Palestine and Israel - Timeline

Introduction

Some of the main themes are:

• Israelis are in great danger from the Palestinians. In fact the Israelis have the third largest armed forces in the world, with advanced military hardware, while the Palestinians' weapons range from stones to automatic weapons, with a few simple rockets that very rarely inflict any real damage. [3]
• Israelis are 'murdered' by Palestinians. Palestinians are 'caught in the crossfire'.
• A bomb attack by Palestinians in Israel is widely reported, with TV images being shown repeatedly. A bomb attack by Israel on Palestinians is barely mentioned, if at all. This gives the impression that the Israelis are suffering more.

  According to the Israeli human rights organisation, B'Tselem, between the start of Second Intifada (uprising) on 29 September 2000 and the end of March 2006, 3,445 Israelis were killed by Palestinians and 998 Israelis were killed by Palestinians. If we compare minors, 685 Palestinian children were killed by the Israeli military and 119 Israeli children by Palestinians. [4]

• The Palestinians are just a bunch of terrorists. No mention is made of the Jewish terrorist campaign against the British and Palestinians between 1939 and 1948.
• Israel wants peace with the Palestinians and its generous offers have been rebuffed at every turn. See below for Barak's 'generous' offer in 2000.

Timeline

1914

With the outbreak of World War I, Britain promised the independence of Arab lands under Ottoman rule, including Palestine, in return for Arab support against Turkey which had entered the war on the side of Germany. [5]

1916

Britain and France signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided the Arab region into zones of influence. Lebanon and Syria were assigned to France, Jordan and Iraq to Britain and Palestine was to be internationalized.

1917-1918

Aided by the Arabs, the British captured Palestine from the Ottoman Turks. The Arabs revolted against the Turks because the British had promised them, in correspondence with Shareef Husein ibn Ali of Mecca, the independence of their countries after the war. Britain, however, also made other, conflicting commitments in the secret Sykes-Picot agreement with France and Russia (1916), in which it promised to divide and rule the region with its allies. In a third agreement, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Britain promised the Jews a Jewish "national home" in Palestine.

1918

After WW I ended, Jews began to migrate to Palestine, which was set aside as a British mandate with the approval of the League of Nations in 1922. Large-scale Jewish settlement and extensive Zionist agricultural and industrial enterprises in Palestine began during the British mandatory period, which lasted until 1948. (Zionism is the political movement and ideology that supports a Jewish homeland in the "Promised Land". [6])

1919

The Palestinians convened their first National Conference and expressed their opposition to the Balfour Declaration.

1920

The San Remo Conference granted Britain a mandate over Palestine. and two years later Palestine was effectively under British administration. Sir Herbert Samuel, a declared Zionist, was sent as Britain's first High Commissioner to Palestine.

1922

The Council of the League of Nations issued a Mandate for Palestine.

1929

Large-scale attacks on Jews by Arabs rocked Jerusalem. Palestinians killed 133 Jews and suffered 116 deaths, sparked by a dispute over use of the Western Wall of Al-Aqsa Mosque. But the roots of the conflict lay deeper in Arab fears of the Zionist movement which aimed to make at least part of British-administered Palestine a Jewish state.

1936

The Palestinians held a six-month General Strike to protest against the confiscation of land and Jewish immigration.

1937

The Peel Commission, headed by Lord Robert Peel, issued a report. Basically, the commission concluded, the mandate in Palestine was unworkable. There was no hope of any cooperative national entity there that included both Arabs and Jews. The commission went on to recommend the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a neutral sacred-site state to be administered by Britain.

1939

The British government published a White Paper restricting Jewish immigration and offering independence for Palestine within ten years. This was rejected by the Zionists, who then organized terrorist groups and launched a bloody campaign against the British and the Palestinians.

1944-1948

After the assassination of a British minister, Jewish terrorist groups such as the Stern gang intensified the violence against the British occupiers and the Arab population, using techniques such as nail bombs in Arab markets and the bomb attack in the King David hotel in Jerusalem killing 91 people, including fellow Jews. [7] After 1945 large numbers of Jewish refugees made their way to Palestine, although the British attempted to restrict immigration.

