THE CONFLICT BETWEEN ISRAELI AND PALESTINE

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN ISRAELI AND PALESTINE

By : Putri Aries Safitri

The history of Israeli – Palestine Conflict, it can be conclude, that are : first, nor can lsrael's right to the land be demonstrated by reference to the Balfour Declaration (1917). For Palestine belonged to its inhabitants, not to the British Foreign Minister. Freedom from British colonial rule was certainly more of a right of the Palestinians in 1917 than of the British citizens of America in 1776. Assuming the right of peoples to self-determination, Arab Palestine was not for the British to give to the Zionists. In short, neither military force, God, a distant past, Lord Balfour, Hitler, nor Arab state acts may, by equal standards of international law, be called upon to demonstrate the rightfulness and legality of taking the land of Palestine from Moslem and Christian Arabs and giving it to Zionists from Europe and elsewhere. If the Zionist settlers (which excludes indigenous Palestinian Jews, whose claim to their land is beyond question) have a rightful claim to the territory, it can only be because they acquired it from the Palestinian Arabs in a just manner. Second, in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-1949 Arab forces (including the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq as well as Palestinian guerrillas) had expected an easy victory over the small and isolated Jewish state, but despite heavy casualties Israel won (The Carter Centre, 2002). Israel also increased the land under its control far beyond what it had been given by the partition plan. In the mid-1950s the Egyptian government began to support Palestinian guerrilla raids into Israel from the Gaza Strip. Egypt also refused to allow Israeli ships to use the Suez Canal and in 1951 blockaded the Strait of Tiran (Israel’s access to the Red Sea), which Israel regarded as an act of war. In June 1956 Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, which had been jointly owned by Britain and France. In late October, Israel invaded the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, defeating Egyptian forces there. Britain and France attacked Egypt a few days later. Although the fighting was brief and Israel eventually withdrew from the Sinai and Gaza, the conflict further exacerbated regional tensions (Aharoni, Ada 2002). The Arabs increasingly threw their support behind the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a political body that had been formed in 1964 to create a Palestinian state. Using terrorism, the PLO attacked Israel from their bases in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria; attacks by Palestinian Arabs came from within the Gaza Strip and West Bank as well. In 1967 Egypt, Syria, and Jordan massed their armies on Israel’s borders, and several Arab states called for war. Egypt demanded the withdrawal of UN observers from the Sinai Peninsula. Assuming the Arabs would attack Israel struck first, in June 1967, and caught the Arabs by surprise. In the Six-Day War that followed, Israel demolished the armies and air forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. It also gained control of the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights region of southwestern Syria, and all of Jerusalem. A second wave of Palestinian refugees fled the fighting, worsening the problem created by the first exodus in 1948. Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat reconstructed the Egyptian army in the early 1970s. Syria also prepared for war and received weapons from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Israel, in turn, fortified its forward positions and was supplied with weapons by the United States. The Arabs attacked in October 1973 on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, and caught Israel by surprise. Following the war, U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger negotiated a series of disengagement agreements with the warring parties (Shaul Cohen, 2009). It’s the history of the conflict between Israeli – Palestine that takes from the article.

The causes of the conflict between Israeli – Palestine Conflict, there are several factors, that are : first, the absence of Israeli military authority in Gaza caused another problem, namely rocket fire. Second, in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-1949 Arab forces had expected an easy victory over the small and isolated Jewish state, but despite heavy casualties Israel won. Israel also increased the land under its control far beyond what it had been given by the partition plan. Third, Netanyahu repeated this idea in his June 2009 speech at Bar-Ilan University says that, the simple truth is that the root of the conflict has been and remains the refusal to recognize the right of the Jewish People to its own state in its historical homeland. The last is, conflict between the Zionist project of colonizing Palestine and the indigenous people of that land, the Palestinian Arabs. In 1948 it became a conflict between Israel – the settler state that is a product of the Zionist colonization project – and the Palestinian Arab people. It’s the causes of the conflict between Israeli – Palestine that takes from the article.

From the references about Palestine territories, it can be conclude that. The Palestinian regions of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip were then, and remain today, very different and much less developed than Israel. The OPT comprises two physically separated land masses which are the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (figure 1). Their total area including the area of the Dead Sea reaches approximately 6221 km2 constituting around 23% of the total area of historic Palestine which is estimated at 27,000 km2. The Gaza Strip is a coastal zone located at the eastern extreme of the Mediterranean Sea and on the edge of the Sinai Desert. It covers an area of 362 km2 and is surrounded by Israel from the north and east, Egypt from the south and the Mediterranean Sea from the west. The West Bank, which occupies an area of 5856 km2 (including the Dead Sea area), is surrounded by Israel from the west, south and north, and the Jordan River from the east. It’s the Palestine territories that takes from the article.

