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Palestine, considered a holy land by Jews, Muslims, and Christians, and homeland of the
modern state of Israel, was known as Canaan to the ancient Hebrews.
Palestine's name derives from the Philistines, a people who occupied the southern
coastal part of the country in the 12th century B.C.
A Hebrew kingdom established in 1000 B.C. was later split into the kingdoms of Judah
and Israel; they were subsequently invaded by Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians,
Persians, Romans, and Alexander the Great of Macedonia. By A.D. 135, few Jews were left
in Palestine; most lived in the scattered and tenacious communities of the Diaspora.
Palestine became a center of Christian pilgrimage after the emperor Constantine converted
to that faith. The Arabs took Palestine from the Byzantine empire in A.D. 634–40.
Interrupted only by Christian Crusaders, Muslims ruled Palestine until the 20th century
(Turkish rule from 1516). During World War I, British forces defeated the Turks in Palestine
and governed the area under a League of Nations mandate from 1923.
As part of the 19th-century Zionist movement, Jews had begun settling in Palestine as early
as 1820. This effort to establish a Jewish homeland had received British approval in the
Balfour Declaration of 1917. During the 1930s, Jews persecuted by the Hitler regime poured
into Palestine. The postwar acknowledgment of the Holocaust—Hitler's genocide of 6 million
Jews—increased international interest in and sympathy for the cause of Zionism.
However, Arabs in Palestine and surrounding countries bitterly opposed prewar and postwar
proposals to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish sectors. The British mandate to govern
Palestine ended after the war, and in 1947 the U.N. voted to partition Palestine.
When the British officially withdrew on May 14, 1948, the Jewish National Council proclaimed
the State of Israel.
U.S. recognition came within hours. The next day, Arab forces from Egypt, Jordan, Syria,
Lebanon, and Iraq invaded the new nation. By the cease-fire on Jan. 7, 1949, Israel had increased
its original territory by 50%, taking western Galilee, a broad corridor through central Palestine
to Jerusalem, and part of modern Jerusalem. Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion became Israel's
first president and prime minister. The new government was admitted to the U.N. on May 11, 1949.
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The next clash with Arab neighbors came when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 and barred
Israeli shipping. Coordinating with an Anglo-French force, Israeli troops seized the Gaza Strip
and drove through the Sinai to the east bank of the Suez Canal, but withdrew under U.S. and U.N.
pressure. In the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel made simultaneous air attacks against Syrian, Jordanian,
and Egyptian air bases, totally defeating the Arabs. Expanding its territory by 200%, Israel at the
cease-fire held the Golan Heights, the West Bank of the Jordan River, Jerusalem's Old City, and
all of the Sinai and the east bank of the Suez Canal.
In the face of Israeli reluctance even to discuss the return of occupied territories, the fourth
Arab-Israeli War erupted on Oct. 6, 1973, with a surprise Egyptian and Syrian assault on the Jewish
high holy day of Yom Kippur. Initial Arab gains were reversed when a cease-fire took effect two weeks
later, but Israel suffered heavy losses.
A dramatic breakthrough in the tortuous history of Mideast peace efforts occurred on Nov. 9, 1977,
when Egypt's president Anwar Sadat declared his willingness to go anywhere to talk peace.
Prime Minister Menachem Begin on Nov. 15 extended an invitation to the Egyptian leader to address
the Knesset. Sadat's arrival in Israel four days later raised worldwide hopes, but a peace agreement
between Egypt and Israel was long in coming. On March 14, 1979, the Knesset approved a final peace
treaty, and 12 days later Begin and Sadat signed the document, together with President Jimmy Carter,
in a White House ceremony. Israel began its withdrawal from the Sinai, which it had annexed from Egypt,
on May 25, and the two countries opened their border on May 29.
Although Israel withdrew its last settlers from the Sinai in April 1982, the fragile Mideast peace
was shattered on June 9 by a massive Israeli assault on southern Lebanon, where the Palestinian
Liberation Organization was entrenched. The PLO had long plagued Israelis with terrorist actions.
Israel destroyed PLO strongholds in Tyre and Sidon and reached the suburbs of Beirut
on June 10. A U.S.-mediated accord between Lebanon and Israel, signed on May 17, 1983, provided
for Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. Israel eventually withdrew its troops from the Beirut area,
but kept them in southern Lebanon, where occasional skirmishes would continue. Lebanon, under pressure
from Syria, canceled the accord in March 1984.
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A continual source of tension has been the relationship between the Jews and the Palestinians living
within Israeli territories. Most Arabs fled the region when the state of Israel was declared, but
those who remain now make up almost one-fifth of the population of Israel. They are about two-thirds
Muslim, as well as Christian and Druze. Palestinians living on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip
fomented the riots begun in 1987, known as the Intifadeh. Violence heightened as Israeli police
cracked down and Palestinians retaliated. Continuing Jewish settlement of lands designated for
Palestinians has added to the unrest.
In 1989 the leader of the PLO, Yasir Arafat, reversed decades of PLO polemic by acknowledging Israel's
right to exist. He stated his willingness to enter negotiations to create a Palestinian political
entity that would coexist with the Israeli state.
In 1991 Israel was struck by Iraqi missiles during the Persian Gulf War. The Israelis did not
retaliate in order to preserve the international coalition against Iraq. In 1992 Yitzhak Rabin
became prime minister. He halted the disputed Israeli settlement of the occupied territories.