1947

In December the UN passed resolution 181 giving the Jewish population (33% of the total population) 55% of the British mandate of Palestine. The Zionist leaders mostly accepted the partition, but the Arab League was against the establishment of a Jewish colony on their lands. In a fascinating essay by King Abdullah of Jordan in November 1947, he asks why after the tragedy of the holocaust that Jews suffered during World War II, America and Europe are refusing to accept more than a token handful of Jewish immigrants and refugees. It is unfair, he argues, to make Palestine, which is innocent of anti-Semitism, pay for the crimes of Europe. [8]

09 April 1948

Early in the morning commandos of the Irgun (headed by future Prime Minister Menachem Begin) and the Stern Gang attacked Deir Yassin, a village with about 750 Palestinian residents. In all over 100 men, women, and children were systematically murdered. [9]. This was done deliberately to terrorise the Palestinians and to cause them to flee.

“Menachem Begin said "The massacre was not only justified, but there would not have been a state of Israel without the victory at Deir Yassin." Unashamed of their deed and unaffected by world condemnation, the Zionist forces, using loud-speakers, roamed the streets of cities warning Arab inhabitants "The Jericho road is still open," they told Jerusalem Arabs "Fly from Jerusalem before you are killed, like those in Deir Yassin."” [10]

May 1948

After the withdrawal of the British from Palestine, the Jews declared the state of Israel. The state of Israel calls itself a 'Jewish democracy' although the inherent contradiction between a state based on ethnicity and democracy should be obvious. By the same logic one might call Germany under Hitler an 'Aryan democracy'. Although there are elections and a relatively free press (arguably much more free than the press in the US), the Israeli propaganda about 'the only democracy in the Middle East' is demonstrably misleading. [11]

May 1948

The Israelis purchased arms with financial help from American Jews, fought the invading Arab forces and used terror tactics to gain as much territory as possible.

1949

After the armistice Israel had expanded its territory to 78% of Palestine, and around 750,000 Palestinians had fled their homes. [12] Although Israeli propaganda often states that the Arab population was ordered to leave by radio, or by local leaders, research has disproved this. [13]

1956

David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, said in an interview: “Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?” [14]

1967

On May 23, Egypt closed the straits of Tiran, thus blockading the Israeli port of Eilat. Although a blockade in normally considered an act of war, international law also requires a state's reaction to be proportional. The massing of Egypt's troops in the Sinai was understood at the time by Israel to be a gesture and it was obvious that Egypt was not really ready for war. The 'Six-Day War' began on June 5 when the Israeli Air Force destroyed the Egyptian Air Force on the ground. Israeli ground forces quickly occupied the Sinai, meeting little opposition from retreating Egyptian forces. After Jordan, bound by a military alliance to Egypt, attacked, the West Bank was captured by Israel, and the Golan Heights were taken from Syria. On June 8, the USS Liberty was sunk by the Israelis. [15]

1967-

From 1967 Israeli influence on the US began to grow and the US aid to Israel increased dramatically. Gradually the Jewish Lobby came to occupy a key role in US foreign policy in the Middle East. More recently the Christian Right and right-wing Jewish leaders in the US have worked more closely together. [16]

In a recent paper, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt write: “For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread 'democracy' throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state?” [17]

The paper has resulted in an orchestrated smear campaign against the authors, accusing them of exaggerating the Israel Lobby's influence and including the traditional accusation of anti-semitism. Strangely enough, AIPAC ("American Israel Public Affairs Committee: America's pro-Israel Lobby", according to its web site) boasts on its web site that “The New York Times has called AIPAC the most important organization affecting America's relationship with Israel, while Fortune magazine has consistently ranked AIPAC among America's most powerful interest groups.” [18]

1973

In an unexpected attack, Egypt and Syria invaded territory occupied by Israel since 1967. Israel suffered heavy losses although after the cease-fire they had gained ground against Syria and a beach-head across the Suez canal. A large Egyptian army was trapped in the Sinai without water or supplies. The US used this fact to exert pressure on the Israelis not to destroy the Egyptian forces and so replaced Soviet influence in Egypt with American influence.

17 September 1978

The Camp David peace agreement is signed under which Israel agrees to return the Sinai to Egypt. The Gaza Strip remains in Israeli hands.

