack, starting the first Arab-Israeli war.
POV 1: download the document to get the views of the two sides in the conflict
At the end of the conflict, which was resolved in 1949 with the defeat of the Arab armies, the borders of the newly formed state of Israel comprised about 78% of the territory of Mandate Palestine. Remaining outside its control were the West Bank (or ‘West Bank’, since it lies west of the Jordanian river) and the so-called Gaza Strip, occupied by Jordan and Egypt respectively. During the conflict, around 700,000 Palestinians were forced to leave their homes, partly out of fear of war and partly because they were threatened by the Israeli army. This forced exodus (known in Arabic as Al-Nakbah, the catastrophe) is at the origin of the Palestinian refugee issue, one of the main unresolved points of the conflict.
In the three decades following its foundation, the relationship between Israel and the Arab states remained deeply conflictual, and the 1948–49 war was followed by other wars, in the context of which hundreds of thousands of Jews living in Arab countries were also forced to emigrate.
In 1956 the war flared up again involving Israel in an international crisis over control of the Suez Canal. The conflict led to the involvement in the Middle East of the US and the USSR, at that time opposing each other in the most acute phase of the Cold War, thus both determined to maintain control over the region. The USSR supported Egypt, allowing Czechoslovakia to sell arms for the defence of its claims. On the other hand, the US, in which the Jewish minority was very influential, tied itself to Israel.
The most important of the Arab-Israeli wars, however, is surely the 1967 war, renamed the ‘Six-Day War’, precisely because in the space of less than a week the Israeli army managed to defeat those of Egypt, Jordan and Syria. This astonishing victory allowed Israel to occupy new territories, including the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including that part of Jerusalem that had until then been controlled by the Jordanians.
POV 2: download the document to get the views of the two sides in the conflict
The PLO, Hamas, the First Intifada and the Oslo Accords
It was precisely the defeat of the Arab armies in 1967 that pushed the Palestinians towards greater political activism. The late 1960s and early 1980s were in fact years characterised by the rise of Palestinian groups and parties that sought to fulfil their national aspirations by political and military means. In the 1960s, most of these groups converged into the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), a structure that was intended to be a political umbrella for Palestinian armed parties and groups active in the Territories and the diaspora. The PLO thus became the main megaphone of Palestinian demands in the world. However, in 1982, the organisation’s cadres were forced to leave Lebanon, one of the main destinations for Palestinian refugees, which would be torn apart by civil war in that very decade. The PLO found asylum in Tunisia, too far from the Territories. This ended up marking the decline of the organisation. Meanwhile, in 1973, Israel and its Arab neighbours faced each other again in the Yom Kippur War, remembered by the Arabs as the Ramadan War or simply as the Israeli-Arab War of ’73. The main protagonists of the confrontation were Egypt, since Israel had occupied the Sinai peninsula, and Syria. The outcome was rather interlocutory, but led to the return of Sinai to Cairo and a further expansion of the counter of Israeli control over the Golan Heights, occupied in 1967.
Exasperated by the lack of recognition of their national aspirations, in 1987 Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank began a series of protests against the Israeli occupation. These acts soon took on the dimensions of a veritable popular uprising — the First Intifada — which lasted until 1993 and led to the deaths of more than 1900 Palestinians and 200 Israelis. It was during these years of protests and harsh clashes that the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) was born, an Islamist organisation, born from a rib of the Muslim Brotherhood and characterised from the start by its intransigence towards Israel.
It was during the intifada years that the positions of the Palestinian and Israeli leaderships first came closer together. Between 1993 and 1995, the Oslo Accords were signed, which, on the basis of the two-state solution, should have been the first step towards the construction of an independent Palestinian state. It was due to these agreements that the Palestinian Territories were divided into three areas (A, B and C) and that an autonomous administration, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), was created, which exercised a certain degree of sovereignty over area A and B. However, Netanyahu’s ascent to government in Israel for the first time in 1996, together with other factors, ended up blocking negotiations on the issues left open by the Accords and, as a result, dealt a severe blow to the peace process.
POV 3: download the document to get the views of the two sides in the conflict
From the Second Intifada to the Abraham Agreement
The stalemate in negotiations contributed to reigniting the Palestinian Territories between 2000 and 2005 with the outbreak of the Second Intifada. Compared to the first, this one was much more violent and led to the deaths of almost five thousand Palestinians and more than a thousand Israelis.
In 2002, at the height of the Palestinian popular uprising, Israel began the construction of a separation wall between its own territories and the Palestinian territories in the West Bank. The declared aim was to control movement in order to prevent the organisation of terrorist attacks against the Israeli population. However, the route of the wall did not respect the Green Line (established in 1949 between Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan), deviating in some cases by tens of kilometres. According to the Israeli authorities, the purpose of the wall was to contribute to the security of the country. Its construction has had, and continues to have, a negative impact on the lives of Palestinians. According to a UN report, ‘the wall separates communities and prevents people’s access to services as well as to religious, cultural and livelihood facilities’. Since then, the situation in the Palestinian Territories has only worsened. Israel continues to maintain a substantial military presence in the West Bank, where over the past two decades it has also accelerated its policy of expanding Israeli colonies, towns and settlements in Palestinian territory, deemed illegal by the international community.
POV 4: To conclude your understanding of the perspective you have been assigned, analyse the factors that determined the extreme violence of the second intifada by considering them in the light of what you have studied.
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