MERIP Primer on the Uprising in Palestine

The Conflict over Palestine

At the start of the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire ruled much of the Arab world, including the territory that is now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. With the Allied victory in World War I, the area came under the control of the British who made contradictory promises to Arab and Zionist leaders about how--and by whom--the Mandate of Palestine was to be governed. At the time, 90 percent of the population was Arab; the Jewish community included long-time residents and new immigrants fleeing persecution in Russia and, later, other parts of Europe. A three-year uprising in the late 1930s against British rule and increased Jewish immigration resulted in a British proposal to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. UN General Assembly Resolution 181 reaffirmed partition in 1947.

The war that followed led to the establishment of the State of Israel. Part of the area that was designated for the Palestinian state was conquered by Israel, leading to the displacement of some 750,000 Palestinians. Gaza came under the control of Egypt, while Transjordan occupied and later illegally annexed the West Bank. Less than 20 years later, in the June 1967 war, Israel gained control of the rest of the former Mandate of Palestine (the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed in 1980), the Egyptian Sinai (since returned to Egypt), and the Syrian Golan Heights. UN Security Council Resolution 242 (November 22, 1967), still not implemented, affirmed "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war" and called upon Israel to withdraw "from territories occupied in the recent conflict." The 1970s and 1980s saw Arab-Israeli wars in 1973 and 1982, the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada in December 1987, and Yasser Arafat's condemnation of terrorism and recognition of the state of Israel in December 1988.

The Madrid peace conference followed the Gulf war in October 1991. A year later, secret Israeli-Palestinian talks began in Oslo, Norway, culminating in the September 1993 Declaration of Principles (DoP) on interim Palestinian self-government, signed by Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The DoP set out a process for transforming the nature of the Israeli occupation but left numerous issues unresolved, including the status of Jerusalem, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, the disposition of Israeli settlements (whose expansion continues until today) and final borders between Israel and a Palestinian state.

Under the DoP, Israel relinquished day-to-day authority over parts of the Gaza Strip and West Bank to the Palestinian Authority, headed by Arafat who returned to Gaza in 1994. However, ultimate power remained with Israel, which exercised its control by frequently sealing off the Palestinian-governed areas from the rest of the Occupied Territories and from Israel. Subsequent agreements in 1995 (Oslo II), 1998 (Wye River) and 1999 (Wye River II) failed to resolve these issues. With Palestinian-Israeli negotiations stalled, US President Bill Clinton called a summit at Camp David in July 2000. After two weeks of intensive negotiation, the talks ended without a deal.

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