06 June 1982

Backed by the US, Israel invaded Lebanon on pretexts later shown to consist of deceit and exaggeration. [19] Tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians were slaughtered and Beirut was repeatedly bombed. The Palestine Liberation Organisation was forced to leave the country. On Thursday 16 September, truckloads of Christian Lebanese Phalange and Haddad troops, the Christian militia, armed to the teeth by the Israelis, entered the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps, which had been sealed off by the Israelis. The massacre that followed shocked the world. [20] In Israel, demonstrations led to an inquiry in which Ariel Sharon, as Defence Minister, was held personally responsible for the massacres.

1983

By 1983 there were an estimated 100,000 settlers in illegal colonies on Palestinian land in the territories occupied in 1967.

June 1985

Worn down by the brave resistance of the Hezbollah fighters to Israel's brutal occupation of Lebanon, Israel withdrew from Lebanon into a so-called security zone in southern Libanon. Later Hezbollah would be declared a terrorist organisation by the US, despite the fact that it had done nothing more than resist occupation and had never committed any attacks outside Israel or Lebanon.

1986

After 19 years of occupation the First Intifada (Uprising) begins. The reaction of the Israeli Defence Force grew increasingly brutal and the soldiers, like the French before them in Algeria, became more and more dehumanised, despite Israeli propaganda about 'the world's most humane army'.

1986

Mordechai Vanunu revealed that Israel had developed nuclear weapons. Most estimates put their number today at around 200-300. [21]

1989

Early in 1989, Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Defense Minster at that time, ordered his soldiers to break the bones of Palestinians in order to bring the Palestinian Intifada to an end. [22] Few of the horrible stories of soldiers crushing the bones of Palestinians were televised. One report, that shocked the conscience of the whole world was filmed by the CNN network and broadcasted in the USA and Europe. This film showed Israeli soldiers trying to crush the arms of two detained Palestinian youths using huge rocks. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that "23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada." Nearly a third of them were aged ten or under.

1993

In the Oslo accords the PLO agreed to recognize Israel and give up violence. In return the Israelis agreed on a degree of autonomy for some parts of the Occupied Territories. This ended the First Intifada. Important issues were not resolved, such as the right of return of Palestinian refugees specified in the UN resolution 194. [23] Israel was totally opposed to this, even though any Jewish person in the world had the right to emigrate to Israel, and even a group of Peruvian Indian has been converted to Judaism and admitted to Israel as immigrants. [24]

1993

The population of the exclusively Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, illegal under international law, had risen from around 100,000 in 1983 to around 250,000. Some of the settlers are racist Jewish Americans who have fanatical beliefs and aim to ethnically cleanse the Occupied Territories of the Palestinians. [25] Others are attracted by the financial advantages of living in the settlements. [26]

18 April 1996

Israel shells a UN refugee camp in Qana, Lebanon, killing around 100 civilians. [27]

1996

Yasser Arafat was elected president of the PA (Palestinian Authority). He did very little for his people while his cronies profited from corruption and lived in luxury. [28]

June 2000

Israel finally withdrew from the 'security zone' in Southern Lebanon. Israel still occupies Shebaa Farms, claiming that it was part of Syria that it annexed in 1967. Lebanon and Syria dispute this, considering it part of Lebanon.

July 2000

At Camp David, Bill Clinton, the out-going US president, invited Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak for talks about a peace agreement. According to Israeli propaganda, “Israel offered the Palestinians what they had long claimed to have desired, an independent Palestinian state. They rejected the offer and have conducted a premeditated war of terror that has taken the lives of more than 600 Israelis and maimed hundreds more, mostly civilians.” [29]

The truth was very different. The Palestinians had already accepted that Israel should keep 78% of Palestine, but the 'generous' offer wanted to divide the remaining 22% up into Bantustans divided by Israeli areas, leaving the Palestinians with 80% of the Occupied Territories with Israeli control of internal and external borders. This is freedom for the Palestinians in the sense that prisoners are 'free' in their cells.

28 September 2000

After Ariel Sharon, accompanied by 1000 troops, visited the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, one of the holiest Moslem sites, the Palestinians reacted by starting the Second Intifada. It seems that Ariel Sharon deliberately provoked the Palestinians in order to wreck the Oslo accords, and to portray himself as the strong leader who could save the Israelis from the 'violent' Palestinians. In this he succeeded, and he became Prime Minister in March 2001.

