What was israel before 1947

Israelis and Palestinians clearly each see themselves as holding a strong national identity, so the world should respect that. There is certainly hate on the fringes of both Israeli and Palestinian politics, and those fringes are not small. But the more common feeling among mainstream Israelis and Palestinians could probably be better described as somewhere between apathy and antipathy.

The commonly expressed view among Palestinians is not that they wish to see all Jews driven into the sea; it's that they want just and fair treatment of Palestinians, which they see as requiring that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories end and, for many, that Palestinian refugees and their descendants be allowed to return to their former homes in what is now Israel. They are outraged about the costs occupation imposes on Palestinians, and have next to no faith that Israel will withdraw or generally do the right thing.

They believe Israelis will never voluntarily allow them a state. The commonly expressed view among Israelis is that peace would be great in theory, and establishing an independent Palestinian state would be great in theory, but that they have next to no confidence that Palestinians or Palestinian leaders will actually take the necessary steps to get there. They believe Palestinians will never stop wanting to kill Israelis, and that allowing Palestinians a state would bring unacceptable dangers for Israelis.

Both of these views developed over many decades of conflict, broken deals, and lost opportunities. But they really crystallized during what's called the second intifada , in the early s. Palestinians, outraged that the Oslo Peace Process had failed to bring peace and had seemingly institutionalized the occupation, staged mass protests. Both sides blame one another for the Palestinian protests and Israeli crackdowns that escalated into horrible violence, including Palestinian terrorist attacks and brutal Israeli military assaults.

When it was over, roughly 3, Palestinians and 1, Israelis had been killed. Palestinian youth throw stones at an Israeli tank in , during the second intifada. Ever since, Israelis have generally believed that peace is desirable but not workable because Palestinians would reject it in favor of violence.

Palestinians, who have seen the smothering force of the occupation greatly deepen since the second intifada, and have seen Israeli settlements in the West Bank grow, increasingly believe that Israelis wish to make the occupation permanent. This does not mean that Israelis and Palestinians broadly hate one another or are racist against one another. The occupation-enforced separation does mean that even outside of the extremist fringes, misunderstanding runs deep and empathy does not.

And the rough history between Israelis and Palestinians has engendered a lot of distrust, but that's not hate. However, this antipathetic relationship does allow the truly hateful, the extremists, to fester on both sides and to exploit the broader mainstream's apathy toward the other side's needs.

There is a common trope, especially on the left, that the Israel-Palestine conflict would end overnight if only the US were not so unflinching in its support of Israel, and instead used its influence to bring the conflict to an end. There are two misconceptions here. The first is the premise: that the onus for the conflict and its perpetuation is entirely, percent on Israel. While it is true that Israel today has far more control over the conflict than do Palestinians, and thus bears more responsibility for its perpetuation, Palestinian groups are also plenty active in keeping the conflict going.

It is a canard to argue that the conflict would end if only Israel withdrew from it unilaterally, because without an agreement with the Palestinians, Israel couldn't magically get groups like Hamas to give up on the conflict. The main misconception, though, is the idea that the US is so unflinchingly pro-Israel, and such a crucial Israeli ally, that it is the de facto sponsor of the conflict, and thus could end the conflict by simply withdrawing its support for Israel.

This is wrong on several levels. First, Israel was already engaged in the conflict before it enjoyed so much US support; the two countries had a poor relationship up until , before which Israel's lack of close American support did not stop it from occupying the Palestinian territories.

Second, the US and Israel since are not nearly as close as you might think; they bicker frequently and spy on one another openly. During the Obama and George H. Bush administrations, they reached points of overt antagonism. Third, while the US does provide Israel with an awful lot of military, financial, and diplomatic support, Israel has proven over and over again that this aid does not buy much real leverage on Israel-Palestine conflict issues.

Fourth, when the US has overtly pressured Israel on the conflict, as Obama did during his first term, Israel's response has often been to defy the US by doing the opposite of what is asked. There is a common view in the United States, on both the right and the left, that the US government gives Israel so much support because it loves and supports Israel's role in the conflict.

On the right, the view is that this policy is correct; on the left, the view is that it is a mistake and a result of pro-Israel lobbying or other distorting forces.

Both sides are wrong: the US position has long been and remains that supporting Israel is the only way to nudge the Israelis to the negotiating table, and to make democratically elected Israeli leaders feel politically secure enough that they will take the necessary risks for peace. This is the same reason the US gives heavy financial and political support to the Palestinian Authority. There is a valid case to be made that the high level of American support for Israel does, to some extent, enable its policies in the conflict.

There is also a valid case, though, that withdrawing American support would make Israelis and their leaders feel more threatened and isolated, thus empowering anti-peace politics and making peace that much less likely. Either way, it is not the case that American support for Israel is so overwhelmingly decisive that switching it off would end the conflict. There's a popular view among Americans that Palestinians have rejected nonviolent resistance, and that if only they took up the lessons of nonviolent Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi, then that would bring the conflict to an end.

