This is the first of periodic articles that examine the resurgence of anti-Semitism globally, to an extent no one ever thought possible after the Holocaust.
The Israeli/ Palestine conflict is less a conflict over land than it is a war. At its core it is a religious war. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is treated as the basis for a larger war. This war, however, pre-dates the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Before 1948 Palestine was not a country. Britain, the colonial power over the territory of Palestine, proposed the division of the territory into a Jewish state and an Arab state because it decided that the two peoples could not live together in a single state.
The United Nations General Assembly (UN) voted in favour of a resolution creating the states of Palestine and Israel. The Arab states rejected the resolution because it meant that there would be a Jewish state next to Muslim Palestine.
The decision against partition was taken by the Arab world on behalf of the Palestinians who were not yet a people. The Jews in Palestine accepted statehood and declared independence.
At Israeli independence in 1948, the West Bank and East Jerusalem were occupied by Jordan, the Gaza Strip fell under Egyptian control, and the Golan Heights belonged to Syria.
Two major wars were launched by Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Iraq against Israel; these were classic wars as we understand the term. The publicly stated goal on both occasions was to occupy Israel thus ending the existence of a Jewish state.
As a result of the 1948 war Israel lost territory including East Jerusalem. It ended up with less land than it had at the start of the war. However, notwithstanding these losses, Israel was not defeated.
The armistice agreements between the parties in 1949 resulted in the ‘Green Line’ demarcation lines where the fighting ended, rather than borders. The lines were not to be construed as political or territorial boundaries, and were ‘delineated without prejudice to rights, claims and positions’ as regards settlement of the ‘Palestine question’.
In 1967, these countries again went to war with Israel. Israel regained East Jerusalem, gained the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. All these areas extended beyond the 1948 Green Line.
The Arab states argued that the Palestinians had the ‘right of return’ to the properties they’d left in 1948; they considered Israel’s use of abandoned property as illegitimate. Israel intended to use its newly acquired territories as the basis for a land-for-peace accord. However, on 1 September 1967, the Arab Summit Conference in Sudan declared “No peace, no recognition, no negotiations”. Thus the occupation remained.
The wisdom of sustaining the occupation was then and still is a bone of contention amongst Israelis.
Israel has signed two peace agreements – with Egypt in 1979 and with Jordan in 1994. Israel returned Sinai to the Egyptians, and resolved land and water disputes with Jordan with broad cooperation in tourism and trade.
The reasons for this unending war are numerous and interlinked:
- Islam dictates that Jews are dhimmi or second-class citizens, and thus subordinate to Muslims – Jews cannot be the equals of Muslims;
- The growth of Islamic anti-Semitism through Christian influences and religious teachings, which started in the mid-19th century in Syria;
- The growing nationalisms of Muslims and Jews under the Ottoman Empire, and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire;
- The pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe towards the end of 19th century which gave impetus to Zionism, the re-establishment of a Jewish nation in what was then Palestine.
Currently there are two main parties prosecuting this war.
The first, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), was founded in 1987 as an off-shoot of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. Its goal was to liberate Palestine from Israeli occupation, including all of Israel.
Hamas’s ‘Document’, which replaced its founding Charter in 2017, states:
- “Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea.” (Article 20)
- “There is no alternative to a fully sovereign Palestinian State on the entire national Palestinian soil, with Jerusalem as its capital” (Article 27) and “Not one stone of Jerusalem can be surrendered or relinquished.” (Article 10)
- “Palestine symbolises the resistance that shall continue until liberation is accomplished, until the return is fulfilled and until a fully sovereign state is established with Jerusalem as its capital.” (Preamble)
- “Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws. At the heart of these lies armed resistance…” (Article 25)
- “There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity. Whatever has befallen the land of Palestine in terms of occupation, settlement building, Judaization or changes to its features or falsification of facts is illegitimate. Rights never lapse.” (Article 19)
Hamas, which governs Gaza, does not play a defensive role; its purpose is to attack Israel. This gives the lie to the frequent claims that Israel’s attacks on Gaza are always acts of aggression. Most of the time Hamas initiates attacks to which Israel responds.