2001-

Israeli brutality in the Occupied Territories [30] degenerates into something similar to the Nazi tactics during the Second World War.

As Norman Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors put it, “The Portuguese Nobel laureate in literature, Jose Saramago, invoked the "spirit of Auschwitz" in depicting the horrors inflicted by Israel, while a Belgian parliamentarian avowed that Israel was "making a concentration camp out of the West Bank." (The Observer, 7 April 2002). Israelis across the political spectrum recoil in outrage at such comparisons. Yet, if Israelis don't want to stand accused of being Nazis they should simply stop acting like Nazis.” [31]

The dehumanisation of Israeli soldiers increases. [32]

2001

Chris Hedges wrote in his Gaza Diary: “Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered – death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo – but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.” [33]

March-May 2002

The Israeli military attacked Ramallah and Jenin, killing an unknown number of Palestinian civilians. [34] In Ramallah the Israelis attempted to destroy the culture of the Palestinians. [35]

June 2002

Construction of the Apartheid Wall begins with the confiscation of land and the uprooting of trees in northern Jenin district, as the population of Jenin, and throughout the West Bank – which is still under curfew – tries to recover from the massacres and attacks of the previous months. [36]

16 March 2003

Rachel Corrie was murdered by the Israelis while protecting Palestinians from house demolitions. [37]

March 2003

An editorial in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz began; “Two-and-a-half years of intense fighting against Palestinian terrorism have turned the Israel Defense Forces into an obdurate and callous army, focused on its mission out of an indifference to the consequences of its actions. The IDF, which brought up generations of soldiers on the myth of purity of arms and educated its commanders with the idea of the moral, deliberating soldier, who takes tough decisions, while thinking of humane considerations, is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet shocking.” [38]

2004

The population of the exclusively Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, illegal under international law, had risen from around 250,000 in 1993 to around 420,000.

September 2005

Israel withdraws from the Gaza Strip, removing the 8,000 settlers who had occupied 25% of the land in the world's most crowded territory, leaving the nearly 1.4 million Palestinians in a concentration camp roughly 40km by 9km.

2006

Israel, the 16th richest country on the planet, will in 2006 receive $2.5 billion in aid from the US. The total for 1949-2006 is just under $100 billion, according to the Jewish Virtual Library. [39]

“This number is too low because it omits "hidden" funds. It omits money from the DOD budget on the grounds that those funds are for research and development projects that benefit both the United States and Israel – a questionable premise. The total also excludes estimated interest on the early disbursement of aid. Israeli officials are fond of saying that Israel has never defaulted on a loan from the United States. While this is technically true, the CRS (Congressional Research Service) report states that from FY 1994 through FY 1998, Israel received $29 billion in waived loans. It is, therefore, reasonable to consider all loans to Israel as generally the same as grants.” – U.S. Tax Dollars at Work: Calculating Foreign Aid to Israel by Shirl McArthur. [40]

January 2006

Hamas won the election in Palestine. The US and Europe called on Hamas to 'renounce violence'. No one called on the Israelis to renounce violence, as if the brutal occupation, the expansion of the illegal settlements and the building of the apartheid wall do not constitute aggression. Although Hamas refuses to recognize Israel, it has offered a long-term truce. [41]

“While they are being stomped, shot, beaten, demolished, assassinated, intimidated, robbed, despoiled, starved, uprooted, dispossessed, harassed, insulted and killed with bullets, missiles, armored bulldozers, tanks, helicopter gun-ships, cluster-bombs, fleshettes, fighter-bombers, semi-automatic submachine guns, sonic booms, tear gas, electrified fences, blockades, closures and walls, they must renounce violence so that the hoodlums won't get hurt. If they defend themselves they lose. If they complain, they are insincere; if they ask for something in return, they are untrustworthy; if they ask for a fair hearing, they are advancing an "agenda"; if they hit back randomly, they are an instrument of terror.” – Jennifer Loewenstein. [42]

March 2006

In late 2002 a study revealed very high levels of dietary deficiency among the Palestinian population in Gaza. The study found that 17.5% of children aged 6-59 months suffered from chronic malnutrition. By March 2006 the situation in the Gaza Strip has become desperate for the Palestinians.