Logically, this is a confusing argument. It assumes that Israel is driving the conflict, as the British did by colonizing India, while simultaneously putting the onus for ending it on Palestinians. It also conveniently overlooks, as Westerners often do, the fact that Gandhi was an outlier. Most colonial-era independence leaders to some extent endorsed violence, including South Africa's Nelson Mandela.

More fundamentally, though, this is wrong because there are lots of Palestinians who have used, and continue to use, nonviolence to organize against the Israeli occupation. They consistently fail, because they are ignored, because they're put down by Israeli security forces, or because they lose momentum against the overwhelming force of the occupation itself.

Don't take my word for it: watch a nonviolent Palestinian campaign unfold, and mostly fail, right before your eyes in the award-winning documentary Five Broken Cameras , filmed by a Palestinian man as his village tried to stop Israel from building a wall that would cut off villagers from their olive groves.

Palestinians attempted nonviolence en masse in the late s and early '90s, during which the first intifada uprising challenged the occupation using protests, strikes, and other mass demonstrations. The first intifada did also include Palestinian violence against Israelis, though, and in the early s Palestinians launched the second intifada, which was defined by widespread violence, including terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians.

A common variation of this argument is to acknowledge that some Palestinians are nonviolent but point out that other Palestinians are violent, and conclude that Palestinian nonviolence won't be effective until all Palestinians adopt it. There is a degree of merit to this — Hamas is indeed a large and very violent Palestinian movement, among others, and violence speaks much more loudly than the nonviolence it can drown out — but it makes some fundamental mistakes.

First of all, British India had violent independence movements as well as Gandhi's nonviolence, so clearly violence does not cancel out nonviolence. Second, were all Palestinian violence suddenly to cease, there is no indication that the conflict would magically resolve. Observers often point out that Gazan leaders chose violence, and they got a full Israeli withdrawal in , but West Bank leaders have chosen peaceful compromise, and their reward has been ever-expanding settlements and occupation.

None of this, to be clear, is to argue that Palestinian violent resistance works or is commendable. It does not and is not. The Gaza-based militant group Hamas, by launching rockets and other attacks at Israelis, has only deepened the isolation and suffering of Gazans.

The second intifada left Palestinians much worse off than they were before it began. The point is that nonviolent resistance is certainly commendable and important, but no matter how many Palestinian Gandhis emerge, that is not enough on its own to end the conflict.

There is a pleasant fiction in the United States and parts of Israel that the Israel-Palestine conflict exists in a sort of suspended animation, on pause and simply awaiting diplomatic resolution.

But the truth is that the conflict never really goes away for most of the 12 million people in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Part of this misconception, Duss says, is that there are "only so many stories to write about, 'occupation now entering 17,th day, remains horrible way to live.

Another factor is that after the second intifada of the early s, Israel built up huge walls around Gaza and West Bank communities, physically separating Palestinians from Israelis. While Israelis who live in the country's south are well aware of the rockets fired from Gaza into their communities, most Israelis live physically separated from the conflict, and that is the perspective Americans are more familiar with.

Tel Aviv feels like a peaceful, prosperous Mediterranean beach city, which it is. But less than an hour drive away are Palestinian towns in the West Bank where the conflict is absolutely palpable even in periods of "calm. In the West Bank, beyond the daily humiliations of Israeli military checkpoints, the occupation has severely constricted movement and trade.

The stifled economy is the easiest thing to measure, but many other aspects of Palestinian life suffer, as well. Periodically the situation will escalate so rapidly, with such relatively slight provocation, and to such a level of severity that the rest of us can't ignore what every Palestinian and many Israelis already know: the conflict may be quieter some days than it is on others, but it is still active, still destroying lives and communities, and still scarring these two societies every day.

The status quo of the Israel-Palestine conflict is bad for everyone, but it is especially bad for Palestinians, who are under a suffocating blockade in Gaza and military occupation in the West Bank.

They do not have a state or full rights, while Israelis have both. And the longer the conflict drags on, the tougher it will be to change that. So you can see why some might think that all Israelis want this to happen and want the conflict to drag on forever or to end it by permanently expelling or subjugating Palestinians — but when you look at how Israel makes decisions, and what Israeli voters want, it becomes pretty clear that this is not the case.

As is true of any country, especially a parliamentary democracy, Israel's actions are less the result of a single calculated strategy than they are about messy internal politics, short-term thinking, and strategic drift.

Take, as a micro example, Israel's approach to Gaza since Hamas took over in Israel has invaded or launched extended bombing campaigns in Gaza every few years; this costs many Israeli lives, in addition to the much higher Palestinian death toll, and it never actually solves the underlying problems. The changes and differences, however, do not end there.