Highly secretive talks in Norway resulted in an agreement between the PLO and the Israeli government
(the Oslo agreement, 1993). The accord stipulated a five-year plan in which Palestinians of the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip would gradually become self-governing. In 1994 Israel signed a peace
treaty with Jordan. Israel has no formal peace with Syria or Lebanon.
On Nov. 4, 1995, Prime Minister Rabin was slain by a Jewish extremist, jeopardizing the tenuous
progress toward peace. Shimon Peres succeeded him until May 1996 elections for the Knesset gave
Israel a new hard-line prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, by a razor-thin margin. Netanyahu reversed
or stymied much of the Oslo agreement, contending that it offered too many concessions too fast and
jeopardized Israelis' safety. Elections for seats on the Palestinian Council and for its president
took place in Jan. 1996. Yasir Arafat obtained an easy victory as president.
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Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations in 1997 were repeatedly undermined by both sides. Although
the Hebron accord was signed in Jan., calling for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the city,
the construction of new Jewish settlements on the West Bank in March profoundly upset progress
toward peace. Some Jews cited the influx of immigration from Russia (since the collapse of the
Soviet Union, more than 700,000 Russian Jews arrived in Israel) as necessitating the additional
settlements. Others believe that Netanyahu wishes to curb Palestinian expectations raised by the
Oslo agreement.
Terrorism erupted again in 1997 when radical Hamas suicide bombers claimed the lives of more than
20 Israeli civilians. Netanyahu, accusing Palestinian Authority president Arafat of lax security,
retaliated with draconian sanctions against Palestinians working in Israel, including the
withholding of millions of dollars in tax revenue, a blatant violation of the Oslo agreements.
Netanyahu persisted in authorizing right-wing Israelis to build new settlements in mostly Arab East
Jerusalem. Arafat, meanwhile, seemed unwilling or unable to curb the violence of extremist Arabs.
An Oct. 1998 summit at Wye Mills, Md., generated the first real progress in the stymied Middle East
peace talks in 19 months, with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian president
Yasir Arafat settling several important interim issues called for by the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords.
The Palestinians agreed to remove language from their founding charter that called for the
dismantling of the Jewish state; Israelis agreed to cede an additional 13% of the West Bank.
Although Israel did complete the first of three withdrawals from the West Bank on Nov. 20,
released 250 Palestinian prisoners, and authorized the opening of the Gaza airport, the peace
accord began unraveling almost immediately. Disagreement over the Israeli release of Palestinian
prisoners led to violence in the West Bank and Gaza, for which each side blamed the other.
To buttress the flagging accord, President Clinton visited the Gaza Strip on Dec. 15, becoming
the first American president to set foot on Palestinian-occupied land. The visit coincided with
the vote of the Palestine National Council to formally eliminate language from the organization's
charter that calls for the destruction of Israel.
Netanyahu found himself attacked from both sides of the political spectrum—the left accused him of
intentionally thwarting the peace process and the right accused him of betrayal, having elected him
in the belief that he would never give up Israeli territory. In mid-Dec. Parliament voted to dissolve
Netanyahu's government and hold elections in the spring, putting the peace negotiations on hold.
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By the end of April 1999, Israel had made 41 air raids on Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.
The guerrillas were fighting against Israeli troops and their allies, the South Lebanon Army militia,
who have occupied a security zone set up in 1985 to guard Israel's borders. Public pressure in Israel
to withdraw the troops has grown, and the issue dominated the Israeli election campaign in spring 1999.
Ehud Barak of the Labour Party won the election with 55.9% of the vote, against 43.9% for incumbent
Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud. Yasir Arafat originally planned to declare Palestinian statehood
on May 4, but postponed that decision until an undefined time after the election, so as not to
provoke Israeli hard-liners and lessen the chance of resuming the peace talks.
Barak created a broad coalition government and on his inauguration (July 6, 1999) announced that
"nothing is more important in my view than . . . putting an end to the 100-year conflict in the
Middle East." By this he meant not only pursuing peace with the Palestinians, but establishing
relations with Syria and ending the low-grade war in Southern Lebanon with the Iranian-armed Hezbollah
guerrillas. Syria has more than 30,000 troops in Lebanon, and Iran uses Syria as its conduit for
delivering weapons to Hezbollah. In Sept. 1998, Israel moved ahead with the 1998 Wye Accord, ceding
an additional 7% of territory to the Palestinians.
No thaw with Syria seemed forthcoming until Dec., when Israeli-Syrian talks resumed after a nearly
four-year hiatus. From Syria's point of view, normalization of relations between the two countries
would largely depend on Israel's withdrawal from the Golan Heights, which was territory that Israel
had captured from Syria during the Middle East war of 1967. From Israel's point of view, relinquishing
the Golan Heights, which serves as a buffer zone between the two nations, could not occur without a
guarantee of Israel's security from Syria. By Jan. 2000, however, talks had broken down when Syrian
demanded a detailed discussion of the return of all of the Golan Heights. In Feb., new Hezbollah
attacks on Israeli troops in southern Lebanon led to Israel's retaliatory bombing as well as Barak's
decision to pull out of Lebanon by July, whether or not an agreement had been reached with Syria.
Israeli troops pulled out of Lebanon on May 24, 2000, after 22 years of occupation.
Peace talks also broke down in early 2000 with the Palestinians over Israel's failure to cede
additional West Bank territory to the Palestinian authority—the two sides could not agree on the
choice of land.
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