Feb 15, 2024 5 min read

By Kent James

The second of three parts.

In the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors, Israel was always David fighting the Arab Goliath determined to destroy Israel.

But the dynamic began to change starting with the 1967 war, in which Israel pre-emptively struck its Arab neighbors as they prepared to attack Israel. Israel’s quick victory was reinforced by more aggressive U.S. support, due to the desire of the U.S. to counteract growing Soviet influence in the Arab world, especially in Egypt. U.S. support was crucial to Israel’s ability to survive a surprise attack on Yom Kippur in 1973, when the Arab armies caught Israel off-guard, and Israel needed U.S. support to repel the attack.

In 1978, President Jimmy Carter was able to broker a peace deal between Israel and Egypt, which was Israel’s most formidable foe. This seemed to be a potential end to the conflicts that had roiled the Middle East for decades.

The deal allowed Israel to avoid military confrontations with most of its Arab neighbors, and it isolated the stateless Palestinians. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was based in Beirut, Lebanon, and was made up of Palestinians displaced by the Israelis, continued to attack Israel from Lebanon. Israel countered by invading Lebanon in 1982 in an effort to stop the cross-border attacks. Israel’s military success forced the PLO leadership to evacuate to Tunisia. The PLO’s absence from Gaza encouraged the growth of the more radical Hamas, which gained credibility during the First Intifada, which lasted from 1987 to 1993, when they were on the ground resisting the growing number of Israeli settlements.

This also began to change how the world saw the participants in the conflict, as Israeli soldiers killed Palestinian protesters who were often only armed with rocks. In 1988, the secular PLO accepted U.S. conditions for peace talks, recognizing Israel’s right to exist. But Hamas, an Islamic organization that was an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that had been gaining the support of a growing number of Palestinians, did not agree.

After years of sporadic negotiations, Yasser Arafat, chairman of the PLO and Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s prime minister, agreed to the Oslo Accords in 1993. Under the agreement, the PLO formally recognized Israel’s right to exist, and both sides agreed to a two-state solution, the details of which were to be worked out over the next few years. But right-wing Israelis, as well as Hamas and Islamic Jihad on the Palestinian side, did not want a two-state solution, and did what they could to disrupt it. A radical right-wing Israeli assassinated Rabin, and Israel continued to build settlements while Hamas sent suicide bombers into Israel, causing terror by blowing up crowded civilian buses.

In 2000, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat a generous deal, putting forward Gaza and 90% of the West Bank, but Arafat rejected the offer, concerned about Palestinian opposition. He told Barak, “If I accept this…Do you want to walk behind my casket?”

Unable to make a deal at that time, Arafat never made a counter-offer. The failure to build on the Oslo Accords led to the Israelis building more settlements on land that was supposed to be given back to the Palestinians, and the more radical Palestinians conducted terrorist attacks against the Israelis, which strengthened the right wing in Israel. The Second Intifada, which lasted from 2000 to 2005, was much more violent than the first, with around 4,300 dead.

In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops and 8,000 settlers from Gaza, while retaining control over the borders to restrict access. Theoretically this would allow Israel to prevent the smuggling of weapons that could be used to attack Israel, but it hurt the economy and contributed to extremely high unemployment and poverty in Gaza. Israel continued to build settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as infrastructure to support them. Although Israel let some Palestinians work in Israel, the security checkpoints both at the borders and within the West Bank led to long delays and daily humiliations for many Palestinians.

As part of its effort to spread democracy in the Middle East, the administration of George W. Bush encouraged elections in Gaza, which, unfortunately for the administration, were won by Hamas. When Hamas won, the U.S. put conditions on any further aid; when Hamas would not meet those conditions, which included renouncing violence and recognizing Israel, the U.S. cut off aid and Israel tightened the border restrictions.

This led to more than 15 years of a blockade on Gaza, and an expansion of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Terrorist attacks on Israel sparked military incursions into the occupied territories by the Israelis, where many Palestinians could not see any possibility for change, and the right-wing Israeli governments adopted a policy of “mowing the grass” – using violence to occasionally repress militants – in Gaza while solidifying their control of the other occupied territories.

The horrendous Hamas attack on Oct 7, 2023, was a desperate effort to disrupt the gradual elimination of the prospect of a Palestinian state.

Kent James is a member of East Washington Borough Council.