The truth about how the Israel, Gaza impasse began

Opinion and Analysis

An Israeli soldier carries a shell as he and his comrades prepare their Merkava tanks stationed at an army deployment area along the border between Israel and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. AFP PHOTO 

By MARVIN SISSEY

In Summary

• A history lesson on how the Jewish and Palestinian entities were carved from a fractious Middle East.

A West African proverb goes thus, “Until the lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

 

For a long time, the Middle East Israel-Palestine conflict has been reported to the world through the exclusive lens of Western international cable news stations and newspapers.

News stations like CNN, BBC and Fox, and publications like Times and Newsweek have unashamedly carried a systematic bias in their coverage of the perpetual conflict, in the end creating a perception in the world that Israelis are the sole victims of terrorist Islamist Palestinian factions and only respond heavily militarily as a matter of self-defence rather than malice.

It is no wonder that Israel has continued to enjoy public support and goodwill especially from the Western public and other neutrals whose mindsets are artificially configured by the specific content they consume.

One can, however, understand why Israel seems to enjoy substantive goodwill in Western countries. Throughout much of Jewish history, most Jews were exiled to the Diaspora (especially during the Roman conquest).

Today, only around 43 per cent of the world’s Jewish population live in Israel. The rest live in G8 countries with the majority in the US, hence their ability to shape much of US’s policy towards Israel.

The State of Israel wasn’t formed until 1948 which came as a culmination of a strong uprising of Zionism movement (a nationalist movement of Jews in the Diaspora that supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in the hitherto Palestine territory).

This movement was incentivised by the continued anti-Semitic sentiments in most of the countries in which Jews were exiled.

This fear was visibly defined during the Second World War when millions of Jews perished in the Holocaust in Germany’s Nazi concentration camps. It was no surprise then that a Jewish country, the State of Israel was declared barely three years later on May 14, 1948.

Prior to that, in November 1947, the UN General Assembly had discussed and adopted Resolution 181 (II) regarding issue of partitioning the Palestine territory, which was then still under the British Mandate since 1922.

The plan was to replace the British Mandate with an independent Arab State (Palestine), an independent Jewish State (Israel) and a separate City of Jerusalem (under an International Trusteeship System).

The plan had provided that Britain would use its powers to facilitate the partition process. Unfortunately, neither Britain nor the UN Security Council took any action to implement the resolution.

Britain was concerned that the partition would severely damage Anglo-Arab relations. The British half-heartedly managed to withdraw from Palestine territory by May 1948 in time for Jews to proclaim their independence and set up their state. Strangely, the Arab State was never to be established (at least officially).

Obviously, the establishment of the Jewish state was not received by fanfare in the mostly Islamic Arab Middle East. The Arab League members of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq refused to accept the UN partition plan, instead declaring the right of self-determination for Arabs across the whole of Palestine.

Barely a day after declaring independence, Israel was invaded by all its Arab neighbours in a battle that lasted the latter part of 1948. This war only came to a halt in 1949 with the signing of the so called Armistice Agreements.