The Israeli military air strikes on Hamas sites in Gaza on August 21, 2021 was a grim reminder of the systematic oppression and institutional discrimination of Palestinians under Israeli Military Occupation (IMO) in Palestinian territory. This Israeli military air strikes on Hamas facilities, according to Deutsche Welle (DW) and Aljazeera, followed clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian protesters during the commemoration of the burning of Jerusalem’s Al-Alqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam, on August 21, 1959. The reports on the incident showed dozens of people wounded, including a 13-year-old Palestinian boy, who was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier, and a 21-year-old Israeli sniper was also shot by a Palestinian protester.
Based on a value free account of the rights of Palestinians under IMO, I beg to put aside the biblical narrative of the progenital divisiveness of Ishmael and Isaac, the sons of Hagar and Sarah, respectively, in Abraham’s household, for which some people have flaunted the protracted Israel-Palestine conflict. Thematically, this conflict has essentially been about “Settlement Zones” in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), which was again triggered in April and May, 2021 by disagreements between some Palestinian Arab families and a few Jewish Israeli settlers over the rightful ownership of lands that were to be ceded to Jewish Israelis.
Given the ongoing Israeli settlement policy, which was founded on the demographic goals of the 1950 Law of Return, the Jewish citizens of other countries are guaranteed the right to settle in Israel or the OPT. The Law of Return, as enshrined in the historic mandate of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), was established in 1897 to achieve the goal of Jewish immigration (i.e. Aliyah in Hebrew) to Israel or the OPT. In addition, the 1952 Citizenship Law provides automatic Israeli citizenship to Jewish returnees from other countries, as well as arrangements for free flight and a bunch of perks to encourage Jews around the world to return to Israel or the OPT. Whereas, in the case of Palestinians, the same Law prohibits them from returning to Israel or the OPT from the United Nations (UN) organized camps in neighbouring countries, after they have been expelled from their homes, since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War by the might of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).
Having lived through these long decades of violations of the rights of Palestinians, the Palestinians violently reacted to a new turn of events that unfolded in April, 2021, after a video footage showed a dramatic threat of eviction of a Palestinian Arab family from a land that was granted them by the Jordanian government. Several Palestinians had occupied this land as refugees after they were displaced from Palestinian territory by the IDF during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which established the state of Israel. It was, however, reported that some Jewish families had earlier filed a lawsuit claiming they also lost lands during the 1948 war. These Jewish families intended to reclaim the lands in the OPT, based on Israeli law, for which a prove of pre-1948 title is required to allow Jewish families to reclaim ownership of Jerusalem properties after the IDF successfully captured East Jerusalem from Jordanian forces in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Consequently, several Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Israelis were angered by the possibilities that Israeli court may rule against dozens of vulnerable Palestinian families, who reside in the majority-Arab East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah. The dread of eviction of these vulnerable Palestinian families from their homes by Israeli court, and granting them to Jewish Israeli settlers was simply the cause of the 11-day violent confrontation between the Israelis and Palestinians in April-May 2021. Moreover, this confrontation, unfortunately, resulted in volleys of rockets fired into Israeli civilian territory by Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades—the armed wing of Hamas, causing 12 Israeli deaths. In retaliation to the guerrilla attack by this Palestinian armed group, the IDF engaged in overkill or disproportionate bombardments of Gaza, causing about 248 Palestinian deaths, including 66 children and 39 women. These mutual assured attacks from both sides remain unacceptable, with specific reference to Israel as a sovereign state, whose accession and ratification of the 1949 Geneva Convention IV on Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War on December 8, 1949 and July 6, 1951, respectively, violates the provisions of “laws of war.”
To be specific, of course, land occupation has been the foremost cause of this perennial conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Historically, the politics of land occupation in Palestine and its surrounding environments has long been shaped by colonial expansion, which dates back to 11th century Crusade, when the Roman Church captured Palestine during the many expeditions by Christians to capture the “Holy Land” from the Muslims. This followed several other Crusades, up to the ninth, though, failed to achieve the mission of the Roman Church to unite the Christians Church that had fractured into East-West Schism before Salâh al-Dîn Yûsuf ibn Ayyûb (Saladin), a Sunni Muslim of Kurdish origin, defeated the Crusaders and established a Sultanate over Egypt, Syria, and some other parts of the Middle East. Before Saladin captured Palestine and Jerusalem from the Crusaders in the Battle of Hattin in 12 AD, majority of the Palestinian inhabitants were Christians. Saladin converted many of them to Muslims and extended his control of Palestine to the Mamluk Sultanate before the Ottomans took charge in 1516.
