by David Hornestay

Created on: July 08, 2011

In 1937, Great Britain, administrator of a League of Nations Mandate for Palestine was faced with a Middle East crisis. Nazi persecution of German Jews had increased pressure for the admission of large numbers of European Jews to Palestine. The Arab population of Palestine had revolted against this prospect and in 1936 had begun carrying out attacks against Jewish population centers and British military and police installations.

Great Britain established the Peel Commission to find a peaceful solution to the crisis. It recommended a three-way partition, with separate Arab and Jewish entities and a continued British presence. The Jews, a minority, reluctantly accepted a small portion of Western Palestine, while noting that nearly 80 percent of the original Mandatory territory had been removed in the 1920's to form an Arab state of Transjordan. The Arabs refused the partition and continued their revolt until 1939, when the British government placed strict limits on future Jewish immigration, i.e. 75,000 over the next five years and further immigration only with Arab consent. World War II soon rendered that amount academic.

In the wake of the war, the United Nations took up the crisis. Its Special Commisssion recommended partition into Arab and Jewish states and this proposal was adopted by the General Assembly in November 1947. Armed elements in Palestine again rose to fight the Jewish population and, upon the declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948, were joined by the armies of the neighboring Arab countries, most notably Egypt, Syria, and Transjordan. By the time UN peacemaking efforts had succeeded, Israel had repelled the Arab attacks and controlled more than its allotted share. While there was an armistice, the Arab states refused to recognize Israel or negotiate permanent peace. Israel absorbed approximately 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands as well as many Holocaust survivors from Europe, while Arabs fleeing from the hostilities in Palestine were kept in refugee camps in Arab-held Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Transjordan (renamed Jordan when it occupied the West Bank).

In 1967, the Six-Day War precipitated by the Egyptian blockade of Israel's access to the Red Sea led to more territory lost to Israel and more Arab refugees. Again, the Arab states publicly declared their refusal to recognize or negotiate with Israel. 

In 1979, Egypt concluded a peace treaty with Israel. An agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization was signed in 1993 and has been followed by several rounds of intense negotiations aimed at the establishment of an independent Palestinian Arab state. On the two occasions when they seemed closest to fruition, 2000 at Camp David and 2008 between Palestinian President Abbas and then Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, the sticking point was apparently the Palestinian inability to give up the right of their refugees and their descendants to return to what has been Israel since 1948.  Israel regards the exercise of that "right" as a demographic threat to the survival of the world's only Jewish state in a region of Arab states. 

There have been numerous Middle East crises over these decades, beyond the uprisings and wars noted above, and their immediate causes have varied from land seizures and boycotts to terrorist attacks and reprisals. But the constant prevailing cause of the crisis which began in 1937 and persists to this day seems to be the refusal to share a part of the original Palestine Mandatory Territory with an independent Jewish political entity. 

    

    

  

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