According to estimates, approximately one-fifth — or up to , Jews were living in Jerusalem — the newly-declared capital of the nascent state. Outside of Jerusalem, Jews were widely dispersed across Mandate Palestine. Approximately half of the remaining , Jews living in the country — , people — lived in the Tel Aviv area.

Tel Aviv itself was established in It was an administrative backwater of the rapidly crumbling Ottoman Empire, which ruled the region for years and did barely anything to develop it.

By the end of Ottoman rule, there were several thousand living in Jerusalem, and as for the rest — for the most part, they were widely dispersed — mostly in villages and small towns — throughout Judea and Samaria and the Galilee. During the Ottoman period, most lived as tenant farmers in a somewhat feudal system with landowners, but some lived in towns such as Gaza, Hebron, Haifa and elsewhere. At the end of the 19th century there were stirrings of Arab nationalism, which included wealthier Palestinian Arabs urging Turkish authorities not to allow Jewish refugees and pioneers from settling in the country.

One of the most vexing questions — or issues — today, is the notion that somehow all Palestinian Arabs were unceremoniously expelled from their land — or at the very least denied appropriate remuneration for it. That is simply not the case. It was only in that the Ottomans had passed a law allowing foreigners to buy land in the empire u nder the tanzimat reforms, which were a belated and somewhat half-hearted attempt at permitting people to feel part of the state by giving them rights.

By , the Ottomans began banning land purchases by Jews and Christians, also declaring that Jews were still permitted to immigrate to the Ottoman Empire — but with the exception of Palestine.

As with so many functions of Turkish rule, official declarations made in Constantinople, were much diluted when it came to Palestine. The legal path to Jewish acquisition of land in Palestine remained open, and the Yishuv made the most of the opportunity. Arabs were willing to sell to wealthy Jews — such as Moses Montefiore or Baron Edmond de Rothschild — often at inflated prices. The Jewish National Fund was also able to purchase large tracts of land from the Ottomans and much of this was utilized by an enduring legacy of the Second Aliyah ; namely the kibbutz movement.

The records for those who would wish to open their eyes to see them are clear. In the late s, the British developed Haifa as a deep-sea port, attempting to take advantage of the oil found in Persia prior to the outbreak of World War I.

It seems ironic now that the Arab Revolt between — a violent nationalist Palestinian Arab uprising, in part to protest growing Jewish immigration — led to the development of Tel Aviv as a port. The use of Jaffa was considered too precarious, and an effort to effect systemic change in the country, not for the first time, backfired massively on those it was intended to help.

The civic society of the Jewish part of Mandate Palestine, known as the Yishuv, included functioning quasi-governmental institutions. Other imperial powers also discussed the fate of Yishuv, particularly in April in the Italian town of San Remo. Britain, France, Italy and Japan convened to discuss the division of the land that had been held by the Ottoman Empire.

Palestinian Arabs were infuriated that as a result of this, the Jews would have a national home in Palestine. Their response — as was so often the case — and in a pattern that has repeated for more than a century — was to react with violence. The British government hoped that the formal declaration—known thereafter as the Balfour Declaration —would encourage support for the Allies in World War I.

Arabs vehemently opposed the Balfour Declaration, concerned that a Jewish homeland would mean the subjugation of Arab Palestinians. The complex hostility between the two groups dates all the way back to ancient times when they both populated the area and deemed it holy.

Both Jews and Muslims consider the city of Jerusalem sacred. In the late 19th and early 20th century, an organized religious and political movement known as Zionism emerged among Jews. Zionists wanted to reestablish a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Massive numbers of Jews immigrated to the ancient holy land and built settlements. Between and , about 35, Jews relocated to Palestine. Another 40, settled in the area between and Many Jews living in Europe and elsewhere, fearing persecution during the Nazi reign , found refuge in Palestine and embraced Zionism.

Arabs in Palestine resisted the Zionism movement, and tensions between the two groups continue. An Arab nationalist movement developed as a result. The United Nations approved a plan to partition Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state in , but the Arabs rejected it. In May , Israel was officially declared an independent state with David Ben-Gurion , the head of the Jewish Agency, as the prime minister.

While this historic event seemed to be a victory for Jews, it also marked the beginning of more violence with the Arabs. Following the announcement of an independent Israel, five Arab nations—Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria , and Lebanon—immediately invaded the region in what became known as the Arab-Israeli War. Civil war broke out throughout all of Israel, but a cease-fire agreement was reached in As part of the temporary armistice agreement, the West Bank became part of Jordan, and the Gaza Strip became Egyptian territory.

Numerous wars and acts of violence between Arabs and Jews have ensued since the Arab-Israeli War. Some of these include:. Clashes between Israelis and Palestinians are still commonplace. Key territories of land are divided, but some are claimed by both groups. For instance, they both cite Jerusalem as their capital.

Both groups blame each other for terror attacks that kill civilians. Several countries have pushed for more peace agreements in recent years. Many have suggested a two-state solution but acknowledge that Israelis and Palestinians are unlikely to settle on borders.