Later, the Ottoman Empire or the Turkish Empire ruled over Palestine during the 16th and 17th centuries by an alliance of local dynasties on behalf of the Ottoman Emperor before the rise of Zionism in the region. The upsurge of Zionism in the region was, perhaps, the consequence of the declining power of the Ottomans by a major intrusion of political control of the southern Mediterranean coast by Britain and France. By the last part of 19th century, there was a significant Zionist migration to the Ottoman Syria, which included Palestine. In 1860, the first Jewish neighbourhood (Mishkernot Sha’ananim) was built outside the Old City of Jerusalem. Subsequently, this historic Jewish migration began to gain momentum in Western political space in form of a historical justification for territorial reclamation by the Israelis—a theological proclamation of their sacred connection to the “Holy Land.” The first Congress for Jewish migration to the “Holy Land” was held in Basel in 1897. Then in 1917, a letter written by the British Secretary of State, Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, who was a member of the British Jewish community, shows British incontrovertible support for a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. The British government thus considered the Jewish needs as greater importance than the rights of Palestinians that were already living in Palestine. Between 1922 and 1923, the Sykes-Picot Agreement was signed by Britain and France, and the thrust of the Agreement excluded Arabs’ interest for an independent state, and granted the British the mandate to govern Palestine, which was formerly ruled by the Ottomans before their defeat in First World War (1914-1918).
Peradventure, most of the British policies of divide and rule in Palestine supported Jewish migration, with which they, in any case, resulted in the Arab Revolt for independence in 1936-9, following the killing of Muhammad al-Qassam, a Muslim activist. When it then became obvious that there can’t be a harmonious relationship between the Jewish population and the Palestinians in the Middle East, the British Palestine Royal Commission led by Lord William Peel sought a “two-state solution” that would flag the establishment of an independent state of Palestine. Based on this Resolution, the World Zionist Organization (WZO) established a surreptitious Jewish military formation, and recruited young Israelis, who were funded and trained on the mission to develop and maintain the state of Israel in Palestinian territory. In 1947, the UN turned up a Partition Plan that paved way for Jewish settlement in Palestinian territory. This mission was to develop and maintain the state of Israel in Palestine, which therefore manifested in the First Arab-Israeli War in 1948. The 1948 war was perceived by the Arabs as a traumatic experience of persecution, displacement, occupation, repression and suppression of Palestinians in their territory. Etymologically, this traumatic experience was dubbed the “Nakba” by the Arabs, which means “catastrophic” destruction of Palestinian societies and homeland by the conspiracy of Western powers in 1948, as millions of Palestinians were coldly condemned to refugee camps. This horrific experience can, as well, be exemplified by the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, where at least 107 Palestinian Arabs were killed by roughly 130 fighters from the far-right wing Zionist paramilitary groups.
Furthermore, tension mounted between the Arabs and Israelis between 1948 and 1956, which explicatively illustrates a surrogate theatre for Soviet-American “Cold War” antagonism, where US sided with Israel, and USSR supported Arab demands. In the midst of this tension, the Second Arab-Israeli War (Suez Crisis) broke out on October 29, 1956, with a coalition of the British, French, and Israeli troops on the offensive (tripartite aggression) against Egypt over the nationalization of the Suez Canal by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. As a result of the Suez Crisis, the United Nations (UN) established the United Nation Emergency Force (UNEF) to police the Egyptian-Israeli border. Immediately after UNEF was withdrawn from Egyptian territory and in Gaza in May-June, 1967 at the request of the Egyptian government, the Six-Day War (the Third Arab-Israeli War) broke out on June 5, 1967, with the rezoning of the Middle East by the IDF. After the 1967 war, Israel gained full control of more Arab lands, such as the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and Golan Height from Syria.
- Sule is a Middle East diplomacy analyst and PhD Student, Dept. of Public Administration, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria.
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