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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is a historian of the modern Middle East and author of ‘A Line In The Sand’ and ‘Lords of the Desert’
“We will break Transjordan, bomb Amman and destroy its army; and then Syria falls; and if Egypt will still continue to fight, we will bombard Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo,” wrote Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion when war broke out in 1948. “This will be in revenge for what they . . . did to our forefathers in Biblical times.”
History, in the Middle East, has long been used to justify violence. But the Israel-Palestinian conflict is intractable not because it is ancient, but because, in recent times, it has become so much more complicated.
A year before Ben-Gurion’s warning, a UN proposal had allocated Jews 55 per cent of the land area of Palestine. By the end of the war, Israelis controlled 78 per cent. More than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled to the surrounding countries, taking title deeds and door keys with them. That exodus instantly expanded the conflict by destabilising the surrounding Arab countries in turn.
These same tremors are echoing across the region today following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 and the Israeli reprisals in the Gaza Strip. Recent exchanges of fire in Lebanon between militants and Israeli forces stoke fears that the violence will spread once more.
But this is a conflict that has always flared beyond its own contested borders, making any solution infinitely more convoluted. Since 1948, the tendency of Israel, the Palestinians and the surrounding Arab states to appeal to outside help has turned what was at heart a land dispute into a far wider geopolitical problem, muddled still further by the number of external players.
Backing from these outside superpowers has only served to encourage the conflict. Historically, it was the Soviet Union and, more recently, Iran that provided support to Israel’s enemies while Tel Aviv relied on France and latterly the US for military backing. Israel’s close relationship with France had one crucial consequence: in 1956, during the Suez crisis, France agreed to help the Jewish state to build a nuclear reactor so it could manufacture a bomb. A French official later told President John F Kennedy, that while “one to two bombs” from Israel might provoke some unrest in the Middle East, they “would not be a real threat to the survival of the human race”. Kennedy had his doubts.
But, since the early 1960s, the US has also supplied increasing quantities of conventional weapons, fuelling a hawkishness that led to the 1967 six-day war — an Israeli-Arab conflict from which Tel Aviv emerged victorious.
We are still living with the consequences of this war. The Palestinians, displaced into Jordan or shunted into newly occupied territories, shifted their effort from resistance to terrorism. Their early targets were symbolic and reflected Marxist-Leninist thinking: an attack on the Aramco pipeline, which pumped Saudi oil to the Mediterranean through the Golan Heights, struck a blow not just against the Israelis (who had seized the Heights) and the oil company (then American-owned) but the Saudi monarchy and capitalism, simultaneously.
The seeds of today’s violence were planted when, in 1987, a frail and wheelchair-bound man named Sheikh Yassin founded Hamas, after a truck struck Palestinians queueing at a Gaza checkpoint, triggering the first intifada. The Israelis co-operated with Yassin in an effort to undermine the existing Palestinian organisations, the PLO and Fatah. He, meanwhile, concealed Hamas’s true purpose and when the PLO dropped its pledge to destroy Israel, the militant group vowed to continue armed resistance.
Tel Aviv cracked down repeatedly to suppress the militants, but only provoked more reprisals. When the Israelis eventually assassinated Yassin in 2004, they inadvertently removed the man who was blocking closer ties between Hamas and Iran. With Tehran’s help, Hamas then seized power in Gaza.
Ensuring Israel’s security is the priority for any Israeli prime minister. Benjamin Netanyahu, the current occupant of that office, is now caught in the middle of a blame game over this month’s deadly assault. But he would not have had to look far back in history to know that mere containment of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank was not going to be enough to ensure his country’s security. The inability of Israel’s security forces to stop a series of suicide bombings destroyed the career of his predecessor, Shimon Peres, just as the recent, far more devastating attack will surely now end his own.
Following a second wave of suicide bombings, Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005, forcing settlers who had stayed on in the strip to leave. But disengagement, as the shocking mass-murder of the recent days shows, is not working. Both sides want the same territory. After Israel’s 1967 victory, Ben-Gurion wrote to an American general that while he was proud of his country’s success, he was “not certain that the six days war was the last war we have to fight and win”.
A military victory will never achieve a lasting peace. That requires a political solution — the prospects of which have never seemed more distant.
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