The longstanding Arab-Israeli conflict is about land above all else. From the moment of Israel’s creation as an independent Jewish state in 1948, following a United Nations vote in favor of partition the year before, Jews and Arabs have clashed over this slice of land on the eastern coastline of the Mediterranean Sea and at the juncture of three continents. Many more wars followed in the decades after a 1949 armistice. Another war rages today.
Today’s combatants have different names and leaders than the groups who collided more than 70 years ago, but the fundamental issue hasn’t changed. What Jews celebrated as the establishment of their homeland is referred to by Palestinians as the “nakba,” or catastrophe. About 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes as Jewish forces secured their victory against the forces of five invading Arab states in 1948-49. These people ended up in refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank and neighboring countries. To this day, they rely on the U.N.’s agency for Palestinian refugees.
In this episode of History As It Happens, University of Pennsylvania political scientist Ian Lustick, an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, says the problem of displaced Palestinians from the first Arab-Israeli War could have been resolved, if not for the fact that they became permanent refugees.
“All of this ink has been spilled on were they expelled or did they flee. They were expelled, but that doesn’t matter. All wars involve displaced people. … What turned them into refugees was Israel’s refusal after the war to allow anybody to come back. Thousands of Arabs trying to come back were shot by the Israelis as infiltrators. Many of them, about 10- to 15-thousand, succeeded in staying in Israel, but about 750,000 were not able to,” said Mr. Lustick, the author of “Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality.”
Although much has happened since 1948, the origins of today’s conflict are directly tied to the events of that year.
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