“David Shearer of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OCHA) stated, "What we were warning before was that stocks (of wheat) were getting low. Today we are saying stocks are gone, and the end point has been reached." Israel has closed Gaza's commercial lifeline, the Al-Minter Crossing, these past 50 days in peak harvest time, preventing the export of goods and stopping the import of bread supplies. 3,594 MT of wheat flour contracted to local mills did not enter. Now there is no bread and the 70% of Palestinians living below the poverty line have no food. This barbarity one does not expect from the people who cried for protection from fascist forces when they were under siege.” – William A. Cook. [43]

Notes

[1]	Palestine and Israel/Media Coverage
[2]	Palestine and Israel/Israeli propaganda
[3]	For a comparison of the two sides, see Strategic Balance - Israel vs Palestine: A comparison of the military resources of the parties in the conflict.
[4]	Statistics - Fatalities from B'Tselem.
[5]	The timeline from 1914-1939 has been extracted from A Brief History of Palestine by Esam Shashaa.
[6]	Zionism
[7]	Timeline of Zionist Terror from a UN committee, 01 October 1948.
[8]	As the Arabs see the Jews by His Majesty King Abdullah, November 1947.
[9]	Deir Yassin Remembered
[10]	The massacre of Deir Yasin by Esam Shashaa.
[11]	Palestine and Israel/"The only democracy in the Middle East"
[12]	List of Palestinian Localities destroyed after the creation of the State of Israel (1948) by Christoph Uehlinger.
[13]	What Happened to Palestine? The Revisionists Revisited by Michael Palumbo, September – October 1990.
[14]	The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, 23 March 2006.
[15]	Palestine and Israel/The Israeli attack on the USS Liberty.
[16]	Palestine and Israel/The American connection.
[17]	The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, 23 March 2006.
[18]	Who we are from AIPAC. [The page has been removed. An archive version is available from the Wayback Machine]
[19]	According to former chief of Israeli military intelligence Yehoshafat Harkabi, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon was accompanied by deceit at the highest political levels. Harkarbi cites misleading statements to the cabinet by Ariel Sharon and Begin, inaccurate announcements by Israel's military spokesmen and the Likud government's gross exaggeration of terrorist acts conducted from Lebanon.
[20]	The Israeli invasion of Lebanon 1982 by John Rose, 1986.
[21]	Palestine and Israel/Weapons of Mass Destruction
[22]	According to the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim in his book The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.
[23]	UN Resolution 194 from Wikipedia.
[24]	How 90 Peruvians became the latest Jewish settlers by Neri Livneh, 07 August 2002, in the Guardian.
[25]	'That weasel word' by Omayma Abdel-Latif, 10 April 2002.
[26]	Palestine and Israel/The illegal settlements
[27]	Middle East/Lebanon
[28]	Leader cannot escape the scorn of his own people by Robert Fisk, 17 May 2002.
[29]	Myths - Barak's Generous Offer.
[30]	Palestine and Israel/The situation in the Occupied Territories
[31]	First the Carrot, Then the Stick: Behind the Carnage in Palestine by Norman G. Finkelstein, 14 April 2002.
[32]	Hebron Diaries by Aviv Lavie, 17 June 2004; Hatred, brutality and murder consume the rotten soul of Israel's military by Greg Felton, 15 October 2004.
[33]	A Gaza Diary: Scenes from the Palestinian uprising
[34]	Palestine and Israel/Israeli attack on Jenin and Ramallah March-May 2002
[35]	Myths - The Israeli army was not to blame for any damage to Palestinian libraries or cultural institution.
[36]	Timeline of the Apartheid Wall and The Resistance Against It from Stop The War
[37]	Rachel Corrie.
[38]	Unbridled force, Ha'aretz, March 2003.
[39]	U.S. Assistance to Israel (FY1949 - FY2006) from the Jewish Virtual Library.
[40]	U.S. Tax Dollars at Work: Calculating Foreign Aid to Israel by Shirl McArthur, 27 November 2000.
[41]	Palestine and Israel/Hamas
[42]	Watching the Dissolution of Palestine by Jennifer Loewenstein, 24 February 2006.
[43]	Israeli Human Rights: Starve the Palestinians by William A. Cook, 21 March 2006.