President Donald Trump is pushing for Palestinians from Gaza to be relocated in the Arab countries albeit temporarily.
However, Arab foreign ministers of six nations met and issued a joint statement that said Palestinians’ ability to stay in the their lands should be ensured, strongly opposed to any measures aimed at uprooting Palestinians from their land in any form.
The ministers forewarned that such actions threaten regional stability, risk escalating the conflict, and undermine prospects for peace and coexistence.
Why are Arabs countries jittery with more Palestinians brought into their countries? This article revisits the history spawning the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and peeks at how the future will unfold.
After the end of the second World War, the UN created a state of Israel in 1948. It had her own temporary borders in 1949 but did not do the same to Palestine State Israel’s borders have kept encroaching on what is internationally accepted as Palestine territory.
The former colonial rulers of Palestine, the British, left behind a conflict that prevails even today, and thereafter.
Because the cooperation of the Arab states was considered essential to this goal, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin opposed Jewish immigration and the foundation of an independent Jewish state in Palestine.
During the First World War, great powers, appeared to have promised Arab Palestinians of their own statehood in order to gain their support to subdue the Ottoman Empire. Yet by May 1916 Great Britain, France, and Russia had reached an agreement (the Sykes-Picot Agreement) according to which, inter alia, the bulk of Palestine was to be internationalized.
At the end of the War, the future of Palestine was problematic.
Great Britain, which had set up a military administration in Palestine after capturing Jerusalem, was faced with the problem of having to secure international sanction for the continued occupation of the country.
This was in a manner consistent with its ambiguous, seemingly conflicting wartime commitments. Uncertainty over the disposition of Palestine affected all its inhabitants and increased political tensions.
In July 1922, the British mandate was established by the Council of the League of Nations.
Palestine became a distinct political entity for the first time in centuries.
This created problems and challenges for Palestinian Arabs and Zionists alike. Both communities realized that by the end of the mandate period the region’s future would be determined by size of population and ownership of land.
Thus, the central issues throughout the mandate period were Jewish immigration and land purchases, with the Jews attempting to increase both and the Arabs seeking to slow down or halt both.
Conflict over these issues often escalated into violence, and the British were forced to take action—a lesson not lost on either side.
Arab nationalist activities became fragmented as tensions arose between clans, religious groups, and city dwellers and fellahin over the issue of how to respond to British rule and the increasing number of Zionists. ewish expansionist initiatives.
With the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Zionist and British policies came into direct conflict.
Throughout the war Zionists sought with growing urgency to increase Jewish immigration to Palestine, while the British sought to prevent such immigration, regarding it as
illegal and a threat to the stability of a region essential to the war effort. British attempts to prevent Jewish immigration to Palestine in the face of the Holocaust.
This was a terrible tragedy befalling European Jews and others deemed undesirable by the Nazis—led to the disastrous sinking of two ships carrying Jewish refugees, the Patria (November 1940) and the Struma (February 1942).
In response, the Irgun, under the leadership of Menachem Begin, and a small terrorist splinter group, LEHI (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel)
It was known for its founder as the Stern Gang, embarked on widespread attacks on the British, culminating in the murder of Lord Moyne, British minister of state, by two LEHI members in Cairo in November 1944.
Palestine was hard-hit by the war. In addition to the destruction caused by the fighting, the population was devastated by famine, epidemics, and Ottoman punitive measures against Arab nationalists.
Major battles took place at Gaza before Jerusalem was captured by British and Allied forces under the command of General Sir Edmund (later 1st Viscount) Allenby in December 1917. The remaining area was occupied by the British by October 1918.
Uncertainty over the disposition of Palestine affected all its inhabitants and increased political tensions. In April 1920 anti-Zionist riots broke out in the Jewish quarter of Old Jerusalem, killing several and injuring scores.
British authorities attributed the riots to Arab disappointment at not having the promises of independence fulfilled and to fears, played on by some Muslim and Christian leaders, of a massive influx of Jews.
Following the confirmation of the mandate at San Remo, the British replaced the military administration with a civilian administration in July 1920, and Sir Herbert (later Viscount) Samuel, a Zionist, was appointed the first high commissioner.
The new administration proceeded to implement the Balfour Declaration, announcing in August a quota of 16,500 Jewish immigrants for the first year.
There was little political cooperation between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. In 1923 the British high commissioner tried to win Arab cooperation by offers: first a legislative council that would reflect the Arab majority and then of an Arab agency. Both offers were rejected by the Arabs as falling far short of their national demands.
Nor did the Arabs wish to legitimize a situation they rejected in principle. The years 1923–29 were relatively quiet; Arab passivity was partly due to the drop in Jewish immigration in 1926–28. In 1927 the number of Jewish emigrants exceeded that of immigrants, and in 1928 there was a net Jewish immigration of only 10 persons.
Nevertheless, the Jewish national home continued to consolidate itself in terms of urban, agricultural, social, cultural, and industrial development.
