When was palestine formed

Once you see the truth about a few widely held misconceptions, the conflict starts to make a lot more sense. This is, in many ways, the Israel-Palestine misconception from which all other Israel-Palestine misconceptions flow: that the conflict is an impossibly complicated mess so far beyond human untangling or comprehension that we should not really try. It's true that Israel-Palestine is complicated, but it's not that complicated you can get the full primer here.

At its most basic level, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is over who gets what land and how that land is controlled. Yes, there are some very thorny details — how to divide the city of Jerusalem, for example — but the list of such details is not impossibly long. And while these issues can be extremely difficult to resolve, grasping them is not.

There are three main reasons the conflict can feel much more complicated than it actually is. First, it's been going on for several decades, which is a long time. That means hashing out any one detail means reciting through lots of history; while it can be tough to remember all that information, this does not make the issues inherently impossible to understand or resolve. Second, each side has a very different narrative of the conflict, what's happened, what matters, and who bears what responsibilities.

So you'll hear a lot of contradictory information, which can be confusing and exhausting; this effect is compounded by the fact that American public discourse also splits between the two narratives. But having two versions of history is not at all unusual in big conflicts, and it does not actually make the reality of what's happened somehow beyond human understanding.

In both tellings, the conclusion is the same: you shouldn't think too hard or read too much about what's happening. This is a sadly effective way to shut down conversation; it make people want to ignore the other side's legitimate positions, ignore their own preferred side's abuses, or simply check out altogether.

The effect of all this, by the way, is to yield the conversation to the most vehement partisans, which is one of several reasons why that conversation is so toxic. It also helps serve the status quo of perpetual conflict, which is great news for extremists on both sides that want to see the conflict end through total military victory over the other.

So consider it your civic duty as a citizen of the world to ignore the naysayers who insist you could never possibly understand this conflict — you can. It is true that Israelis are mostly Jewish and Palestinians are mostly Muslim, but religion is pretty low on the list of direct drivers of the conflict. This is not, despite what your grade school teacher may have suggested, a clash between Judaism and Islam over religious differences.

It's a clash between nationalities — Israeli and Palestinian — over secular issues of land and nationhood. The European Jews who first encouraged and organized mass Jewish migration to what we now call Israel, in the late s and early s, were mostly secular Jews. Their movement, Zionism, treated Jews primarily as a nationality — like the French or Chinese — in addition to a religious group.

While a number of Israelis are religiously observant, especially on the political right, the larger movement that created Israel was and remains primarily secular. Initial Palestinian armed movements were largely secular, as well.

They were not, despite common misconceptions, Islamic extremists; they were Palestinian nationalists not unlike the Irish Republican Army were Irish nationalists. Some early groups were even officially communist. It is true that more recent groups such as Hamas , which formed in , espouse Islamism. But beneath their language of jihad is, in significant part, the same nationalist drive of previous groups. There is one aspect of the conflict with a more overt religious dimension: Jerusalem.

The long-divided city has, in its ancient center, Islam's third holiest site the al-Aqsa mosque compound located physically on top of the much older Temple Mount, the Western Wall of which is Judaism's holiest site. That means both Israelis and Palestinians want access to the same area for religious reasons. There is a similar, smaller dispute over the West Bank city of Hebron.

But the dispute overJerusalem is, in practice, still experienced more as a political than a religious issue. This is by far the most common, and the most clearly wrong, of the Israel-Palestine misconceptions. It's so common that even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cited it, joking that the conflict has been going on for so long that it makes the year-old British-Irish conflict look positively young.

But here's the thing: the Israel-Palestine conflict is a very modern phenomenon. It didn't really formally begin until , or at the earliest you might say in the early s. That's still a very long conflict, but it's about years at most, significantly less than the 3, years you hear people cite. This gets to a bigger misconception: that the conflict is between Jews and Muslims over religion.

In fact, those two religious groups have been coexisting in the region, for the most part peacefully, since Islam was first born in the seventh century. The conflict did not really begin until the early 20th century, as thousands of Jews left Europe to escape persecution and establish a homeland in what is today Israel-Palestine it was Ottoman Palestine until , when it came under British control.

Communal violence between Jews and Arabs escalated into a crisis, and in the UN proposed splitting the land into a state for Jews Israel and a state for Arabs Palestine. Regional Arab leaders saw the plan as European colonial theft and invaded to keep Palestine unified. The Israeli forces won, but they pushed well beyond the UN-designated borders to claim land that was to have been part of Palestine, including the western half of Jerusalem. They also uprooted and expelled entire Palestinian communities, creating about , refugees — the status of these refugees and their descendants is still a major component of the conflict today.

The war ended with Israel roughly controlling the territory that you will see marked on today's maps as "Israel. In Israel fought another war with its neighbors, during which it militarily occupied the West Bank and Gaza.

Today, the West Bank is still occupied including eastern Jerusalem , Gaza is under military blockade, Jerusalem is officially divided between east and west, and there are 7 million Palestinian refugees.

Palestinians still don't have a sovereign, independent state. Those are the very basics of the conflict. As you can see, it's not ancient at all, and it's not really primarily about religion. It's about a century old at most, and it's predominantly about national self-determination.

