So in light of the recent UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements as illegal, which the US allowed to pass by abstaining from the vote, it got me thinking about the whole conflict. I realized I know almost nothing about it, so I started reading. Pretty much everything I've found is written from a clearly pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian POV, so it's tough to separate fact from opinion.
Here's what I've got so far - please correct me and/or fill in the blanks.
1. The area is the ancestral homeland for the Jews, going back thousands of years. It's also the ancestral homeland for at least some of the Arab Palestinians. (I'm a little hazy on all the race/ethnicity/religion distinctions).
2. The region, including Israel, disputed lands, and pieces of surrounding countries have been the subject of one conquest after another for thousands of years.
3. After the Ottoman Empire was defeated in WWI, the League of Nations gave Great Britain a Mandate to govern the Palestine territory.
4. This continued until 1947, when the newly formed UN passed Resolution 181, which partitioned Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Some Jews relocated to the Jewish state, but a lot had already been living there continuously for thousands of years.
5. the Jews accepted the plan - the Arabs didn't. The Jewish state declared their independence when the British Mandate expired in 1947, and the surrounding Arab countries immediately invaded. The Jews kicked their collective asses - to the point that many Arabs refer to this war as "the Catastrophe."
6. So as a result of that war, the Jews expanded the territory they held, and this was sort of formalized by "Armistice lines" - in armistice agreements between Israel and surrounding countries, though nobody except I think Lebanon agreed that these armistice lines constituted final international borders.
7. So at this point, the Jews are controlling the area originally partitioned for them by the UN, plus some additional land that had been offered to the Arab state, and Jordan is controlling all the West Bank (apparently it was referred to as "Transjordan" at the time, which is kinda
)
8. Next, we've got "The Six Day War" in 1967. I guess enough time had passed since The Catastrophe for the Arab nations to forget why they called it that. They gave it another try, and Israel kicked their asses again. This time the Jews took Gaza, Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights, and West Bank and East Jerusalem. But the Jews gave most of that back in exchange for peace treaties over the next 10 years or so. Big exceptions were Gaza, which they withdrew from more recently (but still blockading it and raiding it because of rocket attacks), and the West Bank and Jerusalem, which they continue to occupy to this day. But now at least there are definite international borders between Israel and Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. The only question marks are Gaza Strip and West Bank.
Everything I said accurate so far?
Ok, now here I start getting a little hazy. At some point "Transjordan" decides to just be "Jordan" (still a gender neutral name) and just lets Yasser Arrafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization be in charge of the West Bank. (Seems like this was not a good decision, but I don't know, maybe it was from Jordan's POV). These people aren't Transjordanian anymore - in fact, Jordan revoked their citizenship, so now they're stuck in the West Bank and they're just referred to as Palestinians.
Gaza strip is also this little pocket that Egypt doesn't want anything to do with, and they're separated from the West Bank by Israel, but the Arabs in both spots are referred to as Palestinians, which kind of seems like a more polite description for "Arabs that Israel hasn't conquered yet and no other Arab country wants to annex so they're just kinda stuck." Fair?
Meanwhile, the Palestinians can't really decide who their government should be. Gaza is controlled by a military junta called Hamas. The West Bank is sort of governed by a part called Fatah, but seems like Hamas has some influence there, too.
There have been a number of attempts at creating a "Two State Solution" and peace between Israel and a country called "Palestine," but they can't come to an agreement on borders. Apparently Israel would be ok with giving up some of it's occupied territory, but it cannot agree to the withdrawing to the "1967 borders" because they say they are hard to defend militarily. On the Palestinian side, they don't seem interested in Israel existing, period.
In the meantime, Israel continues to "settle" areas of the West Bank, mostly spots that they are already occupying militarily but some other areas that they don't. Israeli has actually deemed some of these settlements illegal and torn some of them down, but Jews continue settling outside the occupied areas, saying it is their ancestral right to the land.
Do I have this right?