Large amounts of land were purchased from Arab owners, who often were absentee landlords. In August 1929 negotiations were concluded for the formation of an enlarged Jewish Agency to include non-Zionist Jewish sympathizers throughout the world.
As the war came to an end, the neighboring Arab countries began to take a more direct interest in Palestine.
In October 1944 Arab heads of state met in Alexandria, Egypt, and issued a statement, the Alexandria Protocol, setting out the Arab position. They made clear that, although they regretted the bitter fate inflicted upon European Jews by European dictatorships, the issue of European Jewish survivors ought not to be confused with Zionism.
Solving the problem of European Jews, they asserted, should not be achieved by inflicting injustice on Palestinian Arabs.
The covenant of the League of Arab States, or Arab League, formed in March 1945, contained an annex emphasizing the Arab character of Palestine.
The Arab League appointed an Arab Higher Executive for Palestine (the Arab Higher Committee), which included a broad spectrum of Palestinian leaders, to speak for the Palestinian Arabs.
In December 1945 the league declared a boycott of Zionist goods. The pattern of the postwar struggle for Palestine was unmistakably emerging.
The major issue between 1945 and 1948 was, as it had been throughout the mandate, Jewish immigration to Palestine.
The Yishuv was determined to remove all restrictions to Jewish immigration and to establish a Jewish state.
The Arabs were determined that no more Jews should arrive and that Palestine should achieve independence as an Arab state.
The primary goal of British policy following World War II was to secure British strategic interests in the Middle East and Asia.
Because the cooperation of the Arab states was considered essential to this goal, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin opposed Jewish immigration and the foundation of an independent Jewish state in Palestine.
The U.S. State Department basically supported the British position, but Truman was determined to ensure that Jews displaced by the war were permitted to enter Palestine. The issue was resolved in 1948 when the British mandate collapsed under the pressure of force and diplomacy.
In 1951, Palestinian militants assassinated Jordan’s King Abdullah, beginning the tumultuous history between the kingdom and the Palestinians.
In the early 1970s, Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization was driven out of Jordan after the group tried to seize power from King Hussein but was crushed by the state military in a brutal civil war.
Thousands of Palestinians were either killed in the fighting or expelled in the aftermath; many went to Lebanon. Jordan still has the biggest population of Palestinians with refugee status, with 2.4 million.
Most—but not all—have Jordanian citizenship, posing a challenge to the U.S.-backed government in Amman that has recognized Israel since a 1994 peace deal.
After the 1948 war, Egypt administered a Philadelphia-sized swath of Mediterranean coastline that became known as the Gaza Strip.
The U.S. and U.N. initially tried to resettle Gazans in Egypt, Libya and other Arab countries, but President Gamal Abdel Nasser halted the effort in 1955 after protests erupted.
Nasser’s stand helped turn the Palestinian struggle for a nation into a cause that resonated across the Arab world and brought a halt to international attempts to resettle them elsewhere.
Israel occupied Gaza after the 1967 war, and Egypt reached a peace accord with Israel in 1979. Since Hamas took control of Gaza in 2006, Egypt has joined an Israeli embargo on the strip.
Thousands of Palestinians fled to Iraq after the 1948 war, when the Iraqi army fought Israeli forces around the city of Haifa.
Palestinians in Iraq faced a backlash after the U.S. invasion of 2003 toppled Saddam’s government, including “intense harassment, violent attack, and forced evictions from their homes,” according to a Human Rights Watch report.
Much of the pre-2003 population of 34,000 fled to Jordan.
At least 80,000 Palestinians fled to Syria during the 1948 war, eventually settling across the country in about a dozen camps. Conflict between the government and militants largely
happened outside its borders. The Syrian military occupied Lebanon for almost 30 years starting in 1976, during the country’s civil war, and fought with Arafat’s PLO, eventually helping to expel him to Tunisia.
The Persian Gulf monarchies technically don’t host any Palestinian refugees, instead viewing them as immigrants seeking a better life.
Yet the Gulf has more than 600,000 Palestinians, including some who hold influential roles advising the region’s monarchies. However, Palestinian militarism has screeched to a halt more of them to dwell in these monarchies.
Efforts to reconcile Israel and Palestine have hit a wall because of dispute over ownership of East Jerusalem and expansion of Jewish settlements into West Bank and elsewhere.
With a history of both sides pursuing a maximalist option of kicking the other side out, it is no wonder Trump’s stopgap to the plight of Gaza is viewed with suspicions and resentment.
Equally significant, migration of the Palestinians into neighbouring Arab nations has a violent and destabilizing history which ought to be taken seriously.
Ultimately, Palestine and Israel will continue waging sporadic wars with the former bearing the brunt of the confrontations in the foreseeable future.
However, four to five decades later demographics will shift decisively to the Palestinians forcing Israel to reinvoke the South Africa Apartheid policies to cling onto power and survival.
Read more about South African land seizures attract IRE of US President Donald Trump