There are actually two misconceptions behind the idea that Europe created Israel to apologize for the Holocaust. The first is that Europe created Israel, and thus that Israel is an extension of European colonialism. The second is that Israel's creation was a response to the Holocaust.

Both have elements of truth but are, on balance, not correct descriptions of Israel's founding. First, Israel was not a creation of European colonialism: Israel's creation was in large part the work of Jews who moved to present-day Israel, despite European efforts to stop them, and who dragged the world into accepting them as a state.

It is true that in , Britain issued its famous Balfour Declaration promising the Jews a homeland in British-controlled Palestine as long as this did not undercut the rights of non-Jews there. But in the s, as Jewish immigration and Jewish-Arab tension increased, the British tried to sharply limit Jewish immigration into the area, forcing many Jews into refugee camps in Cyprus and elsewhere. Jews smuggled in large numbers of illegal immigrants in the s; Jewish militias that formed to fight Arabs also conducted violent operations against the British, whom they saw as an enemy.

This was not, in other words, a European-Jewish joint project at all. The United Nations did come around to creating a Jewish state with its plan for partitioning Palestine, but that was in large part a reaction to the chaos and communal violence in British Palestine, which the UN hoped to solve by dividing the territory. And of the 33 countries that voted for the resolution, only 12 were European; 13 yes votes came from Latin and Caribbean countries.

Thirteen countries voted against it. To be fair, it is definitely true that the UN ignored Arab and Palestinian objections to the plan, in a way that left them disenfranchised and feeling, with reason, that their land had been taken from them without their consent.

But the point is that it was not a European or Western conspiracy. The last British troops in what had been the British Mandate of Palestine lower their flag in Haifa harbor in June Second, Israel's creation was not just a response to the Holocaust: While it is true that Holocaust galvanized global public opinion in support of Jews, and accelerated Jewish immigration to Israel, it is also true that all the factors that led to the creation of Israel were already well in place before the Holocaust happened.

There were centuries of European anti-Semitism, a strongly felt Zionist movement among Jews, many thousands of Jewish immigrants in Palestine, and an international campaign to generate diplomatic support. In some ways, the Holocaust depressed Jewish immigration, because Nazi governments largely forbade it and because it left Europe with so many fewer Jews to emigrate.

The question of how big a role the Holocaust played in leading up to Israel's creation is debated among scholars, but the point is that it was by no means, despite the widespread misconception, the only significant impetus for Israel's creation.

You hear variations of this argument from partisans to the conflict who argue that the other side has an insufficient claim to the land because their nationality is made up. The pro-Palestinian argument is that Israelis are actually European Jews who trumped up the idea of an Israeli identity in order to steal land, but who actually belong in Europe and need to go back.

The pro-Israeli argument is that Palestinians are just Arabs who trumped up the idea of a Palestinian identity in order to claim land they weren't fully using, but who should instead be absorbed into the neighboring Arab states of Jordan and Egypt.

There is obviously a real degree of racism implicit in both of these arguments, and both arguments fundamentally ignore the actual experiences of Israelis and Palestinians. Israelis are in Israel, and not in Europe, in significant part because Europe spent centuries violently rejecting them as not European. They had little choice but to adopt a distinct national identity, which they began doing in the s.

This movement became Zionism. In recent history, the area called Palestine includes the territories of the present-day Israel and Jordan see the map. From to most of this area remained under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. On November 2, , the British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour issued the Balfour Declaration for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people".

Thus, Jordan covers the majority of the land of Palestine under British Mandate. Jordan also includes the majority of the Arabs who lived there. In other words, Jordan is the Arab portion of Palestine. In , the modern Republic of Turkey that is the successor of the Ottoman Empire , signed the Lausanne Treaty agreeing to transfer territories including Palestine to the control of the British Empire.

Under the British rule, the residents of Palestine were called "Palestinians". Since Palestine included both modern day Israel and Jordan, both Arab and Jewish residents of this area were referred to as "Palestinians". It was only after the Jews re-inhabited their historic homeland of Judea and Samaria, after the Six-Day War, that the myth of an Arab Palestinian nation was created and marketed worldwide.

In documents not more than hundred years, the area is described as a scarcely populated region. Jews by far were the majority in Jerusalem over the small Arab minority.

Until the Oslo agreement, the major source of income for Arab residents was employment in the Israeli sector. To this day, many Arabs try to migrate into Israel with various deceptions to become a citizen of Israel. Following Palestinian legislative elections of , the Quartet conditioned assistance to the PA on its commitment to nonviolence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements. After an armed takeover of Gaza by Hamas in , Israel imposed a blockade. The Annapolis process of failed to yield a permanent status agreement.

The UN Security Council adopted resolution The PA programme to build State institutions received wide international support. A new round of negotiations in broke down following the expiration of the Israeli settlement moratorium. Exploratory Israeli-Palestinian talks were held in early in Amman. In November another cycle of violence between Israel and Gaza concluded with an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire.

A new round of negotiations begun in was suspended by Israel in April following the announcement of a Palestinian national consensus Government. Another round of fighting between Israel and Gaza took place in July-August In the Security Council adopted resolution on settlements. The General Assembly adopted a resolution granting to Palestine the status of non-member observer State in the United Nations.

The vote was for, 9 against, with 41 abstentions. The Peace Process of the s. Subscribe to our mailing list. Sign-up to get UN updates, incoming events straight to your inbox.