The conflict’s history and how it is perceived by its protagonists and their external constituencies has a deep and abiding impact on its significance and its evolving outcomes.
The protagonists may be grouped into two forces powerfully divided by ideology, politics, and divergent interpretations of history. Each side, however, includes external parties and constituencies whose involvement in the conflict and whose objectives vary considerably.
From 1922-47, the primary protagonists were Palestinian Arabs, both Muslims and Christians, and Palestinian Jews, as well as Jewish immigrants, who subsequently became Israelis. Since 1948, the primary protagonists are the Israelis and the Palestinians. The identification of these primary protagonists is not, however, without complicating factors. Both have external constituencies whose allegiance is either divided or multiplied.
There are Palestinian Arabs who remained in Israel after that state declared its independence in 1948 and who became Israeli citizens. They generally consider themselves Palestinians, and Israel treats them in some respects as such, but they are nonetheless Israelis. There are also large numbers of Palestinian Arabs who left Palestine between October 1947 and May 1948 and who became part of a Palestinian diaspora. They have since spread out throughout the world and have acquired different nationalities.
There is also a large population of Jews who have experienced their own diaspora, both as understood as a key element of Jewish identity and history and as being directly bound to recent history and the terrible experience of the Holocaust and who have different nationalities. They, too, have divided or multiple allegiances.
For many Jews who are nationals of different countries, Israel is a nation of enormous symbolic and political import. For Palestinians in and outside Palestine, and for Jews in and outside of Israel, there exists a similar link between these two respective communities. But the strength of these respective links is not the same, and the result is an asymmetry of forces between them, which is overwhelmingly weighted in favor of the Jews and against the Palestinians.
The latter’s tragedy is that there is no force and no system of law to redress this imbalance.The external constituencies for both sides have varied over the conflict’s evolution. As the conflict between the Palestinian Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine evolved during the British mandate period (1922-47), its external constituencies played a significant role. On the Palestinian side, the external constituency consisted of some Arab states characterized by varying degrees of interest and involvement. Ultimately, the Arab states were of no help to the Palestinians. They were divided between those nations known as “the confrontation states”— Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, and to some extent Iraq—and other states that are members of the League of Arab States and whose support for the Palestinians has generally been marginal. During each military conflict, these states have been defeated by Israel, and at all times, they were politically outmaneuvered by it. Thus, they were ineffective in their support for Palestinians. Even this marginal support ended with peace treaties being signed between Egypt and Israel in 1979 and Jordan and Israel in 1994, and the de facto state of peace, or at least a state of no war, between Syria and Lebanon and Israel.
The external constituency for the Palestinian Jews consisted originally of the world Zionist movement whose effectiveness grew over the years, especially after WWII. The degree of Zionist and other internationalJewish community support for, at first, the Yishuv (the organizedJewish community in Palestine), and then for the State of Israel, varied from country to country, and it also varied as to the type and quality of involvement and support provided by these international Jewish communities to Israel.
But it was in the United States that support for the political aspirations of the Jewish nation grew significantly. It started at the end of WWII and was exhibited in the United States’ support for the 1947 United Nations General Assembly Partition Plan and its near-immediate recognition of the State of Israel. Over time, the involvement and support of the American Jewish community and its ability to marshal political support for Israel through a powerful pro-Israel lobby became an important factor that helped transform the United States into an external constituency of Israel.
Geo-strategic considerations played a role in America’s support for the Jewish state. That was clearly the case during the Cold War and in the wake of the 1967 war when Israel was perceived as a central ally in America’s drive to dismantle the Soviet influence in the Middle East.Since 1948, the imbalance between the interests ofthe Palestinians and the State of Israel has been heightened by the general exclusion of the Palestinians from the political arenas where their fate has been decided. Responsibility for representing Palestinian interests originally fell on relatively ineffective Arab states. When Palestinians assumed their proper role in representing their own interests, they lacked the force and capability of effectively achieving their goals. This situation was exacerbated by the absence of an Arab lobby in the United States capable of balancing the Israeli lobby. While Arab states have only themselves to blame for this lack of symmetry, they instead criticize Israel and its supporters for being so effective.
The United States has always been an indispensable party to the peace process, even while remaining a staunch ally and supporter of Israel. It was an honest broker in the 1978 Camp David Accords, the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, the Madrid Conference of 1991, and the 1994 Jordan-Israel Peace Treaty. However, with respect to the Palestinians, the United States has consistently been less than even-handed.
Since 1967, there has been a new and growing external constituency in this conflict, namely, the global Muslim community. In general, Muslims identify with and support the Palestinian cause, and view Israel as a threat to Muslim Holy Sites in Jerusalem. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has come to condition inter-Arab and intra-Arab politics and is extending to almost all Muslim countries of the world, feeding into the growing populist Islamic nationalism.
The Muslims’ antagonism toward Israel is sometimes traced to the days of Prophet Muhammad and historical conflicts with the Jewish tribes of Yathrib (near Medina, now in Saudi Arabia).
These tribes had signed a peace treaty with the Muslims who had migrated from Mecca to Medina, and then betrayed the Muslims at a time of high vulnerability. This story provides a powerful textual support for a common perception among Muslims that Jews are untrustworthy. While Jews and Muslims have a long history of mutual acceptance, classic tales of this type are commonly overlaid onto the nationalistic conflict between Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs and are used to interpret Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. These and other factors help fuel religious antagonism between Muslims and Jews. The role and influence of Muslim fundamentalists have exacerbated the situation by introducing an intransigent religious dimension into the conflict, matched only by that of extremist fundamentalists among Jews in Israel and elsewhere.Islamic nationalism brings into the region countries historically outside of it, like Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The latter two have respectively fallen under the control and influence of the United States, but there exists military resistance in Afghanistan and popular opposition in Pakistan. Iran is a target of U.S. regime-change policy, but that is not likely to occur, and it would be folly for the United States to try to do there what it did in Iraq. Both Iran’s army and people would fail to be easy conquests, and the United States knows that.
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