Enemies and Neighbors summary

The 1930s was a decade of great change. At its start, the Jewish population was still under a fifth of the total. By 1936, this number had doubled. A lot of that had to do with the trouble brewing in Europe, with many Jews fleeing persecution.

Everything was becoming more urgent for the Yishuv while at the same time it was becoming apparent that the Arab population was at a disadvantage. The Zionist movement had funding and expert legal maneuvering that made it hard for the Arabs to gain traction. When efforts to set up an Arab national land fund failed, the resentment hardened into activism.

When the Second World War ended, Britain was exhausted and eager to withdraw from the region. So it handed the problem over to the newly formed United Nations, who, in 1947, voted to partition the area into Jewish and Arab states. The plan led to chaos and collapse.

The vote was celebrated by Jews who saw it as long-delayed recognition of their national home. By Arabs, it was considered a betrayal. They rejected the idea that foreign powers could give away their own country. Within hours of the UN vote, violence broke out: Jewish buses ambushed, Arab workers massacred, retaliations spiraled in every direction.

After 1949, Palestine was unrecognizable. Israel was a newborn state while hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were scattered, bewildered and dispossessed, across neighboring lands that were largely unwelcoming.

Israel made its position clear almost immediately: the refugees would not return. The United Nations disagreed. Resolution 194, passed in December 1948, insisted on the refugees’ right to return or to receive compensation – but Israel brushed it aside.

While the PLO offered more organized representation, it was far from unified. Arafat kept Fatah at arm’s length in his desire to operate independently and more aggressively. By 1965, Fatah’s fedayeen were staging small raids, adding to the tension in the area and raising questions as to whether the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and neighboring nations would hold.

That friction caught fire in 1967, leading to the Six-Day War. It was, once again, a war that would reshape everything. Israel’s preemptive air strikes gutted Egypt’s air force within hours, and swift ground offensives rolled through Sinai and Gaza, took the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and seized the Golan Heights from Syria. In mere days Israel had more than tripled its territory and came to rule over roughly 1.1 million Palestinians. For Palestinians it was a naksa – a staggering setback that produced another wave of displacement.

Arab pride reached new heights in 1974, when Yasir Arafat made a historic speech at the United Nations, offering Israel both “the gun and the olive branch,” and leaving it up to them to choose. As the PLO’s program kept the rhetoric of armed resistance it was quietly opening the door to diplomacy. It was a tactical compromise, but it also ran the danger of splitting the movement.

Peace talks stalled through much of the ’80s as the IDF pushed Arafat into exile in Tunis. And yet, the PLO’s political infrastructure inside the territories kept growing. A tighter, more local Palestinian movement was taking shape under occupation. By the end of 1987, that movement was ready to explode.

Founded in late 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Hamas blended nationalism with religion. Its charter portrayed the conflict as a holy struggle rather than a political one. It didn’t recognize Israel, and all of Palestine was considered an Islamic trust that could never be surrendered.

But while Hamas considered Arafat’s moderation a betrayal, the peace talks continued. As the 1990s began, anything seemed possible. The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union crumbled, and in 1991, US officials orchestrated an Israeli-Arab peace treaty summit in Madrid. For the first time, Palestinians sat across from Israelis at an international table – as equals.

As the new millenium got underway Palestinian leadership was in crisis. Yasser Arafat was in ill health and losing influence. In 2003, Mahmoud Abbas, another PLO leader, became prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, and he would become president when Arafat passed away in 2004.

But Abbas wasn’t very charismatic and proved unable to keep his party in power. It all fell apart in early 2006, when an international push for a new round of elections backfired in spectacular fashion. The world was demanding Palestinian democracy – and the world recoiled when Hamas soundly defeated the PLO establishment. Washington and Brussels responded by cutting off aid.