Introduction

The origins and causes of the Arab-Israeli conflict have been the subject of much debate. Some have argued that religion is at its heart, seeing the contest for Palestine as an extension of the religious wars over Jerusalem in previous centuries and the Arab-Israeli wars as a continuation of the dispute between the Prophet Muhammad and the Jews of Medina.

self-determination

The idea that each national group has the right to establish its own national state. It is most often associated with the tenets of Wilsonian internationalism and became a key driving force in the struggle to end imperialism.

anti-Semitism

A word which appeared in Europe around 1860. With it, the attack on Jews was based no longer on grounds of creed but on those of race. Its manifestations include pogroms in nineteenth­century Eastern Europe and the systematic murder of an estimated six million Jews by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945.

While there is some validity to all these arguments, this chapter will argue that the causes of the conflict were the product of distinct historical developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: European anti-Semitism and the rise of Zionism, the emergence of Arab nationalism and the quest for Arab independence, the Ottoman defeat in the First World War, the British mandate in Palestine, and the Second World War and the Holocaust. Thus it was not religious antagonism, fanaticism or colonial policy which pitted Arabs and Jews against each other, but, above all, competing national projects, laying claim to the same territory and resources. Arab nationalism and Zionism almost inevitably

Arab nationalism

The belief that all Arabic­speakers form a nation that should be independent and united.

mandates

The colonial territories of Germany and the Ottoman Empire that were entrusted to Britain, France, Japan, Australia and South Africa under the supervision of a League of Nations Commission.

Holocaust

The systematic mass murder of six million European Jews by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945.

Zionism

Movement for the re­establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Theodor Herzl is conventionally seen as the founding father of political Zionism based on his 1896 book Der Judenstaat.

found themselves embroiled in a bitter struggle for land and self-determination which came to be known as the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Aliyah (Hebrew: Ascent)

The wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine and, later, to Israel.