In 2000 Hamas adopted suicide attacks against Israelis as a method of prosecuting the war. Suicide bombings did more than anything to harden Israeli attitudes towards the Palestinians. The post-2000 generation of Israelis tends to be be less sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people largely because of this strategy
In early June Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, thanked Iran for sending weapons used to attack Israel. “Iran provided us with rockets, and we surprised the world when our resistance targeted Beersheba.” He was referring to the violence at the beginning of May when Gaza-based Islamist groups fired nearly 700 rockets into Israel. The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) estimates that Hamas has stockpiled over 20,000 mortars and rockets.
The recent rocket attacks have not led to all-out war for two interrelated reasons: Hamas, recognising its own military, political and diplomatic weakness, knows that a longer war would achieve little and leave Gaza in worse shape than it is now. On the other hand, Israel recognises that a weak, extremist regime in Gaza is better than the collapse of order and replacement by an even more radical group.
The ‘Marches of Return’ which have been held on most Fridays this year on the Gaza-Israel border, are held to support the Palestinian ‘right to return’ to the land they left in 1948. By virtue of demographics, a return as envisaged would collapse the Jewish state.
Hezbollah, which was founded by Iran in the early 1980s, is a Shi’a Islamist political party and militant group based in Lebanon.
Hezbollah’s chief purpose is to act as a proxy for Iran in its conflict with Israel. The group was conceived by Muslim clerics and funded primarily to harass Israel. Its leaders were followers of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Hezbollah was supported in Lebanon by the Shi’ite Syrian military regime and grew in strength to be more powerful than the Lebanese Army. Syria entered Lebanon in 1976 to help fight a series of militias in Lebanon’s civil war.
Hezbollah now has seats in the Lebanese government, a radio and satellite TV station, social services and large-scale military deployment of fighters beyond Lebanon’s borders.
A national unity government was formed in 2008 giving Hezbollah and its allies veto power. Hezbollah was guaranteed its right to “liberate or recover occupied lands”
Hezbollah is considered a terrorist organisation by the United States, Israel, Canada, the Arab League, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia and the European Union. .
Hezbollah uses criminal activity to fund itself, including drug trafficking, kidnapping, the diamond trade, cigarette smuggling, and intellectual property crime.
Hezbollah and Iran regularly engage in Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. The motivation is religious. The anti-Semitism of Hezbollah (and Iran) combines the image of seemingly invincible Jewish power and cunning, with the contempt reserved for weak and cowardly enemies.
Hezbollah’s 1985 manifesto states that ‘our struggle will end only when this entity [Israel] is obliterated’. The struggle against Israel is a core belief and the central rationale of Hezbollah’s existence.
It justifies its actions as acts of defensive jihad. “ … Our goal is to liberate the 1948 borders of Palestine, … The Jews who survive this war of liberation can go back to Germany or wherever they came from. However, that the Jews who lived in Palestine before 1948 will be ‘allowed to live as a minority and they will be cared for by the Muslim majority’, according to spokesperson Hassan Ezzedin.
Both Hamas and Hezbollah vilify Jews as ‘enemies of mankind,’ ‘conspiratorial, obstinate, and conceited’ adversaries full of ‘satanic plans’ to enslave the Arabs. It fuses traditional Islamic anti-Judaism with Western conspiracy myths, Third Worldist anti-Zionism, and Iranian Shi’ite contempt for Jews as ‘ritually impure’ and corrupt infidels.
Although Hamas is Sunni, Iran and Hezbollah support it because of their shared enmity towards Israel.
There are other jihadist groups involved in Gaza but these two are the most dangerous to Israel.
Sara Gon is the head of strategic engagement at the IRR.
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