MERIP
Middle East Research and Information Project
Middle East Report
Middle East Report Online
Newspaper Op-Eds

MiddleEastDesk.org
Press Room
Background
Contact Info
Subscribe
Back Issues
Internships
Giving
Search
Subscribe Online to
Middle East Report

Order a subscription and back issues to the award-winning magazine Middle East Report.

Click here for the order page.

SPECIAL PUBLICATIONS

Report of the Task Force for a Responsible Withdrawal from Iraq June 2008 [Click to view PDF]

Primer on Palestine, Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Click here (PDF)

[Click here for HTML version]

 

 

 

 

Palestine, Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict
A Primer

Back to Table of Contents

The June 1967 War

After 1949, although there was an armistice between Israel and the Arab states, the conflict continued and the region remained imperiled by the prospect of another war. This was fueled by an escalating arms race as countries built up their military caches and prepared their forces (and their populations) for a future showdown. In 1956, Israel joined with Britain and France to attack Egypt, ostensibly to reverse the Egyptian government's nationalization of the Suez Canal (then under French and British control). Israeli forces captured Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, but were forced to evacuate back to the armistice lines as a result of UN pressure led by the US and the Soviet Union (in an uncharacteristic show of cooperation to avert further conflict in the Middle East). By the early 1960s, however, the region was becoming a hot spot of Cold War rivalry as the US and the Soviet Union were competing with one another for global power and influence.

In the spring of 1967, the Soviet Union misinformed the Syrian government that Israeli forces were massing in northern Israel to attack Syria. There was no such Israeli mobilization. But clashes between Israel and Syria had been escalating for about a year, and Israeli leaders had publicly declared that it might be necessary to bring down the Syrian regime if it failed to end Palestinian commando attacks against Israel from Syrian territory.

Responding to a Syrian request for assistance, in May 1967 Egyptian troops entered the Sinai Peninsula bordering Israel. A few days later, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel-Nasser asked the UN observer forces stationed between Israel and Egypt to evacuate their positions. The Egyptians then occupied Sharm al-Shaykh at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula and proclaimed a blockade of the Israeli port of Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba, arguing that access to Eilat was through Egyptian territorial waters. These measures shocked and frightened the Israeli public, which believed it was in danger of annihilation.

As the military and diplomatic crisis continued, on June 5, 1967 Israel preemptively attacked Egypt and Syria, destroying their air forces on the ground within a few hours. Jordan joined in the fighting belatedly, and consequently was attacked by Israel as well. The Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies were decisively defeated, and Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

The 1967 war, which lasted only six days, established Israel as the dominant regional military power. The speed and thoroughness of Israel's victory discredited the Arab regimes. In contrast, the Palestinian national movement emerged as a major actor after 1967 in the form of the political and military groups that made up the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO -- click here for more information).

Page 7 | The Occupied Territories
Jerusalem

Back to Table of Contents

DonateNow

Search MERIP

MERIP OP-EDS

Western Sahara Poser for UN
 Reuters (Africa Blog)
 April 28, 2009
Jacob Mundy

Morocco serves as the backdrop for such Hollywood blockbusters as Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and Body of Lies. The country’s breathtaking landscapes and gritty urban neighbourhoods are the perfect setting for Hollywood’s imagination.

Unbeknown to most filmgoers, however, is that Morocco is embroiled in one of Africa’s oldest conflicts - the dispute over Western Sahara. This month the UN Security Council is expected to take up the dispute once more, providing US President Barack Obama with an opportunity to assert genuine leadership in resolving this conflict. But there’s no sign that the new administration is paying adequate attention. Full Story>>

Letters, He Gets Letters
 Bitter Lemons International
March 26, 2009
Chris Toensing

Shortly before assuming office, President Barack Obama was handed a missive signed by such Washington luminaries as ex-national security advisers Zbigniew Brezezinski and Brent Scowcroft, urging him to “explore the possibility” of direct contact with Hamas. One month after he entered the White House, Obama received an epistle from Ahmad Yousef, a Gaza-based spokesman for the Islamist movement, making the same recommendation. “There can be no peace without Hamas,” Yousef told the New York Times when asked about the letter's contents. “We congratulated Mr. Obama on his presidency and reminded him that he should live up to his promise to bring real change to the region.”

There is no word, as yet, on how the foreign policy doyens' message was received, but Yousef's occasioned a huffy US rebuke of the UN Relief Works Agency, whose top official in Gaza, Karen Abu Zayd, passed the letter to Sen. John Kerry while he was visiting the devastated territory in mid-February. Even a single sealed envelope, it seems, creates the appearance that the Obama administration is breaking with the US vow, enunciated first under President George W. Bush, not to speak with Hamas until it agrees to renounce violence, abide by previous Palestinian agreements with Israel and recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Full Story>>

Elections Are Key to Darfur Crisis
 The Montreal Gazette
March 7, 2009
Khalid Medani