The conclusion about Palestine economic condition are. The economy of the Gaza Strip just after 1948 was on the verge of collapse due to its isolation from the rest of Palestine and the influx of vast numbers of refugees. Having lost most of its cultivable land and many of its domestic trade links, the Strip's rural, agrarian sector could not absorb its massive population. Indeed, only 14 percent of all households in the Gaza Strip had land as a source of income compared to 42 percent in the West Bank, and a significant portion of this land (20-25 percent) was concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy families and was devoted to citrus production, Gaza's largest source of foreign exchange during this period. Agriculture was clearly the primary economic activity; industrial activity remained virtually undeveloped. Prior to 1967, the Gaza Strip had no large scale industrial enterprises and the industrial sector was characterized by small workshops engaged in the production of traditional crafts in addition to the processing of food products. The occupation of the Gaza Strip brought its economy into direct contact with that of Israel and represented the second major dislocation of the economy since 1948. Small, unorganized, and largely agricultural, the economy possessed few means to withstand the effects of a highly industrialized and technologically advanced economy such as Israel's. By 1967, the total GNP of the Gaza Strip and West Bank combined, equalled 2.6 percent of the Israeli GNP. During the years 1968-82, however, the Gaza Strip's GNP grew at a rate averaging about 9.7 percent per annum. In the first five years after occupation (1968-73), the economy attained a higher annual rate of growth owing to expanded income-generating opportunities inside Israel. After 1973, these rates decreased and fluctuated as Israel's economy moved into recession. External payments, of which salaries earned in Israel are a large part, contributed directly to the increases in GNP after 1967. Contributing only 2 percent to GNP in 1968, this factor rose to 31 percent in 1973 and 44 percent in 1984. This fact highlights the weakness of Gaza's internal economic base and its dependence on externally generated sources of income. Income derived from work outside Gaza (either in Israel or other Arab countries) grew by 9 percent per year in 1983 and 1984, a decrease from annual jumps of 16 percent in 1982 and 1983. Industry; General Features. The composition of the industrial sector (manufacturing and mining) has remained largely unchanged since before 1967 when it was highly undeveloped and productively limited. Low levels of investment by the Egyptian administration in favor of agriculture's clearly dominant position precluded capital accumulation within the industrial sector, thereby insuring the sector's stagnation. Contributing approximately 4.5 percent to GOP in 1966, industry continues to provide only a small percentage of Gaza's GOP (11.6 percent in 1984) despite early increases in the level of industrial output after 1967. It’s the Palestine economic condition that takes from the article.

The negotiations process that began in Madrid progressed slowly; at the beginning Israel sat opposite a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation and later faced Palestinian leaders from the Occupied Territories. But the most significant factor at negotiations - the one that pulled the strings - was the PLO, which did so from its headquarters in Tunis. With the election of a left-center government under Yitzhak Rabin in Israel in 1992, a new Israel-PLO channel opened; in 1993 it led to what became the Oslo Accords. Both sides devised political and economic arrangements; the latter took place in Paris between Israeli and PLO teams. They resulted in an economic agreement that nurtured great expectations. Both sides abandoned the “imposed” row in the scheme outlined in Diagram 1 and searched the “agreed” row for an arrangement that would either establish borders or be borderless (i.e., continue economic integration). In February 1993, while the Oslo channel was still a secret, the Rabin government appointed an Israeli “Economic Consulting Team to the Political Negotiations.” Headed by Professor Haim Ben-Shahar, the team presented its findings in July 1993, a short time before the signing of the Declaration of Principles (DoP) better known as the Oslo Accords. Its recommendations were based on the assumption that during the interim agreement (for at most five years): “The principle of integration between the economies will be preserved, and no economic borders will be established.” In September 1993, with the signing of the Oslo Accords between the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization, exclusive Israeli power over economic policy concerning the West Bank and the Gaza Strip ended. Paradoxically, just as the new economic regime with the declared objective of encouraging economic development was adopted, a serious economic crisis commenced which, in various ways, continues until today. The strategic decision not to choose between “One” and “Two” is partly responsible for the failure. Negotiations on the economic aspects of the Oslo Accords continued for six months after the Accords were signed. In April 1994, after agreeing to implement the DoP in Gaza and Jericho, “The Protocol on Economic Relations between the Government of Israel and the PLO Representing the Palestinian People” (briefly, the Paris Protocol) was signed in Paris. The following important declaration appears in the Preamble to the agreement: “The two parties view the economic domain as one of the cornerstones] in their mutual relations with a view to enhance their interest in the achievement of a just, lasting and comprehensive peace. Both parties shall cooperate in this field in order to establish a sound economic base for these relations, which will be governed in various economic spheres by the principles of mutual respect ... This protocol lays the groundwork for strengthening the economic base of the Palestinian side and for exercising its right of economic decision making in accordance with its own development plan and priorities.” After more than a quarter century the era of Israeli economic policy imposed on the Territories ended, at least according to the agreement. Further agreements in 1994 and 1995 gave the Palestinians autonomy over most aspects of life in the Gaza Strip and in urban areas of the West Bank through a new administrative body, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). Jordan and Israel signed a peace agreement in 1994. By the mid-1990s Israel had also achieved diplomatic relations with Arab countries in North Africa and the Persian Gulf. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli student opposed to the peace process. Under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the peace process stalled in 1997. Few survey studies conducted in the early years after Oslo Agreement, signed in September 1993, indicate that Palestinian identity had weakened and Israeli identity had strengthened among Palestinians in Israel.

The solution of Israeli – Palestine conflict that, are : On April 22, 2005, the Executive Council of Britain’s Association of University Teachers (AUT) voted to boycott two Israeli universities (Bar Ilan and Haifa). The boycott was advocated “as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel’s occupation, colonization and system of apartheid”, while the boycott’s main proponent stated that this action would increase pressure on the “illegitimate state of Israel.” No balance of power lasts forever. A genuine resolution of the conflict will become possible in the longer term, given a change in the present balance of power. It is impossible to foresee exactly how this change may come about. But it seems quite certain that it will not be confined to the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians, while all else remains as it is: it will necessarily involve tectonic movements in the entire region, as well as inter- national global shifts. Two interconnected and mutually reinforcing processes will be vital for changing the present balance of power. First, decline in American global dominance, and in particular in the ability of the US to go on backing Israeli regional hegemony without incurring unacceptable economic and political costs. Second, a radical-progressive social, economic and political transformation of the Arab. East, leading to a degree of unification of the Arab nation most likely in the form of regional federation.