It has been quite a week. For the first time, the international community indicted a sitting president of a sovereign state. Omar al-Bashir of Sudan stands accused by the International Criminal Court in The Hague of "crimes against humanity and war crimes" committed in the course of the Khartoum regime's brutal suppression of the revolt in the country's far western province of Darfur. Having indicted two other figures associated with the regime in 2007, ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo began building a case against the man at the top, and on Wednesday, the court issued a warrant for Bashir's arrest. Full Story>>

Out of the Rubble
The National
January 23, 2009
Mouin Rabbani

Speaking to his people on January 18, hours after Hamas responded to Israel’s unilateral suspension of hostilities with a conditional ceasefire of its own, the deposed Palestinian Authority prime minister Ismail Haniyeh devoted several passages of his prepared text to the subject of Palestinian national reconciliation. For perhaps the first time since Hamas’s June 2007 seizure of power in the Gaza Strip, an Islamist leader broached the topic of healing the Palestinian divide without mentioning Mahmoud Abbas by name.

At a press conference the following day convened by Abu Ubaida, the spokesperson of the Martyr Izz al Din al Qassam Brigades, the Hamas military wing, the movement went one step further. “The Resistance”, Abu Ubaida intoned, “is the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”. Full Story>>

The Horrors of Israel's Peace
Al Ahram Weekly
January 22-28, 2009
Samera Esmeir

Three weeks after the war on Gaza, Israel declared a unilateral ceasefire but refused to terminate its so-called defensive operations. In response, Hamas declared a ceasefire for one week, until the withdrawal of Israeli troops has been completed. For many in the West, the ceasefire might seem like an occasion to celebrate, for the cessation of military hostilities on both sides will perhaps renew the peace process. But there are reasons to be critical of this ceasefire, since it continues the situation in which Israel acts unilaterally. What we are actually witnessing is a new phase of the catastrophe in Gaza. While the characteristics of this phase are not yet known, Israel's violence has become ever more evident. And perhaps this is why Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert did not mention the word "peace" once in the speech he gave to announce the ceasefire. The "peace process" might soon be revealed as the other side of the coin to war -- its continuation by other means -- that simultaneously feeds it. Full Story>>

A Battleground for the Foreseeable Future
Bitter Lemons International
September 11, 2008
Chris Toensing

Bob Woodward’s four books chronicling the wars of President George W. Bush are sensitive barometers of conventional wisdom in Washington. Whereas the first volume, published in 2002 at the height of the self-righteous nationalism gripping the capital after the September 11, 2001 attacks, hailed Bush’s self-confidence in acting to protect the homeland, the 2008 installment depicts the same man as cocksure and incurious. This much is not news. More educational are Woodward’s hints about the worldviews that will outlast this unpopular administration, embedded in the organs of the national security state. Full Story>>

Egypt Stifles Debate in the United States
 Northwest Arkansas Times
 August 27, 2008
Bayann Hamid

The Egyptian regime has once again succeeded in stifling freedom of speech, this time not in Egypt, but in the US. Earlier this month, an Egyptian court convicted a prominent Egyptian-American activist for his outspoken criticism of the regime’s poor human rights record in American public fora. The court accused Saad Eddin Ibrahim, of "tarnishing Egypt's image" abroad. The conviction referred primarily to writings he published in the foreign press; most notably among them an August 2007 op-ed in the Washington Post in which he criticized Egypt's human rights record and questioned the reasons behind US aid to Egypt. Full Story>>

Want to Fight Terrorism? Think Globally, Act Locally
 Globe and Mail (Toronto),
 August 4, 2008
Khalid Mustafa Medani

Militant Islam is under global scrutiny for clues to conditions that foster its rise, and to strategies for reversing that growth. But the key is not in Islamic doctrine, US foreign policy or formal ties to various nations, as many analysts have asserted. It lies at the community level, with clan and local leaders. Full Story>>

Iraq’s Kurds Have to Choose
 Globe and Mail (Toronto)
 July 30, 2008
Joost Hiltermann

Kurdish parties have become kingmakers in Baghdad , and they know it. As no federal government can work without them, they are pulling every available political lever to expand the territory and resources they control, trying to build the foundation of an independent Kurdish state. But even more than territory, they need security. If everyone acts quickly and wisely, that understanding could help resolve one of the Iraq war’s thorniest issues. Full Story>>

Exiting Iraq Is Easier Than They Say
 The Nation (web-only)
 July 16, 2008
Chris Toensing

The debate over the war in Iraq follows a yellowing script: The minute someone suggests that the US move to withdraw its troops, war supporters cry “Havoc!” True to form, when no less a figure than Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki stated he wants a timeline for a US pullout, John McCain summoned the specter of dire consequences. “I’ve always said we’ll come home with honor and with victory and not through a set timetable,” McCain said. In his major foreign policy speech on July 15, Barack Obama affirmed his support for a withdrawal timetable, adding that the US must “get out as carefully as we were careless getting in.” Obama’s position is the correct one, but he, like many other war critics, has done too little to counter the refrain that withdrawal is simply “cutting and running,” a recipe for disaster. Full Story>>
  Home | Contact/Intern | Background Info | Middle East Report | MER Online | Newspaper Op-Eds | Giving
Copyright © MERIP. All rights reserved.